STANFORD UNIVERSITY PIE, Precourt Institute of Energy, STANFORD UNIVERSITY

GOALS OF THE
TOMKAT CENTER

The TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy works to transform the world's energy systems by:

  • Identifying key challenges and defining research agendas
  • Carrying out evaluation and analysis
  • Challenging our faculty to form interdisciplinary groups to provide new approaches to problem solving
  • Developing methods for analysis that will be adopted by other practitioners
  • Performing systems level and cross-disciplinary research
  • Facilitating translation to actual applied technology
  • Proposing innovative solutions

INCREASING PENETRATION OF RENEWABLES
INTO THE ENERGY SYSTEM

This problem is inherently interdisciplinary because renewable resources:

  • Behave intermittently with varying timescales
  • Require a different transmission and distribution system than the current infrastructure
  • Involve technical issues of information management and system control
  • Are influenced by markets that determine which fraction of energy comes from renewables
  • Impact the environment