Operations Manager

Role: Operations Manager

Location: Eden Prairie, MN

Apply: www.spearmintenergy.com / [email protected]

Who We Are

Spearmint Energy ("Spearmint" or the "Company") is a leading energy company focused on developing, owning, operating, and optimizing around battery energy storage systems ("BESS") to reduce grid volatility and increase system resiliency. Spearmint currently operates a 150MW/300 MWh BESS project in West Texas, and has more than 20 projects, totaling over 13GWh of capacity, under development in 10 states across 5 U.S. regions. Headquartered in Miami, with an additional office in Minneapolis, the Company employs over 60 professionals and is guided by strong values rooted in people, partnerships, and the planet. For more information, please visit: https://www.spearmintenergy.com/.

What You Will Do

The Operations Manager is responsible for overseeing the day-to-day operations, maintenance, and performance of the company's BESS assets. This role involves ensuring operational efficiency, optimizing availability, coordinating with internal teams and external contractors, and ensuring regulatory compliance. The Operations Manager plays a crucial role in achieving organizational goals for reliability, availability, and compliance, while minimizing costs.

Core Responsibilities:

Operations Oversight:

• Oversee day-to-day operations across multiple BESS projects, coordinating operations and maintenance (O&M) providers, asset managers, original equipment manufacturers (OEM), and other 3rd parties
• Ensure that all operations and maintenance (O&M) activities are carried out in a timely, cost-effective manner while adhering to industry best practices.
• Manage SCADA systems and other remote monitoring tools to track asset performance.
• Participate in a rotating team responsible for 24x7 escalation of critical project issues, ensuring timely resolution and communication with stakeholders

Maintenance and Repairs:

• Oversee preventive maintenance schedules to ensure optimal functioning of equipment while minimizing operational impact
• Coordinate and supervise external contractors and outsourced maintenance teams, ensuring that all work is performed to company standards.

Regulatory and Compliance Management:

• Ensure project compliance with national, state, and local regulations, working with 3rd party asset management and outside counsel as needed
• Coordinate with internal regulatory team to maintain compliance with relevant independent system operators (ISO)

Financial Management:

• Provide inputs to current and future operations budgets as needed, including costs related to O&M, spare parts, and capital expenditures.
• Work with finance and asset management teams to track operational expenses and ensure that operations remain within budget.

Vendor and Contractor Management:

• Manage relationships with equipment manufacturers, service providers, and other external partners.
• Ensure that outsourced services meet contractual requirements, including quality and timeliness of maintenance and repairs.

Who You Are

• Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Renewable Energy, Supply Chain Management, or a related field.
• 3+ years of experience in operations, commissioning, or project execution in the energy sector
• Experience working with SCADA systems and remote monitoring tools.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to clearly present technical and operational information to non-technical stakeholders.
• Ability to communicate with regulatory bodies and external contractors, including on-site staff
• Hands-on, troubleshooting, and/or field experience is a plus
• Strong problem-solving and decision-making abilities.
• Ability to communicate with regulatory bodies and external contractors.
• 25% travel to project sites, sometimes remote

Physical requirements and environment:

The work environment and physical demand characteristics are representative of those the employee encounters while performing the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

The successful candidate will perform primarily sedentary office duties with travel to company offices or development & construction sites. They may occasionally lift up to 25 pounds and may be required to sit, stand, walk and use a computer. Development site work may occasionally require significant amounts of time outdoors in undeveloped areas, at all times of year, in all weather conditions, and across all climatic regions with which the company conducts business. Successful candidates will occasionally be required to walk and/or stand for significant amounts of time over uneven terrain outdoors.

Extensive air and car travel with driving to remote sites along with office work in field conditions is also included. Driving may require operating vehicles off-road in various conditions on development and/or construction sites. Some sites may require travel in small regional jet or prop airliners and stays at limited-service hotels.

The company's offices follow traditional business hours however routinely employees conduct work outside of these hours due to meet the company's objectives including communicating with contacts in other time zones, traveling, attending government and community meetings, and other circumstances.

Must have work authorization to work in the United States