UT Energy Symposium

A weekly guest lecture series that is both free and open to the public and available for course credit.

In an effort to provide a multidisciplinary platform for UT faculty and students to interact on the most pressing energy issues facing our world, the Energy Institute sponsors the UT Energy Symposium (UTES), which entered its 29th semester in fall 2025. 

The UTES serves as a “convener” for the campus community, uniting students interested in energy issues with faculty and others working on sustainable energy security. Students who register for the symposium receive one credit hour for the 15-week seminar course, which is open to both undergraduate and graduate students. The course is taught in both the fall and spring semesters.

Ongoing themes for UTES include climate change policy, innovation and diffusion of energy technologies, low-carbon technology options and status, and behavioral aspects of energy consumption.

Each UTES talk is recorded and posted on this page and on the Energy Institute YouTube channel.

Instructor: Carey King
Unique Number (Fall 2025): 65605 (graduate students) / 65310 (undergraduates)
Day & Time: Tuesday, 12:30 – 1:45 p.m.

If you need an accommodation to participate in this event, please contact Christa Hopkins, who can be reached at 512-475-8447 or christa@energy.utexas.edu, no later than five (5) business days prior to the event.


Upcoming UT Energy Symposium Talks

Date
Speaker
Talk Title
10/21/2025James K. Galbraith | Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government / Business Relations, LBJ School of Public Affairs, and Professor of Government, The University of Texas at Austin 
Jing Chen | Assistant Professor, Finance, University of Northern British Columbia
Book Talk – Entropy Economics: The Living Basis of Value and Production
10/28/2025Xi Chen | Associate Professor CUNY Advanced Science Research Center Department of Chemical Engineering, The City College of New YorkWater-Responsive Materials for Evaporation Energy Harvesting
11/4/2025Michael Howland | Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Assistant Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyPowering Decarbonization With Modeling and Optimization of Renewables in the Changing Environment
11/11/2025Chris Kennedy | Professor, Institute for Integrated Energy Systems, University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada Energy and Economic Regimes
11/18/2025Leah Ellis | CEO and Co-founder, Sublime SystemsEnergy-Efficient Cement Manufacturing
12/2/2025Andrew Fix | Assistant Professor, Maseeh Department of Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering, The University of Texas at AustinTBD

UT Energy Symposium Talks

Displaying 276 - 300 of 347

September 4, 2014

The Importance of Fuel Diversity in the Energy Generation Mix

Cris Eugster, Executive Vice President, Chief Generation and Strategy Officer, CPS Energy

April 28, 2014

Energy and Urbanization

Arnulf Grubler, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and Yale University

April 24, 2014

Student Research Showcase

  • Brent Bennett, PhD student, Materials Science and Engineering: “Redox Flow Batteries: How Cutting-Edge Chemistry Will Transform the Electric Grid”
  • Sean Wood, PhD student, Chemical Engineering: “Improved Lithium-ion Batteries using Lead Telluride (PbTe)”

April 17, 2014

March 27, 2014

Carbon Neutral Design: An Architectural Primer

James Wasley, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Architecture, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

March 20, 2014

Electricity Scarcity Pricing and Resource Adequacy

William Hogan, Raymond Plank Professor of Global Energy Policy, Harvard University

March 6, 2014

Stanford’s ARPA-E Sensors and Energy Behavior Initiative

Carrie Armel, Research Associate, Stanford University

February 27, 2014

Human Nature & the Grid

Craig Boice, President Boice Dunham Group

February 13, 2014

Emerging Legal and Political Issues in Shale Gas Production

David Spence, Associate Professor, McCombs School of Business, UT Austin

February 6, 2014

A Status Report on the U.S. Nuclear Energy Program

William C. Ostendorff, Nuclear Regulatory Commissioner

January 30, 2014

January 23, 2014

Transforming America’s Grid through Technology, Competition & Green Power

J. Calvin Crowder, President, Electric Transmission Texas

November 21, 2013

The impacts of shale gas development on surface water quality

Sheila Olmstead, Associate Professor at UT Austin’s LBJ School of Public Affairs

November 14, 2013

Valuation of plug-in vehicle life-cycle air emissions and oil displacement benefits

Paulina Jaramillo, Assistant Research Professor at Carnegie Mellon University

November 7, 2013

Leveraging large data sets: demand side models and control in low carbon power systems

Duncan Callaway, Assistant Professor at the University of California Berkeley

October 31, 2013

Telling the U.S. Energy Story

Jim Malewitz, Energy Reporter at The Texas Tribune

October 24, 2013

The Future of Coal

Andrew Maxson, Program Manager at Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI)

October 17, 2013

October 3, 2013

September 26, 2013

September 19, 2013

Modelling energy technology policy alternatives using expert elicitations

Greg Nemet, Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison

September 12, 2013

Student Research Showcase

  • Craig Andrew Milroy, PhD student, Chemical Engineering: “Lithium-sulfur batteries”
  • Daniel Urieli, PhD student, Computer Science: “A Learning Agent for Heat-Pump Thermostat Control”
  • Krystian Perez, PhD student, Chemical Engineering: “Smart Use of Smart Meters: Disaggregation of A/C Loads from Residential Homes”

September 5, 2013

Framing Energy Innovation Policy: Why We Fail to Learn from Experience

Jeffrey Alexander, Associate Director for Research & Analytics, SRI International

April 30, 2013

Energy with the CEO: "Energy Innovation and Entrepreneurship”

Randy Foutch, Chairman and CEO, Laredo Petroleum