Overview
The drive for clean and secure energy is at a crossroads.
From Capitol Hill to Wall Street to Silicon Valley, and from Beijing to Bangalore to Brussels, yesterday's green rhetoric is giving way to a sobering realization: Achieving an energy future that cuts emissions, boosts security and promotes jobs will require building it in an economically sustainable way.
Stanford University's Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance was created in 2011 to help blaze an economically sensible path toward an advanced global energy system. The center, housed jointly at Stanford's law and business schools, incubates practical ideas and actual businesses intended to transform the energy world in two ways. The first is by helping attract massive capital flows. The second is by helping ensure that money is spent intelligently and efficiently. The International Energy Agency projects the world will have to spend $38 trillion over the next two decades to meet soaring energy demand. Given those stakes, the Steyer-Taylor Center's guiding principle is non-partisan and no-nonsense: If the global energy system is to grow into one that's cleaner, more secure, and more efficient, the finance and policy tools used to build it must themselves get more robust and less wasteful.
The Steyer-Taylor Center seeks to ensure that investments are made in an economically and environmentally reasonable way across the entire energy system: in fossil fuels, in renewable sources, in nuclear power, and, critically, in energy-efficiency technologies that minimize waste in the delivery and consumption of energy regardless of where that energy comes from.
The center has four principals: Dan Reicher, executive director; Jeffrey Ball, scholar-in-residence; Kassia Yanosek, entrepreneur-in-residence; and Felix Mormann, research fellow.
News & Announcements
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Honorary Degree Recipient Has Early Connection To ESF
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Oilprice.com's 5 Most Influential Figures in U.S. Clean Energy
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Subsidy Nation: Can U.S. Firms Compete Against China?
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How Bright Is Solar Power's Future In A Post-Solyndra America?
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Analysis: Solyndra Casts Shadow On U.S. Energy Loan Aid
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Stanford's Law And Business Schools Launch Green Energy Initiative
Courses
Publications
- Jeffrey Ball, Tough Love for Renewable Energy, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2012.
- Felix Mormann, Enhancing the Investor Appeal of Renewable Energy, 42 Environmental Law (2012 forthcoming).
- Dan Reicher, The Wind at Our Backs, 336 Science 672 (2012).
- Kassia Yanosek, Policies for Financing the Energy Transition, (The Alternative Energy Future, vol. 1), [special issue], 141/2 Daedalus 94 (Spring 2012).
- Felix Mormann, Requirements for a Renewables Revolution, 38 Ecology Law Quarterly 903 (2011).
Program Contacts
- Jeffrey Ball
- Scholar-in-Residence
- jeffball@stanford.edu
- 650 724.9648
- Jeffrey Ball is the center’s scholar-in-residence. He came to Stanford in fall 2011 after 14 years as a reporter, columnist and editor at The Wall Street Journal. For most of that time, he wrote about energy and the environment. Most recently, he was the Journal’s environment editor.
- Felix Mormann
- Research Fellow
- fmormann@stanford.edu
Felix Mormann is the center's research fellow. Previously, he was the Kauffman Fellow at Stanford Law School, working on clean–energy policy. He has served as a legal advisor to clean–energy technology investors and as a management consultant in the high–tech sector.
- Dan Reicher
- Executive Director
- dreicher@stanford.edu
- 650 723.4185
Dan Reicher is the center's executive director. He is a faculty member at the Stanford Law and Business Schools. Before coming to Stanford in early 2011, he was the director of Google's climate change and energy initiatives, an investor and executive in the clean–energy industry, and an assistant U.S. energy secretary in the Clinton administration.
- Alicia Seiger
- Consultant
- aseiger@stanford.edu
Alicia Seiger is responsible for managing the center’s strategic development and operations. Alicia has over a decade of experience building and scaling early stage companies. She is the founder of Climate Strategy Partners, a consultancy specializing in climate and energy related projects for NGOs, foundations and investors. Previously, she was VP of Business Development for TerraPass, a carbon management firm. She holds a MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where she also worked as a Case Writer for the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, and a BA in Environmental Policy and Cultural Anthropology from Duke University.
- Kassia Yanosek
- Entrepreneur-in-Residence
- kyanosek@stanford.edu
Kassia Yanosek is the center's entrepreneur-in-residence. She has more than a decade of corporate and private-equity energy-investment experience and is the founding principal of Tana Energy Capital, an investment firm. Her experience includes energy investing at Bechtel Enterprises, Hudson Clean Energy Partners and BP plc, and energy policy in the George W. Bush administration.
Recorded & Past Events
May 2012
April 2012
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The Alternative Energy Future: Building a Pracitcal Energy Policy
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America’s Energy Future – Gas Boom, Nuclear Renaissance, or Renewables Revolution?
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After Solyndra: Obstacles and Policy Options for Financing Renewable Energy
March 2011
Press Releases
The Opportunity
Corporate and political leaders are scratching their heads over how to shift to a radically cleaner, more diverse, and more efficient energy system. Climate change; soaring demand for energy in industrializing countries such as China and India; a global race to dominate advanced-energy-technology innovation; a new dawn for U.S. oil and natural-gas production – all these forces will remake the energy world.
Energy infrastructure lasts for decades. So today's innovations will shape the energy system for at least the next generation. But making the global energy system cleaner and more efficient – not just bigger – will require unprecedented ingenuity and economic discipline. It will require spending trillions of dollars on new energy infrastructure and new energy technologies in ways not starry-eyed but smart.
The stakes are huge. Amid a continuing global recession, crucial economic and policy decisions over the next several years will determine whether promising new technologies revolutionize the global energy system or die from lack of funding before they can scale up, as happened with an earlier technological surge following the 1970s Arab oil crises. These decisions also will determine which countries and companies profit most from the coming energy transition.
Right now, the landscape for energy supply and demand is shifting fast.
In the U.S. and much of Europe, after several years in which governments and private investors invested big money in renewable energy, the continued flow of capital is uncertain. The recession has led governments to roll back renewable-energy subsidies. In turn, the growth in private investment in renewable-energy has slowed and renewable-energy companies' stock prices have skidded. Meanwhile, in the U.S., new natural-gas supply has slashed the price of this resource, which is cleaner than coal and which in recent years has fueled most new electricity-generating capacity installed in the country. That raises the possibility that the U.S. could become a significant natural-gas exporter. And it is making it more difficult in the U.S. for renewable-energy technologies to compete.
Industrializing countries, not the U.S. and Europe, will build the vast majority of new energy infrastructure in the coming decades. In China, coal-fired plants generate most electricity and are expected to dominate for decades. China's investment in renewable energy remains a tiny fraction of the country's total energy spending, but it too is rising fast; by some accounts China now invests twice as much money in renewable energy as the U.S. does. In energy technologies ranging from coal to nuclear to solar to wind, Chinese companies that five years ago were essentially unknown outside the country are now formidable international players.
Importantly, this global race to develop new energy sources often ignores the least-costly one: energy efficiency. This low-hanging fruit, which can compete straight up with the cheapest of energy sources, isn't much picked because multiple market barriers stand in the way.
The Steyer-Taylor Center intends to leverage innovative financing and policy approaches to address these challenges. It will do so through two channels: as an incubator of ideas, producing research and analysis with a practical impact; and as an incubator of businesses that can help take promising advanced-energy technologies to scale.
Contact Information
- Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance
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Stanford University
559 Nathan Abbott Way
Stanford, CA 94305
For administrative questions, please contact:
Karen Menard
kmenard@law.stanford.edu
650 723.0981