For 6 months she had been charging her white Tesla Model S off my private off-grid solar array. 47 kilowatt-hours stolen. $4,200 in untaxed and unbilled residential electricity. Her name was Tamsin Lockhart Bramble, HOA board president of Sandia Vista Estates, New Mexico. 45, polished, blonde, certain my solar grid was a community amenity. My name is Otto Cunningham.
I am a retired senior electrical engineer at Los Alamos National Laboratory. I designed grid integration inverters for 31 years. The week my daughter at Sandia confirmed the unauthorized cable from my service panel to her garage, I modified the inverter to spike at 380 volts during her 9:00 p.m. charging window. The Tesla's onboard charger absorbed the spike across 4 minutes. $14,000 in replacement cost. Tesla refused warranty coverage.
My grandfather Clement Cunningham moved his family from Galesburg, Illinois to Placitas, New Mexico in the spring of 1923 to take a job as a track engineer for the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway. He had been a railroad engineer in Illinois for 12 years before the Santa Fe extended his employment to the New Mexico territory line. He paid $1,200 cash for 18 acres of high desert foothill property at the northwestern edge of what is now Placitas, 16 miles north of Albuquerque on the south slope of the Sandia Mountains. He built the original adobe and stone farmhouse himself across the summer of 1924 with help from two of his Santa Fe coworkers. He brought my grandmother Adelaide and their three children up from Illinois the following autumn.
They had four more children in New Mexico. The youngest was my father, Egan Cunningham, born in the upstairs east bedroom in 1936. My father followed Clement into the railroad. He worked 38 years for the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway as a signals engineer. He retired in 1996.
He died of complications from emphysema in 2009. My mother, Henriette, followed in 2013. The 18 acres came to me by my father's will. I was born in the same upstairs east bedroom in March of 1957. I went to the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque from 1975 to 1979.
I studied electrical engineering with a minor in physics. I earned a master's degree from New Mexico Tech in Socorro in 1981, specializing in power systems engineering. I joined Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1986 after 5 years at a small Albuquerque electrical engineering consulting firm. I worked at Los Alamos for 31 consecutive years across two main research groups. First in the experimental physics division, working on Z-pinch fusion power containment problems.
Then in the engineering division, working on grid integration for renewable energy. I had been by the early 2000s one of the lab's senior engineers on photovoltaic system integration and inverter design. I had personally co-designed the grid-tie inverter architecture used by three major American solar manufacturers between 2008 and 2016. The architecture was published in 17 peer-reviewed journal articles across the decade. The architecture remains, by my own quiet bragging, the underlying engineering principle of approximately 40% of currently installed residential grid-tie solar inverters in the United States.