About SunFlower Corporation

The Staff

Professional backgrounds of the key Sunflower staff members are outlined below. Click here to see their detailed resumes (pdf).

Gary Cler is an independent consultant who specializes in energy efficiency, renewable energy, and combined heat and power (CHP) applications.

Most recently Gary was an engineer with Encorp Inc. Before that, Gary worked at E Source, where he specialized in high-efficiency residential and commercial heating and cooling technologies as well as distributed generation and CHP technologies and applications. He also led E Source research on gas cooling and desiccant dehumidification. Gary formerly served as an engineer for the U.S. Army Construction Engineering Research Laboratories, where he conducted energy technology research and demonstration programs for Department of Defense facilities. Demonstration projects he worked on include fuel cells, natural gas-driven cooling systems, desiccant dehumidification, reciprocating engine driven CHP, and thermal energy storage. He received an MS in mechanical engineering from Colorado State University and a BS in mechanical engineering from the University of Illinois.

John Hutson is an electrical engineer and product manager.
John’s engineering work has included the design of control and servo systems for video tape recorder transports as well as system, control, and video processing for digital video storage systems. He has also designed global positioning system receivers for the marine market as well as OEM customers. As a product manager at Network Appliance, he determined the need as well as the cost/benefit for the greatest number of new features that have ever been added to their server platforms. John also works with Yale/Goldman Sachs evaluating Non-Profit business plans. John holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Rochester and a Masters of Business Administration from Yale University.

Larry Kinney is a primary inventor of the technology, and major contributor to the development work of Sunflower. Larry is the founder and president of the Synertech Systems Corporation, an RD&D corporation established in 1984. Active in energy conservation-related research for almost 30 years, he has broad experience in lighting and daylighting technologies, efficient fenestration systems, weatherization program operations, energy-efficient refrigeration, air handling and conditioning systems, and controls. Larry also has experience in energy efficiency program evaluation, from instrumentation design and analysis to policy research.

Since moving to Boulder from Upstate New York early in 2000, Larry was a Research Manager with the Technology Assessment Group, and Senior Consultant with the Consulting Group of E SOURCE, an energy research and information company. He also worked as a Senior Researcher for the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project for several years doing work in building energy systems and energy policy prior to devoting more of his time to developing daylighting and related products through Sunflower and Synertech.

Prior to co-founding Synertech in 1983, he was a Senior Research Fellow with the Syracuse Research Corporation, where he co-founded and directed the Corporation’s Energy Research Center. Larry did undergraduate work in physics and philosophy at Rhodes College in Memphis, TN and holds a PhD in philosophy from Syracuse University in Syracuse, NY. He is the author of over 100 articles and reports. He holds a U.S. Patent on an active daylighting system and (through Synertech Systems Corporation) owns another.

Ross McCluney is a research scientist whose specialty is optical physics.
He currently serves as Principal Research Scientist, Buildings Research Division, Florida Solar Energy Center, a research institute of the University of Central Florida. He is an expert in ray trace simulations of complex fenestration system optical performance and has developed a calculational standard practice for rating the solar gain and visible transmittance of tubular daylighting devices. He is the author of a comprehensive and accurate computer program for predicting solar position, and programs for the hourly energy performance simulation of windows and skylights, of a program to calculate the unshaded fraction of the area of a window shaded by an awning or overhang, and of a popular introductory textbook in radiometry and photometry. He is also the author of Daylighting: Natural Light for Passive Design and recently wrote two textbooks for courses in environmental ethics. He did his undergraduate work in physics at Rhodes College in Memphis, TN and holds a PhD in physics from the University of Miami and an M.S. in physics from the University of Tennessee. Click here for Dr. McCluney's list of publications.

Peter Novak is a global business leader with proven success in the development of high-performance organizations that bring the customer to the center of an organization's mission.

Peter had a distinguished career with Cooper Industries before joining Sunflower. He leads Sunflower’s initiatives to bring innovative daylighting products to market with the objective of greatly improving the lighting environment for our customers while saving energy and reducing harmful emissions.

Peter has lived and worked on three continents–North America, Europe and Asia. He has successfully developed organizations from scratch in Asia which have achieved high double-digit growth across multiple markets. He has led organizational development and change initiatives in a multi-cultural environment that have achieved strong results across the complete supply chain while redirecting business resources to work toward the total satisfaction of the customer. Peter holds a BS in Engineering from the University of Vermont and an MBA from the Thunderbird Garvin School of International Management in Glendale, Arizona.

Jim Walsh is the President of Energy Service Associates, Inc in Boulder, CO. ESA provides resource management consulting and turnkey operational management services to public and private sector clients with an emphasis on schools. ESA’s services include energy conservation programs, security systems engineering and planning, and water resource management services. Jim has managed a number of innovative successful energy-efficiency programs in school districts and has a long-term interest in achieving excellent lighting and thermal environments in schools. He has both bachelor and masters degrees from the University of Colorado and has studied economics, political science, and energy policy.

