The Stanford Energy Seminar has been a mainstay of energy engagement at Stanford for nearly 20 years and is one of the flagship programs of the Precourt Institute for Energy. We aim to bring a wide variety of perspectives to the Stanford community – academics, entrepreneurs, utilities, non-profits, and more. 

About the talk

Grid planning has never been harder — or more consequential. Variable renewables, distributed resources, vehicle electrification, data centers, and industrial decarbonization are compounding in real time, turning the grid into a dynamic, multi-sector nervous system for the entire economy. Yet the tools guiding these decisions remain proprietary black boxes: artifacts of a simpler era, too slow to innovate and too closed to build the stakeholder trust that decisions of this scale require. A century of regulatory layering and institutional fragmentation built this quagmire. Getting out of it demands a new approach — one where modernizing planning tools and restoring trust are pursued as a single mission, enabling the faster, more credible decisions the energy transition cannot afford to delay. 

Alice Yake, is Vice President of GRIDS at Breakthrough Energy, where she leads a team focused on achieving faster energy system decisions. Her team is focused on the development of an open-source grid planning ecosystem designed to make energy system modeling transparent, accessible, and trustworthy. With 25 years of industry experience at Enron, Oxy, and Xcel Energy (where she served as President of Colorado and Chief Planning Officer), she has lived the incentive structures, regulatory complexity, and institutional ethos that slow decarbonization. She now works to replace opacity with shared data, repeatable tools, and facts anyone can use. Alice is also a mom to four boys and stepmother to two more — which makes solving the climate problem feel a little more urgent.

Anyone with an interest in energy is welcome to join! You can enjoy seminars in the following ways:

• Attend live. The auditorium may change quarter by quarter, so check each seminar event to confirm the location. Explore the current quarter's schedule.
• Watch live in a browser livestream if available. Check each seminar event for its unique livestream URL.
• Watch recordings of past seminars 
  • Available on the Past Energy Seminars page and the Energy Seminars playlist of the Stanford Energy YouTube channel
• (For students) Take the seminar as a 1-unit class (CEE 301/ENERGY 301/MS&E 494)

If you'd like to join the Stanford Energy Seminar mailing list to hear about upcoming talks, sign up here.