Powering water with clean energy
Shirley Zhou (she/her)
Hometown: Suzhou, China
Major: Atmosphere/Energy, MS '26
Internship: California Department of Water Resources
Shirley Zhou, a Shultz Energy Fellow, looks at what it will take to achieve California's 24/7 clean energy mandate.
Over the course of my fellowship at the Department of Water Resources (DWR), I learned that clean energy planning is as much about navigating tradeoffs as it is about crunching numbers. I came in expecting to focus on technical modeling, but I left with a much deeper understanding of how hydrology, market prices, and policy mandates all intersect in shaping SWP’s operations.
This experience was especially meaningful because it connected the abstract concepts I’ve studied—like 24/7 clean energy and temporal matching—to the real-world challenges of an organization tasked first and foremost with delivering water. Being part of Power Operation Management office gave me a front-row seat to the balancing act between policy ambitions, financial realities, and operational constraints.
My biggest takeaway is that progress toward California’s clean energy goals won’t come from a single solution but from a combination of solar, complementary resources, and smarter system design. I also take away a new sense of purpose: that my work can contribute, in a tangible way, to bridging the gap between technical analysis and actionable policy.
Beyond the technical lessons, the fellowship was also personally rewarding. For the first two weeks of my internship, I worked at the Sacramento office to get to know my colleagues. I had the opportunity to stay at UC Davis, which gave me the chance to explore the food and places in a city I had never been to before. I often went out to lunch with my colleagues, and those experiences made the fellowship even more memorable by building personal connections outside the office.
