Alice Yake on Planning for a Reliable, Cleaner Grid

**Alice Yake** (0:04)
If you were to put blinders on in a planning environment, sit there and say, can we produce enough kilowatt hours to manage and supply that energy to all customers around the world? The answer would be yes.
The next question has to be, can you deliver it? And then the next question has to be, is it affordable?

**Jason Bordoff** (0:22)
Grid operators sit at the center of many of the biggest forces reshaping the global energy system. They're navigating rising electricity demand, a lack of transmission infrastructure, shifting regulatory policies, and maintaining the tricky balance between affordability, reliability, and the need for dispatchable power. Both here in the US and around the world, operating a reliable and resilient grid in the face of increasingly severe weather and complex interconnection demands is more difficult than ever. And these challenges are felt well outside the power sector, spiking utility rates in some regions have turned electricity into a major political issue. So what does the future of grid planning tell us about the ultimate pace of the energy transition? How can system operators manage the surge in demand from AI and data centers without compromising reliability? And how can open-source grid planning tools help both developed and developing markets build a flexible power system for the next 30 to 50 years?
This is Columbia Energy Exchange, a weekly podcast from the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. I'm Jason Bordoff.
Today on the show, Alice Yake. Alice is Vice President of Grids at Breakthrough Energy, where she leads a team focused on the development of an open source grid planning ecosystem designed to make energy system modeling transparent, accessible and trustworthy.
Previously, Alice spent 14 years at the utility Xcel Energy, where she rose to Chief Planning Officer. Before that, she worked for the oil and gas company Occidental, and she started her career at Enron. Alice joined me to talk about the opportunities but also challenges in building cleaner electrical grids. We talked about the state of grid reliability and the need for long-term grid planning. We explored the regulatory landscape, the need to better align generation, transmission and flexible load factors to improve grid management. And we looked at how energy policy and energy security intersect with the power sector in the US and elsewhere. I hope you enjoy our conversation. Alice Yake, thanks so much for joining us on Columbia Energy Exchange. Really good to talk to you here on this podcast for the first time.

**Alice Yake** (2:41)
It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

**Jason Bordoff** (2:44)
So for people who they will have heard your bio just a moment ago before we got started, but give a little more context to it, your role at Breakthrough Energy, what your team focuses on, and then we'll get into a discussion about all of those things.

**Alice Yake** (2:57)
Absolutely. So inside of Breakthrough Energy, I lead the Grids organization and we spend our time focusing on deploying philanthropic dollars in order to ease the pathway in order to plan a grid, an electric grid specifically. So we focus on making sure that the ecosystem of open source tools, from capacity expansion to power flow to production cost, are accessible and available particularly in developing countries.
But I also believe that with my extensive history here in the US that they could be leveraged significantly to help with some of the gaps, namely the human conflict gaps that cause delays in the infrastructure building process.

**Jason Bordoff** (3:38)
So let's unpack what you just said, because there may be people listening who are deeply versed in how power systems work and how utilities work. And maybe just remind people for a moment before we do that of your background, because you obviously worked in the utility sector for a while, as well as in other parts of the energy sector, sort of before you were doing Breakthrough Energy. What you were doing at Xcel and elsewhere.

**Alice Yake** (3:59)
Yeah, absolutely. So I graduated from Texas A&M a long time ago, it feels like, and started working at Enron. Everybody knows how that one ended.

**Jason Bordoff** (4:09)
I had John Arnold on the podcast not long ago and talked about his start at Enron before tremendous success and impact after that.

**Alice Yake** (4:18)
Yeah, John is an amazing individual and he had a longer tenure at Enron than I did. But I think he saw the writing on the wall earlier too.
I was one of those that came in and I was still a baby in the industry coming out of college and was doing programming for various trading applications, including broadband, which was a really cutting edge area that nobody else was working on at that point in time.