My Life at Palmetto: Eduardo Berlin

Eduardo Berlin is Palmetto’s Chief Data Strategy Officer. Just five days after he rejoined Palmetto, he sat down with the communications team to talk about his return to Palmetto and why now more than ever he’s excited about the work happening at the company.

Can you tell us about your connection to Palmetto?

I'm a true Palmettian, if that's a word. 

I joined in early 2021 after Mapdwell — the cleantech company I founded and led for 10 years — was acquired by Palmetto, to integrate the deep tech capabilities that now power Energy Intelligence, the Palmetto App, and other services. This was in the height of the Pandemic, so we joined Palmetto without ever meeting anybody in person. That’s wild, and it only speaks to the incredible leadership team — Chris and everybody else — and to how natural it was for us to take that step at the time.

We were excited to take what I would call our “consumer-driven clean energy obsession” to scale. In an industry that was characterized by a top down approach, we were all about empowering consumers as a way to catalyze clean energy adoption, bottom up.

That was why we felt such a strong connection with Palmetto. This was a company doing things differently putting consumers first, and going the distance to empower consumers with decision-making tools so that they could take charge. Quite literally. I joined as EVP, Energy Intelligence/Mapdwell, leading the deep tech efforts and integration efforts around solar assessment and design and energy modeling for almost three years.

What excites you about rejoining Palmetto now?

Everything. Palmetto is at an incredible moment now, and as Chief Data Strategy Officer, I see this as a defining opportunity. We don’t just collect data — we manufacture it. Through energy modeling and related systems, we generate original datasets that describe real-world  environments, performance, and behaviors. Integrating and leveraging all of this is a major challenge — but with today’s AI capabilities, it’s achievable efficiently and affordably.

Every company is grappling to unlock value from large datasets. Our focus on structuring, connecting, and applying data intelligently will drive growth across every part of the business. It’s beyond exciting to help lead that transformation.

This was our initial vision at Mapdwell: empowering consumers with actionable insight. The technical and educational barriers that limited us in 2013 — and even in 2021 when I joined Palmetto — are no longer in the way. The race to solve the puzzle is on and we are, I think, in the pole position to be first and to be best.

What will we find you doing as Chief Data Strategy Officer?

The first major challenge is understanding the data we have — classifying it, assessing its quality and reliability, and mapping where it lives, who uses it and who could benefit from it.

Next comes prioritization: identifying which data can most effectively be transformed into insight, business value, and growth in Palmetto’s current state.

Finally, the broader challenge is integration — how we connect these pieces to enable growth. What comes next? What systems or partnerships can amplify our impact and create exponential value? How do we strengthen data integration, collaboration, and flow across the internal and external ecosystems we depend on?

Right now I'm just reconnecting with teams across the company — both new faces and old teammates — to understand our data infrastructure, pipelines, and current needs, to start making sense of it.

What excites you most about Palmetto's potential to impact the world?

We're building a distributed partnership.

We often talk about distributed energy, distributed resources, and being a distributed energy utility. But at the core this is about people. We are working with homeowners and consumers. What we're building is a distributed partnership focused on clean, renewable, optimized energy flows.

That means enabling people with the information, tools, and control they need to manage their own energy. And that is a massive undertaking. It’s not just selling a product — it’s collaborating with hundreds of thousands of people to push the clean energy revolution forward.

Most companies, no matter how admired their brands are, operate in a transactional way: they sell, we buy. This is different: We are partners. We are working with you — your needs, your habits, your local circumstances and conditions — to help you optimize energy use, shift to cleaner sources, and save money. It’s a true feedback loop between people and platform. 

That's the most exciting part for me: to help build a company that relies on this partnership.

What's the best piece of advice you've received?

My grandfather used to say: “make no decisions in anger, no promises in joy.” The business equivalent I derived from his advice, after years in innovation and entrepreneurship, is something like: temper emotion, verify vision.

What do you do outside of work that keeps you energized and ready to go?

That's easy: My kids. I have three, and they're very spread apart. My eldest daughter is a senior in high school, followed by her 13-year-old sister, and all the way to their 8-year-old brother. So every five years (college planning!).

Our home is a broad spectrum of different activities, challenges, and opportunities at these different stages.  So I'm always on the move, with them or around them, and it's fun to listen, watch and learn from what they're doing and experiencing because it's just so broad, and so wild, and so much fun. There are just so many projects, ideas, plans and dreams that it’s sometimes hard to keep up.

Other than that, I am a passionate skier, I read a lot –mainly nonfiction– and I follow the news, all the news. We're in a moment of such change, such incredibly fast paced developments that it is more important than ever to be aware, to connect the dots, and build the best path forward.