Breakthrough Energy’s VP of GRIDS discusses building the software tools needed to modernize the global electric grid for the next 50 years.
Alice Yake’s parents’ taught her and her brother the importance of fairness and discipline, but also how to overcome obstacles and tackle big problems.
Those life skills have served Alice throughout her career in the power sector, from a false start at Enron — just months before it declared bankruptcy — to a long, successful career at Xcel Energy. Last year, she left her role as the utility’s chief planning officer to become VP of GRIDS at Breakthrough Energy, the organization founded by Bill Gates to accelerate clean energy using philanthropy and investment funding.
This week on With Great Power, Alice shares how she’s now helping energy planners across the world improve electric grids through open-source planning and modeling software. She also discusses the challenge of building a better workforce to modernize the grid, as well as the opportunities to integrate more distributed energy resources into infrastructure that can help meet growing demand for clean energy over the coming decades.
Credits: Hosted by Brad Langley. Produced by Mary Catherine O’Connor. Edited by Anne Bailey. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is executive editor. The GridX production team includes Jenni Barber, Samantha McCabe, and Brad Langley.
Brad Langley: Alice Yakes' parents taught her and her brothers to see problems as opportunities. So when something needed fixing, they usually did it themselves. Take cars, for example.
Alice Yake: We would buy them broke, and as a family we would replace the engines, the transmissions, whatever needed to be done. And my dad was a huge scientific method guy. He was just like. "Kids, I want to give you the confidence to be able to explore the world and try different things and problem solve."
Brad Langley: A lot of that problem solving happened on family road trips from their home in Texas. They visited each of the lower 48 states. Alice remembers those trips as mini lessons in life skills.
Alice Yake: We learned navigation, camping, being able to tie knots and fix food and all of those kinds of things. We were given so many opportunities for skill sets that we really weren't scared of trying something and we weren't really scared of failing at things. And you also learned you had to make the decision to take a step forward. You didn't have the luxury of sitting still.
Brad Langley: Years later, that message would come full circle. After graduating from Texas A&M with a data management degree in 2001, she took a role at Enron just a few months before the company went belly up.
Alice Yake: So I was laid off with 3,500 of my closest friends by voicemail that one evening. And having not been somebody who was out of college for a long time [I] was concerned with being able to find that next job because the competition was going to be severe.
Brad Langley: But that worry would turn out to be unfounded. Within weeks, she was working at the energy company Occidental Petroleum, and seven years later she took another step forward.
Alice Yake: So Xcel got to know me because I was intervening in their rate cases as Occidental Petroleum. And I got a phone call that said, "Hey, instead of taking apart these rate cases, how would you like to put them together?"
Brad Langley: Alice started out working in regulatory affairs and rose to president of Xcel Energy in Colorado, and then became the utility's chief planning officer in 2022. But last year she made a big move to Breakthrough Energy where she's now VP of its GRIDS program. Now she spends her days helping to build tools to update the electric grid. It's a bit like fixing up those old cars with her dad as a kid, just a lot more complicated.
Alice Yake: It's probably one of the greatest machines we have ever created as humankind, and it is a life essential. You just live your life and it magically appears. The complexity of doing that is incredible. I think we have to give some serious though to the future on how are we going to use the system going forward and making deliberate decisions now to make sure that we build it economically, reasonably, and have longevity associated with it.
Brad Langley: This is With Great Power, a show about the people building the future grid today. I'm Brad Langley. Some people say utilities are slow to change. They don't innovate fast enough. And while it might not always seem like the most cutting edge industry, there are lots of really smart people working really hard to make the grid cleaner, more reliable, and customer-centric. Today, my guest is Alice Yake, vice president of the GRIDS program at Breakthrough Energy, the Bill Gates-backed organization that uses philanthropy and investment funding to accelerate clean energy. GRIDS is part of a years-long effort to help energy planners across the world design and operate electric grids. And Alice says as energy demands rise globally, the stakes for this kind of effort couldn't be higher.
Alice Yake: Right now we've seen dramatic changes in the energy infrastructure serving customers, and we are seeing a very different demand curve, whether it's in developed areas or undeveloped areas. It is a worldwide event that we are looking at of energy growth and access, and we have to plan it really well because these systems last us 50 to 60 years.