Corporate History

In spring of 2004, Dr. Larry Kinney gave a presentation on daylighting at a day-long seminar on energy efficiency in schools. Following up on the daylighting presentation, energy consultant Jim Walsh contacted Larry to explore the possibility of developing daylighting systems specifically suited for climates like Colorado’s where the availability of 300 days of sunny skies a year suggest the feasibility of practical systems that rely primarily on direct beam sunlight. In July, Larry, Jim, and John Hutson, an electrical engineer, visited the Falcon School District Elementary School east of Colorado Springs, a building with very few windows and virtually no daylighting. Below are photographs of typical classrooms at Falcon Elementary, showing only a small strip of natural light from an exterior door. Note the sharp contrast between the brightness of the fluorescent fixtures and the rest of the ceiling. Some of the light from the overhead fixtures washes a portion of the sidewalls, thereby improving the visual environment. If the light were natural and better distributed, the lighting quality would be much better.

Over weeks and months following that visit, Larry, John, Gary Cler (a design engineer), and Dr. Ross McCluney, a research physicist who specializes in daylighting, developed a preliminary design of a daylighting system that shows great promise, both for daylighting schools, and other buildings ranging from residential to industrial in weather regions where direct beam sunlight is frequently available. Accordingly, the parties involved formed a new company—Sunflower Corporation, which was soon joined by Eric Gertler, a Senior Financial Manager MBA/CPA with two decades of finance and accounting along with much recent experience launching technology-related start-ups

The initial aim of Sunflower is to develop one specific daylighting technology of several invented over the past several months, well tailored for the Colorado Schools market. When this initial product is fully developed, tested, optimized for that specific market, and an initial production run is ordered, Sunflower intends to develop other products in the general area of daylighting, controls, and related areas. We envision that the properties shared by these products is the enhancement of the interior environments in buildings accomplished with excellent energy efficiency and resulting strong market appeal.

The Technology

Antoine-Marie-Roger de Saint-Exupery, author of The Little Prince and many books about flight, made the following observation: "All of man’s industrial efforts, all of his computations and calculations, all of the nights spent over working drafts and blueprints, invariably culminate in the production of a thing whose sole and guiding principle is the ultimate principle of simplicity….It is as if there were a natural law which ordained that to achieve this end, to refine the curve of a piece of furniture, or a ship’s keel, or the fuselage of an airplane, until gradually it partakes of the elementary purity of the curve of a human breast or shoulder, there must be the experimentation of several generations of craftsmen. If anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness."

Sunflower is a robust daylighting system suitable for providing controlled, glare-free natural lighting in classrooms and other spaces. The proposed systems will be applicable to both retrofit and new buildings. The aim of the proposed daylighting development work is to save energy for lighting and cooling and improve illumination quantity, quality, and color rendering—indeed to enhance the lighting environment in general.
Recent research and anecdotal evidence strongly suggest that high-quality daylit spaces in schools enhance the learning environment as reflected in improvements in student attendance, classroom performance, enjoyment of the learning experience, and improved scores on standardized tests.
In commercial buildings, the increased productivity resulting from good daylighting designs using toplighting of the kind Sunflower is developing far exceeds the dollar value of the energy savings attributed to daylighting. The improved learning expected to result from the introduction of high-quality daylight into Falcon district schools should similarly have high value for students, teachers, and parents.

If properly controlled, using natural light to illuminate buildings produces elegant lighting environments and saves energy two ways: it diminishes the need for electric lighting during the day and decreases air conditioning loads since sunlight has substantially higher luminous efficacy than even the most efficient electric lighting fixtures currently in the marketplace. In over two decades of research with a number of daylighting systems, Sunflower’s scientists have found that the most effective and attractive way to employ daylighting is to direct controlled sunlight across light-colored ceilings. This uses the ceilings themselves as light fixtures to distribute diffuse light to the spaces below. The key is to be able to control sunlight well and cost effectively, regardless of the direction of incoming direct-beam sunlight. Direct beam can cause serious glare problems due to view windows facing directions where direct beam sunlight can enter, and is a notorious problem for traditional skylights.

Although a modicum of view glazing may be useful for other considerations, lighting predominantly or solely with top lighting offers an important advantage,. Direct beam sunlight, routinely available from Colorado skies, offers the most concentrated form of daylight. As a result, smaller openings are needed to provide adequate illumination levels. Smaller openings translate to reduced conducted heat and corresponding energy savings. Optimization of beam daylighting involves a means of following the sun’s movement across the sky each day which the team has designed to work well using Saint-Exupery’s principle of elegant simplicity.

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Click here to read the (pdf) paper on daylighitng authored by several Sunflower principles and here for the paper on Sundolier presented at Solar 2006, the American Solar Energy Society's annual conference held 7-12 July 2006 in Denver, Colorado.

=====Last update: 07/18/07=====