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 |
|---|---|---|
| 11/11/2025 | Chris Kennedy | Professor, Institute for Integrated Energy Systems, University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada | Energy and Economic Regimes |
| 12/2/2025 | Andrew Fix | Assistant Professor, Maseeh Department of Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin | Moisture Matters: Leveraging Water Vapor-Selective Membranes in the Built Environment |
UT Energy Symposium Talks
November 3, 2016
Power Markets, Regulation, and Utility Scale Solar in the U.S.
Colin Meehan, Director, Regulatory & Public Affairs, First Solar
October 27, 2016
Reforming the Energy Vision: An Electric System for Stormy Times
Elizabeth Stein, Senior Manager – New York Clean Energy Law & Policy, Environmental Defense Fund
October 20, 2016
Fail Faster, Be Nimbler: Does the Oil & Gas Industry Have Anything to Learn from Silicon Valley?
Russell Gold, senior energy reporter at The Wall Street Journal
October 13, 2016
Cash is King! The Comparative Effectiveness of Solar Incentives
Dan Matisoff, Associate Professor, The School of Public Policy, Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, Georgia Tech
October 6, 2016
New Utility Business Models for an Evolving Industry
Virginia Lacy, Principal, RMI Electricity Practice
September 29, 2016
ERCOT and the Evolving Grid: 2016 Perspectives
Paul Wattles, Senior Analyst, Market Design, ERCOT
September 22, 2016
Who is that Man Behind the Curtain? Philanthropy’s Role in the Transition to Clean Energy
Marilu Hastings, Vice President, Sustainability Program, The Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation
September 15, 2016
What is the World Coming To: From Energy Systems to Global Crisis Analysis and Response
Yaneer Bar-Yam, President, New England Complex Systems Institute
September 8, 2016
Distributed Energy Resources – Driving Multi-Disciplined Innovation
Bert Haskell, Chief Technology Officer, Pecan Street Inc.
September 1, 2016
Global progress in Carbon Capture and Storage – field demonstrations with emphasis on the storage component
Dr. Susan Hovorka, Senior Research Scientist, Bureau of Economic Geology, The University of Texas at Austin
April 28, 2016
Addressing Climate Change Among the Major Economies: The Case of India
Joshua Busby, Associate Professor, LBJ School, UT Austin and Sarang Shidore, Visiting Scholar at LBJ School, UT Austin
April 21, 2016
A century of peak oil predictions
Mason Inman, Author of The Oracle of Oil
April 14, 2016
Student Research Showcase
- Martha Gross, Texas Materials Lab: Hybrid Zinc Batteries for Grid-Level Storage
- Thomas Deetjen, Webber Energy Group: Challenges for grid-level solar integration: generator dispatch concerns and possible solutions
- Vivek Nath, LBJ School of Public Policy: Drivers of Plug-In Electric Vehicle Adoption in California
March 31, 2016
IoT, Analytics, Batteries, and PV: How Utilities Are Transforming Into the Utility of the Future
Raiford Smith, Vice President, Corporate Development and Planning, CPS Energy
March 24, 2016
Political Economy of Energy Policy in India
Nikit Abhyankar, Senior Scientific Engineering Associate, International Energy Studies Group, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
March 10, 2016
Energy Storage in California: From Innovation to Installation
Alex Luce, Program Manager, CalCharge
February 11, 2016
The Building of a $2.5b Cleantech Community in Central Texas
Mitch Jacobson, Co-Director, ATI Clean Energy Incubator
February 4, 2016
Averting Energy Catastrophe: Why I Bet the Farm on China and Innovation
Matthew Nordan, Managing Partner, MNL Partners
January 28, 2016
Economic Perspectives on Oil and Gas Royalties
Tim Fitzgerald, Professor, Texas Tech
November 19, 2015
Student Research Showcase
Sebastian Souyris, PhD candidate in UT’s McCombs School of Business: Peer Effects in the Diffusion of Solar panels – A Dynamic Discrete Choice Approach
Sean Wood, Chemical Engineering PhD student: Looking Towards Higher-Capacity Anode Materials for Lithium-ion Batteries.
November 12, 2015
The Road to Paris: Paved with Domestic Climate Policy
Kate Larsen, Director, Rhodium Group
November 5, 2015
The Social Costs of Energy Production and Use in the United States: Consequences for Measures of Output and Growth
Nicholas Muller, Associate Professor, Middlebury College
October 29, 2015
Solar Energy in the United States – Its Growth and the Challenges Ahead
Francis O’Sullivan, Director, Research and Analysis, MIT
October 15, 2015
ENGIE and the Energy Transition
Zin Smati, President & CEO, GDF Suez Energy North America
October 8, 2015
Financing the Clean Economy
Jonathan Silver, President & CEO, Greenbanc Global