Brad Langley: Alice and I talk about the need for growing the grid planning workforce and why the old approaches to grid management just don't cut it anymore. We look at how the problem of an age grid actually offers an opportunity to do better grid planning and integrate distributed energy resources. But first, I ask her to describe the GRIDS program and why it's centered around open source software.
Alice Yake: So we are investing our time and our dollars philanthropically and ensuring that there is a comprehensive open source ecosystem for the different components that come into planning energy systems. Specifically, our mission is to reduce the amount of time that it takes to get to decision-making. And there are a lot of pieces of the puzzle that go into that decision-making. Two main elements are slowing us down a lot in that process right now. One, the tools that we currently have that we've been using for the past 30 to 40 years are not what we actually need for going forward. The complexity of the system has dramatically changed. Where we get our energy from has changed. The different options we have, the flexibility we need, the weather patterns that we are facing. Those are all driving needs for upgrades in those tools. In addition, those tools, commercial tools, are generally pretty expensive.
So when we're talking about underdeveloped or undeveloped areas of the world, they're inaccessible. Additionally, they're very complex to use. And so rarely can you repeat what somebody has put into these models, and that has caused a lack of trust in the environment and in the process that we work in to make decisions about grid infrastructure. I mean, everything from the NIMBYism, that's symptoms of distrust in the process. Do we really need this? How am I benefiting from this? Are the right numbers being assumed? Why is this costing so much? Isn't there a cheaper way? All of those questions come from second guessing, and much of that comes because people can't replicate the models that tell us what we need. So we need to have repeatability. We need to have transparency and we need to have accessibility. Countries like India that are still developing their system, they cannot afford some of these commercial tools, even India.
And so then when you go to portions of Africa where there's no infrastructure whatsoever, they absolutely aren't going to be able to use these tools.
Brad Langley: Let's dig into the tools that Breakthrough is developing to model and improve grid planning. What are they and when and why were they developed?
Alice Yake: So we take a look at what's available on the commercial side and then also what's available on the open source side. And then if you're familiar with open source, what that means is it's publicly published so that you have access to the code that makes up the software and you can make contributions. You can download it, you can use it, and then you can say, "Hey, this isn't exactly where it should be." You can add to it and you can submit that back, and then the owner can accept it and upgrade that tool. So it's all publicly available. So what we do is we benchmark against the commercial tools and say, "What is missing?" And then we will help the entities that are responsible for owning these open source tools say, "Do you need some funding in order to close the gap on developing this piece?" So what I'll say is directly is we don't own the tools directly.
We incentivize the open source tools, which are owned generally by the individual who has them posted and hosted, but we're incentivizing them to increase the capabilities inside of those tools and move those forward. We also work with academia on analyzing the differences of the deep research, the pre-tool development is what are the things that need to be in place in order to solve this kind of problem? We can get into some deep math and geeky things because there's many layers to how this technology actually works. Not only do you have a model that can look at an aspect of the system, but then you also have to have a mathematical solver underpinning it. And mathematical solvers aren't written just for the energy system. They're generally mathematical solvers that are used for a lot of things. So then we'll work with the people that are coding those mathematical solvers to focus them on the energy sector to look at why aren't they running as fast?
Why aren't they as efficient? And incentivize them also to close those gaps. So there's lots of different pieces that we get involved in, Brad, in order to be able to enhance and improve the modeling aspects.
Brad Langley: And why did Breakthrough go with the open source model versus developing more of a commercial product? What are some of the benefits in your mind of why that was the right approach for these types of tools?
Alice Yake: Well, I think foundationally it starts at the global benefits look at what it is that Breakthrough comes to the table for. So there's nearly 700 million people on the planet that have no electricity at all, and there's billions with insufficient access to electricity. They cannot afford the commercial tools to do the planning that is necessary to design these systems to provide the energy benefits to the customers, the individuals living in those regions. So you have to provide them an opportunity for access. That opportunity for access doesn't come with a commercial tool. It may be philanthropically you could incentivize that for a couple of years, but the intention is sustainability long-term. And so therefore you have to have a tool set that they can afford and that will solve the problems they're looking at. That's one of the reasons of looking at open source because it is available to the market.
