Simon Rowland

Simon Rowland

I develop solar and battery-storage projects as founder and CEO of Renewable Power Partners. I also built telecom systems through my company Direct Leap from 2001 to 2019, running it alongside RPP for its last seven years, and I started out designing spacecraft.

The thread through all of it is radical cost reduction: microsatellites in place of large spacecraft, then open-source software on ordinary servers in place of telephone switches. The current research applies the same idea to propulsion, with plasma sails that push against the solar wind in place of chemical propellant.

I still work on the space problems. This page has been online since 1994, and the first things on it were about getting oxygen out of moon rocks.

Now

Energy and research

  1. 2012–

    Renewable Power Partners

    I founded RPP in 2012 and run it. We develop solar and battery-storage projects in Ontario and New York, working with landowners and businesses from site control through approvals, procurement and financing. RPP’s Ontario solar business won 71 Feed-in Tariff contracts. Its current pipeline is mainly battery storage, with some solar, developed for long-term ownership: as of September 2026, about 2.7 GW across 100 sites, each under lease, with 2,188 MW at 36 sites in Ontario and 490 MW at 64 sites in New York City.

    Renewable Power Partners website

  2. Ongoing

    Research software

    Through Direct Leap I write simulation software for space propulsion and resource processing: a plasma-sail model built to re-run the published magnetic-sail and plasma-magnet results, a port of the WarpX plasma code to Apple GPUs, and a simulator for extracting oxygen and metals from lunar regolith.

    Direct Leap research GitHub

2000–2019

Telecom

  1. 2006

    Cloud Desktop

    An inexpensive laptop for developing countries that ran its applications from the cloud.

  2. 2005–06

    Primus

    Services architect. I designed and prototyped a replacement for about $20 million of Nortel DMS-500 long-distance switching, using a softswitch and four servers, including the company’s main post-paid long-distance IVR system. Separately, on contract through Direct Leap, I designed and delivered an open-source, Linux-based test harness that placed high volumes of real calls against Primus’s consumer services.

  3. 2001–19

    Direct Leap Technologies

    I started Direct Leap as a telecom engineering firm. It built automated test systems for Primus, designed the architecture of Lavalife’s national voice platform, prototyped test equipment, built voicemail, IVR, SMS and billing systems for carriers, and from 2004 ran its own hosted services on open-source software: a hosted predictive dialer for volunteer phone banks, IVR polling and telephone town halls. It was Primus’s first large-volume wholesale VoIP customer and, as far as I know, the first in Canada, and the first large-scale open-source telecom deployment in the country. Those services are retired.

    Direct Leap company history

  4. 2000

    Atlas Handheld

    A design for a 3G touchscreen smartphone that ran desktop applications on an external monitor.

1994–2002

Space

  1. 2002

    Mars mission papers

    Two concept papers: a reusable momentum-exchange tether as a Mars upper stage, written with Robert Hoyt of Tethers Unlimited, and a microsatellite relay and positioning constellation for Mars.

    Papers at Direct Leap

  2. 1997–2002

    TransOrbital

    My early spacecraft-design work brought together the team and investment that became TransOrbital, where I was a founding shareholder. The company received U.S. authorization for a private lunar mission, and on 20 December 2002 its TrailBlazer test article was launched from Baikonur on a Dnepr rocket. It is still in orbit, catalogued as object 27609.

    See it in orbit Orbital elements Photo of the test article Coverage

  3. 1997

    Cislunar propulsion study

    An engineering study of low-cost architectures for delivering payloads to lunar orbit.

  4. 1994

    Moon Society Data Book

    I led a volunteer team of about 30 that assembled a 2,000-document aerospace engineering reference, and wrote or compiled and edited about 400 of its articles. Most of the original site is gone; a few articles survive in the Moon Society’s archive. The same year I was compiling, analyzing and writing up research in inorganic chemistry, on oxygen extraction from lunar rock and asteroid resources, and doing original mission-design work on electric propulsion and microsatellites, aimed at cutting the cost of a mission by an order of magnitude and not by a few per cent. The regolith simulator and the plasma-sail model are those interests, thirty years later.

    An archived article: lunar dinitrogen tetroxide production

Public service

  1. Public service

    I stood for Parliament in 2000. In 2011 I led the technical side, pro bono, of the Elections Canada investigation into misleading election-day calls in Guelph, which led to a conviction in 2014. That April I testified to the House of Commons committee on changes to the Canada Elections Act, proposing faster access to telephone records for investigators.

Press

Short bio

Simon Rowland is the founder and CEO of Renewable Power Partners, which develops solar and battery-storage projects in Ontario and New York. He previously founded Direct Leap Technologies, a Toronto telecom engineering and hosted-services company, worked as a services architect at Primus, and was a founding shareholder of the private lunar-mission company TransOrbital. He writes research software for space propulsion and lunar resource processing.

Contact

For energy projects and land opportunities, the best route is Renewable Power Partners. For anything else, including the research, send me a message here.

Your message is emailed to me and isn’t kept on the website.