In this episode, I interview Joseph Stagner, the Executive Director, Sustainability and Energy Management at Stanford University. Over the past several years, Joe and his team transformed Stanford’s energy infrastructure by electrifying its heating system, replacing its gas-fired power plant with grid power, creating a unique system to recover heat, building massive tanks to store hot and cold water, and building a solar power plant. This project cut the campus’s total greenhouse gas emissions 68 percent and is lowering the system’s operating costs by $425m over 35 years.

Joseph was very gracious to come on and talk about the origins of this project, the hurdles his team met along the way, the results so far, and where it is going in the future. We also covered how these learnings can be applied to get other universities and entities with large campus infrastructures to follow suit.

I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did! Joseph is a rare one, in that he not only has a firm grasp on the problem and what is needed, but he’s gone out and deployed it at scale and is posting amazing results. His story struck me as a real bright spot in what, at times, can feel like an uphill battle. Enjoy!

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