The second thing is, like I was mentioning before, is this trust aspect. Without repeatability and transparency, we will continue to have distrust in this environment. And so closing the gap on distrust is a big piece of the puzzle because in the commercial tools, particularly for these grid modeling, there's a black box and people don't know what happens inside of that black box because it's coded and it's private and it's proprietary. And so giving people a way to replicate, even if the utility's still using the commercial tool, fine, but allowing them to translate those input files into ones that then can be used in an open source tool to rerun and at least validate 97% of what are the results that are being posted by the utility, that closes that gap on distrust.
Brad Langley: And looking beyond better planning, what are some other key needs right now in terms of workforce management, how the grid is managed? What other areas are you guys looking at?
Alice Yake: Yeah, so as I used to tell my team at Xcel is we can put together the most beautiful plan through all the models that we have, but unless you can build it and execute on it, it is quite frankly garbage. On the planning side, we have a huge human resource gap. I'll go deeper into that one. Think about the planning aspect. We've now had 30 to 40 years historically of limited to no load growth, which means the systems that we were looking at building were largely because of replacement. So maintain and replace with a minimal amount of expansion for say new neighborhoods or a new building that was going up or something along those lines. And so the teams, the planning teams themselves have shrunk because you haven't had to have a lot of that enhanced intelligence on theorizing around what this future is going to look like.
And we all got really settled and comfortable into it's maintain and replace. We've got this figured out. This is what we need to do. But now think about where we are. I mean, set the data center stuff aside, but the other changes in our economy, the other changes in people's preferences, those are all driving a different animal. And if you think about that 30 to 40 years, you and I both know the lifespan of a career. If you're sitting at 30 to 40 years in a maintain and replace mentality and environment, the people that last had to design these systems for a period of growth are retired or dead. Yeah, we don't have the skillsets and we don't have the size of teams that we need to now face the future that we are facing. Not only that, you extend that to the universities. We've had so many universities shut down their power systems engineering departments.
We have very few in the US still doing this training. And now we have a dramatic need for people to come into this space. And I'm not even getting into yet the trades, the people that we actually need to build this, the pipe fitters, the linemen, all of those. Those are also missing from the equation. And it is now not just a US, Europe, and parts of Asia type discussion. This is global. It doesn't matter where you are on the face of this planet right now, there is an energy need and there's somebody looking at filling it in the competition for the equipment, the competition for the intelligence, the competition for the design, the competition for the minerals. It is greater than what we've ever seen, and we are falling behind.
Brad Langley: Breakthrough is a global organization. So how does grid planning and grid modeling differ between clients in the northern and southern hemispheres?
Alice Yake: Oh, it's amazing. Here in the US, it's not the primary goal of what it is that we are working on. I think there's some real benefits that will come from it. So like regulatory commissions that don't currently have modeling teams that have licenses to use the commercial tools, I believe they're going to pick up and use these open source tools that we are working on and they will provide great benefit. But it's a game changer for some of the countries when you go into the global south because they don't have access to tools and they're doing planning and Excel spreadsheets. Not only that, it's a game changer because many of those regions also very much are conscious of climate impacts. They're feeling the impacts of climate now with longer heat waves, longer dry spells. So they're very conscious about, well, we want to design a system that is not going to exacerbate this problem.
And in order to do that, you then have to bring in more variable energy resources. Well, variable energy resources mean a more complex system. It's just the fact of the matter because I don't know about you, Brad, I still don't have the red bat phone where I can pick up and say, "Hey God, can you move that cloud aside? Can you change the wind speed? Can you keep the sun up another couple of hours?" That doesn't exist. And so you have to operate these systems in the environment that we are, which is very much a predictive analytics, which is more complex. And so we've got to get the tools in the right hands of the people. So they are game changers on them figuring out what does this look like? How can they maintain reliability? How can they get heavens 76% reliability versus the five nines that we talk about in the US?
Brad Langley: And any specific country examples you're fond of?
Alice Yake: Yeah, so in India, we have a really interesting environment, particularly in the distribution areas. There's a variety of discoms as they're known over in India. Some of them are financially perfectly fine, others are struggling more. And because of the planning aspects, many of them do not have planning tools other than Excel spreadsheets. Many of them don't even have visibility of what their entire system really looks like. And so the planning is minimal. They do the best that they possibly can, but they have some really unique issues that we haven't faced as much. They also have some really unique opportunities that we really can't harness as much here in the US because we've decided already what the design of our system is. And so they have a real opportunity to harness some of the pieces there. The unique situation they're facing is a density situation. The population density there is some of the highest in the world.
