Anouk Vasseur.

Background

Anouk grew up in Sherbrooke, Québec, on a hill farm her family had run since the 1880s. The farm was off-grid — a small Pelton runner her grandfather built in 1962 fed a single-room dwelling and a small workshop — and she learned electrical work the way her grandfather had: by watching the system work and stop working. She studied electrical engineering at the Université de Sherbrooke for two years, didn't finish the degree, and crossed the border in 2014 to take an apprenticeship with a Stowe-area shop. She tested for the Vermont journeyman exam in 2017 and joined the cooperative the same year.

She bought into the cooperative in 2020 — the third generation of ownership in the shop, after the 2014 founding cohort and Skye's 2020 buy-in (which preceded hers by four months). She is the on-the-rotation dispatcher 2020–2023.

What she does at the shop

• Microhydro lead. Every J-05 system the cooperative installs is designed by her. She does the head-and-flow measurements, sizes the runner, picks the inverter, and is on site for commissioning. Eleven of our eleven microhydro installs since 2017 have been her work.
• Off-grid solar design. Same role for J-05 systems where the customer doesn't have a usable head. She's the person who runs the NREL PVWatts simulations and decides the array tilt.
• Outback and Victron firmware. The two inverter platforms we work on most have, between them, hundreds of firmware revisions a year; Anouk reads the release notes so the rest of us don't have to.
• Engineering coordination. Microhydro > 5 kW gets a PE stamp; she coordinates with our usual stamping engineer in Burlington.

What she likes

She'll talk about a microhydro install — the Walden one (see the field log) — for half an hour if you ask. The penstock-route detour around the wetland, the engineering math on net head, the daughter's chalk drawing on the powerhouse floor. She is most animated when describing the resistor-bank diversion load: heating fifty gallons of water with the surplus electricity that would otherwise be dumped, "because the brook will keep producing whether or not we have something to do with it."

She wrote the structural framework of the J-05 page and the Pelton-vs-turgo distinction in the glossary.

Outside the shop

Anouk lives in Walden with her partner and a horse named Argyll. She volunteers with the Home Power Magazine archive project (the magazine is defunct but the archive is being preserved by a small group of off-grid practitioners). She bikes the Lamoille Valley Rail Trail when she can; the trail passes within four miles of the shop.

She speaks French at home and at the dispatch desk when the customer is calling from Quebec, which happens once or twice a year — the cooperative serves a small group of cross-border customers on the Eden / North Troy corridor.

Licensure

VT Journeyman Electrician

EJ-12148 · since 2017

NABCEP PV Installation Professional

since 2019

OSHA

30-hour Construction · current

NEC Article 690 / 705 specialist

annual continuing-ed since 2018