NetEdison IP Holdings GmbH
Open Doors Management
San Francisco State University
Biography
Lane Sharman is a clean-energy entrepreneur whose career runs along a single thread: taking a utility function that people assume must be centralized — water, electricity, land — and rebuilding it as something a community can own and operate for itself. He is the creator of NetEdison, the commercial trademark and deployment vehicle for EnergyNet, the open electricity standard invented by Jonas Birgersson in Lund, Sweden.
Trained in mathematics and computer science, Lane began in software engineering and data analytics before moving into infrastructure. As Chief Technical Officer of the Borrego Water Exchange he helped build California’s first independent water credit exchange — an early demonstration that conservation could be priced, traded, and rewarded. He then turned to solar, helping form the California subsidiary of Spanish developer Solarpack, which went on to develop 130 MW of utility-scale projects.
In 2011 he co-founded the San Diego Energy District with engineer Bill Powers to bring community-based energy choice to the region. Working through Solana Beach’s Clean and Green Committee, he led the effort that produced the Solana Energy Alliance in 2018 — San Diego County’s first Community Choice Aggregation — through which Solana Beach reached 100% carbon-neutral electricity in 2020. Its successors, Clean Energy Alliance and San Diego Community Power, now serve most of the county.
As founder and President of Open Doors Management, Lane represents landowners in the energy transition, structuring long-term partnerships with developers of solar, storage, wind, hydro, and geothermal projects across the United States. In 2016–2017 he led the retrofit of 2001 Union Street in San Francisco — stripping out individual utility meters in favor of a single point of coupling, a sub-meter network, shared rooftop solar, and AI-dispatched battery storage. The building has run that way for a decade and is documented on this site as the EnergyNet Forerunner.
Birgersson invented the protocol and keeps it open. Lane’s role is the other half of any standard’s success: the licensing structure, the regulatory path, the first paying deployments, and the people who will operate them. NetEdison IP Holdings GmbH in Zug, Switzerland is the vehicle; the Oregon Freedom Cable legislation, the Kenya and India licensing tracks, and the NetEdison Communities model are the first proofs.
Milestones
- 2004–2008 — Chief Technical Officer, Borrego Water Exchange: California’s first independent water credit exchange.
- 2011 — Co-founds the San Diego Energy District with Bill Powers; serves as Executive Director and Chair.
- 2015 — Founds Open Doors Management, Solana Beach: “Land for the Energy Transition.”
- 2016–2017 — Leads the 2001 Union Street single-meter, solar-plus-storage retrofit in San Francisco.
- 2018 — Solana Energy Alliance launches as San Diego County’s first Community Choice Aggregation.
- 2020 — Solana Beach reaches 100% carbon-neutral electricity through the Alliance.
- 2025 — Oregon HB 2065 and HB 2066 clear the way for Freedom Cables across property lines — the first U.S. authorization of the EnergyNet architecture.
- 2026 — NetEdison IP Holdings GmbH (Zug) established as steward of the NetEdison™ mark; India and Kenya licensing tracks open.
Affiliations
- Board Member, Chair and Treasurer — Center for Community Energy, successor to the San Diego Energy District
- Co-organizer — the MOVE program, building small-scale solar and storage projects across the U.S.
- Board Member — Swedish-American Chamber of Commerce, San Diego
- Speaker — FEIN e.V. colloquium at the E.ON Energy Research Center, RWTH Aachen (2026); Prabhav Conference, Delhi (2026)
Sixty years in the waves as a surfer, a lifelong attachment to French language and culture, and a standing interest in mathematics — his post-graduate work was on Lotka-Volterra population models, which turn out to be a reasonable way of thinking about grids too.