And being able to solve localized issues as say air conditioning is added, which is one of the largest growing contributors to energy consumption in India is air conditioning. And figuring out how to get that in people's homes, they're simply out of space for wire in some of these areas. So that means you have to very much go local. You have to put the rooftop solar, you have to put the batteries in. And it's not like giant solar rooftop that we do here in the US, it's much smaller. But being able to preserve life through the addition of air conditioning, that is an important factor of solving the problem. So these tools help figure out where can you build in flexibility? Where can you add this energy or put a battery in to try and help communities achieve higher capability of adding that air conditioning and preserving life?
Brad Langley: And is that how you tie it into the bigger decarbonization issue of how better grid planning can move the needle in emerging markets to have fossil fuel dependent grids in terms of getting more of those DERs deployed?
Alice Yake: Absolutely. So flexibility is the name of the game in many of these regions. And optimizing the utilization of the transmission network with the centrally located generation, which includes wind and solar as well, is going to be important. You need those for industry. You need those for agriculture. But then there's also the other end of the spectrum of the city centers that are densely populated. How in the world do you get energy all the way down to that low-voltage customer? And so there's lots of problem solving around this. It's not just one thing. So you can't say the only solution is distributed. You have to bring both pieces together, which is another gap in the tools because these tools do not co-optimize. So finding a way of better data translation between these tools so that you can have what we like to fondly call the easy button that will then give you a solution that satisfies needs on the distribution and transmission system. We're not anywhere close to getting that done yet, but there's some real light at the end of the tunnel that will help us make progress.
Brad Langley: We spend time discussing the benefits of open source, but I mean we know there is no real panacea in that regard. So what are some of the downsides or pain points when it comes to building open source models?
Alice Yake: Yeah, right now, some of the main reasons that they're not adopted is lack of support. So it's not like you have a 1-800 number that you can call and ask, "Hey, I couldn't get this to work. Can you help me fix it?" That generally doesn't exist right now. What I am encouraged to say is that we are seeing that start to form, especially for the most popular open source modeling tools. And that's also one of the things that we're looking at closely on how do we create that environment so that there is confidence, longevity, and that support network for people to be able to adopt these tools, to leverage them and to have the confidence that they are going to be trusted and they can call someone to get help. So that is a piece of the puzzle in solving the equation. They're also incredibly complex.
I sometimes joke that you need a couple of PhDs in a computer science degree in order to be able to use them. And quite frankly, it's real. Right now, if you were to go and download some of the tools, you might have to know Python code, and you would have to know inline coding, and you would have to know how to set it up with a solver and everything else. So what we're working on is building the ecosystem that closes the gap on that. So we've got to reduce the barrier to entry so that more people can have access to them at the same time as we're improving the tools so that they can solve the bigger puzzles that we are facing.
Brad Langley: Breakthrough has been focused on modernizing and decarbonizing the electric grid for many years long before the current AI data center craze and before the resulting surge in demand growth that we're seeing. How do you think we should be viewing rising rates in relation to grid planning? What are the lessons here we should take away?
Alice Yake: Yeah, so this is one of the things that I like to include in the talks that I've been giving recently is that I do not believe anyone should expect that electricity costs are going to be declining. It's straight math and it's the reality of the system that we have. So let's put a couple of facts on the table here for the listenership. First off, if you're located in the United States, this average system age of the infrastructure we have providing our electricity is roughly 55 years old. Think of this also as the life of that asset or those assets is generally around 60 years old. So that should tell you that it largely needs to be replaced, which it does. And that includes a significant portion of the distribution infrastructure, particularly closer to our city centers. We're just getting to end of life on them.
It's the same thing as our roadways, our water pipelines, you name it. It's that part of the system, it's time to turn it over. At the same time as we have that, you also need to understand is how does the cost of this system translate to a utility bill? And one of the basic premises of rate-making is straight line depreciation. What that means is when you initially make the capital investment, it's the most expensive it will ever be on your bill. And then that's a straight line depreciation every single year. So it comes down a little bit less expensive, a little bit less expensive, a little bit less expensive every year on your bill. So if we have a aged system, that means that it's largely depreciated, which means the representation of the cost of that system on your bill right now is low.
