Stanford Energy Seminar | Allocating Electricity | Alexandra Klass, University of Michigan Law School

The Stanford Energy Seminar has been a mainstay of energy engagement at Stanford for nearly 20 years and is one of the flagship programs of the Precourt Institute for Energy. We aim to bring a wide variety of perspectives to the Stanford community – academics, entrepreneurs, utilities, non-profits, and more. 

About the talk

The U.S. electricity system is premised on the ideas that utilities have a duty to serve all customers in their service territories and that electricity supply should always meet demand. Until recently, there has been little reason to question these foundational premises. Now, however, electricity experts predict massive load growth—most notably from data centers to power artificial intelligence (AI) and cryptocurrency—and building new power plants has financial and environmental risks. In this presentation, based on a forthcoming paper, Professor Klass will discuss law and policy frameworks developed for other resources—natural gas and water—for which short- or long-term scarcity is or was the norm rather than the exception, to reevaluate electricity law’s foundational principles, like the duty to serve, and to propose new approaches to meeting electricity demand. She will lay out a new regulatory framework for regulating data centers called “demand-side connect-and-manage” that can reduce the likelihood of overbuilding energy generation plants, allocate risks to and encourage innovation from major data center companies, and accelerate data center grid interconnection.

Alexandra B. Klass is the James G. Degnan Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. She teaches and writes primarily in the areas of energy law, environmental law, and natural resources law. In 2022 and 2023, she served in the Biden-Harris administration as Deputy General Counsel for Energy Efficiency and Clean Energy Demonstrations at the U.S. Department of Energy. Professor Klass’s recent scholarly work, published in many of the nation’s leading law journals, addresses regulatory and permitting challenges to integrating more renewable energy into the nation’s electric transmission grid, siting and eminent domain issues surrounding interstate electric transmission lines and oil and gas pipelines, and applications of the public trust doctrine to modern environmental law challenges. Before joining the Michigan Law faculty in 2022, Professor Klass was a Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, where she was a member of the faculty from 2006 to 2022. She has been a visiting professor at Stanford Law School, Harvard Law School, Uppsala University (Sweden), and the University of Arizona Rogers College of Law. Prior to her academic career, Professor Klass was a partner at Dorsey & Whitney LLP in Minneapolis, where she specialized in environmental law and land use litigation. See more details on Professor Klass’s background and publications here.

Anyone with an interest in energy is welcome to join! You can enjoy seminars in the following ways:

• Attend live. The auditorium may change quarter by quarter, so check each seminar event to confirm the location. Explore the current quarter's schedule.
• Watch live in a browser livestream if available. Check each seminar event for its unique livestream URL.
• Watch recordings of past seminars 
  • Available on the Past Energy Seminars page and the Energy Seminars playlist of the Stanford Energy YouTube channel
• (For students) Take the seminar as a 1-unit class (CEE 301/ENERGY 301/MS&E 494)

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