Alumni Profile: Victoria Mao

Victoria Mao, second from left, and two other students in blue suits and green hard hats speak to an employee of Jonah Energy — Victoria Mao, second from left, and Sophomore College classmates at Jonah Energy in 2014.

An interdisciplinary approach to energy

Stanford alumna Victoria Mao reflects on how the Bill Lane Center has shaped her career in the energy sector.

By Surabhi Balachander

Recently, Victoria Mao, ‘17, celebrated a promotion to Senior Business Implementation Analyst at the California ISO (CAISO). This milestone led Mao to reflect on the arc of her career in energy, which, according to her, began with the Bill Lane Center for the American West.

Site visits and stakeholders

Back in 2014, Mao participated in the Center’s “Energy in the West” Sophomore College course. Co-taught by Professors David Freyberg, Sally Benson, and Lane Center Director Bruce Cain, this course traveled to Wyoming. The group visited a range of energy-related sites, from coal mines to hydroelectric plants to uranium fields. Alongside these site visits, students and faculty met with various stakeholders in the region, from leaders in Wyoming’s Native communities to residents concerned about fracking’s impact on their water resources.

Victoria Mao, front center, poses with Prof. David Freyberg and Sophomore College classmates in Wyoming in 2014 — Mao, front center, poses with Professor David Freyberg and Sophomore College classmates in Wyoming

For Mao, Sophomore College (SoCo) was a uniquely eye-opening and transformative experience. She notes she was exposed to many new things–the course was her third time ever on a plane–and acquired a broad view of the energy field that has shaped the remainder of her career. “That was my first time really seeing how much energy touches different people,” Mao reflects, ”not only the people who stand to gain from it, but also people who have been negatively impacted by the need for energy resources.”

Research mentorship, policy and behavior

After SoCo, Mao went on to declare a major in energy resources engineering, with Benson as her academic advisor and Cain as another longtime mentor. Her interests in energy solidified, Mao later applied for a summer internship with CAISO–her current employer–in the inaugural year of the Shultz Energy Fellowships program. The application process introduced her to CAISO, an organization whose goals and values she found matched her own. Unfortunately, she was the runner-up for the position that year, and afterwards went to Cain seeking feedback. He assured her that she was an incredibly strong candidate, and backed his assessment up by helping her secure another Lane Center-funded position for that summer: a research project with affiliated scholar Dian Grueneich as her mentor. With Grueneich and another student, Mao compared energy policies in the states of California and Georgia and the country of Germany. This project, Mao notes, made her even more conscious of the role of policy, especially given Grueneich’s background as a former California Public Utilities Commissioner. While Mao’s major focused on technology, her Lane Center experiences showed her that “nothing ever gets done unless there’s policy behind it.”

The summer after she graduated from Stanford, Mao participated in one more Lane Center project. Under the mentorship of Gregg Sparkman, PhD ‘18, and in partnership with the City of Palo Alto Utilities, Mao examined how energy efficiency programs were or were not changing consumer behavior. This project introduced her to some technical tools, such as R, that she still uses today. It also furthered her appreciation for the non-technical aspects of the energy industry, and cemented her interests in blending technical and non-technical expertise in her career.

Victoria Mao and Bruce Cain pose on a beach — Mao with Lane Center Faculty Director Bruce Cain

Mao's career today

After some time as a consultant and as a Power Settlements Analyst at the Northern California Power Agency, Mao joined CAISO in 2021, where she now works on a team focused on market settlements design & configuration–in her words, that means they have the responsibility for turning policy into optimal configurations of energy systems. On a typical day, she does anything from writing code to analyzing data to communicating with other teams, and in her new senior role, she’s starting to communicate with energy vendors as well. “What we do gets passed down to customers,” she says of the power of her work, “so I am impacted by the work I am doing.”

In her current role, Mao also thinks about the American West as a region. She grew up in Sacramento, and identifies as “ride-or-die” for her hometown, and so CAISO’s location in the Sacramento area alongside its orientation towards improving energy experiences in the greater West resonates with her deeply. She traces so many of her professional skills and interests to the Lane Center’s generative environment and to Cain’s unwavering support as a mentor (She’s still in touch with him, as evidenced by the recent photo of them below). Mao describes the Lane Center as “truly interdisciplinary in the best way:” an academic home that blends different kinds of projects and perspectives.