When you replace it, it goes back up to the top of that capital investment curve. So logically, if you have to replace a lot of the system, you're going to see bills going up just simply by replacing it. Now, what I'm here to tell you is that there are more expensive and less expensive ways to replace it. What are you going to replace it with? What is the asset life associated with that? What's the timeframe in which you're going to do that? How do you stage it? How do you make the decisions on where you're going to go? All of those things matter. Are you going to repeat a centralized or a decentralized model? How are you going to shift those things? Where are you going to assume you have participation from customers? So flexibility from the customers versus you don't. And that really sets up how conservative you need to be and what it is that you are building out.
Those are things that I would say we have to get to alignment around because we are rebuilding a system that we're going to use for the next 50 years.
Brad Langley: Is it realistic to hope that, I know the bills have gone up and they aren't likely to go down. Is there a path to having them stay steady of where they're at right now? And this is coming from a guy who lives in California. So infer with that what you want. I mean, what should we expect?
Alice Yake: I would say I don't expect them to stay steady. It's a matter of how much is that increase going to be. And I think there are actions we all have to decide, are we willing to take? You can make certain decisions in your household on how much you impact the energy system. That's the whole reason you see time abuse rates from the utilities is they're sending you a signal on this costs more on the system for us to operate. And so alter your usage in your home. Not only does it save you money, it saves the investment that's necessary on the system to replace it.
Brad Langley: So what is your opinion on the state of TOU rates and what utilities maybe can do to make customers improve that understanding so they can be part of the equation in reducing their bills by shifting when they use energy?
Alice Yake: Yeah, I think time of use rates are a way of expressing to customers where these impacts are. I know families make decisions all the time on when do you heat and cool your home, when you run your dryer, your dishwasher, whatever. But I also know that it's a real burden on some families too that don't have the tools in order to be able to do that. So I think the question we have to be asking, Brad, is how do we make this easier on people? Most people have a cell phone. Most people have some kind of smart cell phone. Is there a way to make it a lot easier for people to have that control in their hand, but giving them the ease of doing that? I'm really impressed with some of the groups out there that help low-income families. So here in Colorado, we have Energy Outreach Colorado, and they significantly help low-income housing by going through and retrofitting it with energy efficiency, as well as giving them the control to be able to manage their energy consumption at different times a day. We need more of this.
Brad Langley: We call this show with great power, which is a nod to the energy industry. It's also a Spider-Man quote, "With great power comes great responsibility." So Alice, what superpower do you bring to the energy transition?
Alice Yake: It took me a long time to recognize that while I was different, that different brought a benefit to the system, and that is I tend to see patterns. So finding a pattern for how do we work our way through this transition? What is it that we need to do? What are the options that we have? That is what I believe I bring to the table. And that's why I go back fundamentally to the planning components. You have to have a plan. And I will also be the first to say, when you run a model and you put a plan together, you will be wrong. They are not perfect. What they are is indicative. So Winston Churchill is known for saying plans are of little importance, but planning is essential. And so that kind of goes back to you know your plan is going to fail, but in the acts of planning, you're looking at alternatives.
And so when something doesn't go right, you don't have to go back to scratch. So we have to plan these systems. It's a 50-year decision we are making, and we don't have the luxury of putting that off because the 50, 60-year decision was made 55 years ago. And we now need to replace what was done by our forefathers and put it in place for the next several generations to be able to benefit from.
Brad Langley: Amazing conversation, Alice. Thank you so much for your time.
Alice Yake: Thank you, Brad. It's been a pleasure to speak with you.
Brad Langley: Alice Yake is vice president of the GRIDS program at Breakthrough Energy. With Great Power is produced by GridX in partnership with Latitude Studios. Delivering on our clean energy future is complex. GridX exists to simplify the journey. GridX is the enterprise rate platform that modern utilities rely on to usher in our clean energy future. We design and implement emerging rate structures, and we increase consumer investment in clean energy, all while managing the complex billing needs of a distributed grid.
Mary Catherine O'Connor produced a show. Anne Bailey is our senior editor. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. Sean Marquand composed the original theme song and mixed a show. The GridX production team includes Jenni Barber, Samantha McCabe, and me, Brad Langley. If this show is providing value for you, and we really hope it is, we'd love it if you could help us spread the word. You can rate or review us with Apple and Spotify, or you can share a link with a friend, colleague, or the energy nerd in your life.
As always, thanks so much for listening. I'm Brad Langley.