☀️ Powering Progress, Changing the Climate Symposium — Clean Energy Institute
At the inaugural Powering Progress, Changing the Climate Symposium, hosted by the UW Clean Energy Institute (CEI), join leaders and innovators in academia, business, government, and philanthropy to explore how to:Accelerate deployment of transformative clean energy technologies and policies for the public good, Forge cross-sector alliances that are agile, inclusive, and built to last, Reignite leadership commitment to clean energy innovation, Speakers include President Jones, Professor David Baker (keynote), former WA Governor Jay Inslee, former U.S Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, former U.S. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell, world-leading clean energy/materials researchers, climate tech business leaders, CEI Member Faculty, and CEI Graduate Fellow alumni.
Register via UW TouchNet. UW students, faculty, and staff: contact uwcei@uw.edu for a registration code.
Doors 8:30 am | Reception 5:00 pm in HUB Lyceum.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Student Union Building (HUB). Campus room: HUB South Ballroom. Accessibility Contact: ofreed1@uw.edu. Event Types: Special Events.
Tuesday, November 10, 2026, 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM.
For more info visit www.cei.washington.edu. CEI Interdisciplinary Seminar: Weiwei Yang, Microsoft
GridSFM: A Foundation Model for the Power Grid
AI has a power grid problem. The power grid has a compute problem. Data centers are arriving faster than transmission lines can be built. The fastest new capacity is whatever the existing grid can already carry, but finding it is the hard part. It is nonlinear, nonconvex, and mixed-integer all at once: AC optimal power flow with siting and switching on top. Each solve is slow, and the search is combinatorial. We introduce GridSFM, the first foundation model for the power grid, to break this compute bottleneck. This talk follows the full path, from curating publicly available data into realistic grid topologies to designing a model whose architecture encodes the physics of power flow. Then we put it to work: siting data centers where the grid has headroom, and optimizing topology to relieve the congestion they create.
About the Speaker
Weiwei Yang is the co-founder of Asemic.ai, where she builds foundation models for engineered systems to power civilization,…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Nanoengineering & Sciences Building (NAN). Campus room: NAN 181. Accessibility Contact: Danica Hendrickson, danicah@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Thursday, November 12, 2026, 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM.