Climate Pathfinder: Energy Research Leads to Impacts, Honors and New Role

Tyler Norris portrait in front of the Nicholas School of the Environment
Tyler Norris' research on rethinking load growth is shaping industry and policy conversations, with bipartisan policy efforts, academic impact and a new career opportunity.

As a Ph.D. student and research fellow, Tyler Norris’ work has been gaining more than attention. His work is shaping industry and policy conversations, with bipartisan policy efforts, academic impact and a new career opportunity.

A study on rethinking load growth in U.S. power systems he co-authored has made waves across the energy sector. His research has led to a spot on the 2025 TIME100 Climate list, a guest essay in The New York Times and a new position at Google focused on energy innovation – and more.

His journey has been shaped by a lifelong fascination with how the world produces and uses energy — a fascination that began with physics.

“If you’re interested in physics, you have to be interested in energy,” Norris said. “I became increasingly aware of the nature of our global energy system and the implications it was having for the planet, especially anthropogenic climate change.”

Seeing a Critical Link

Graduating high school in 2006, the same year the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” was released, Norris felt the urgency of the climate challenge from an early age. At Stanford University, he earned his bachelor’s in public policy with an economics focus, seeing energy as the critical link between science, technology and policy.


After college, Norris joined the U.S. Department of Energy, launching a career that would span more than a decade in both the public and private sectors. He later worked at S&P Global and Cypress Creek Renewables. In his work, Norris found himself often in regulatory hearings.

“I ended up spending about half my time in front of state public utility commissions,” he explained. “The decisions around our power system are substantially determined by a small group of people on these commissions and on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. My role was to bring evidence and analysis to bear on questions of how we plan the power system.”

That experience exposed a critical problem: a lack of deep technical expertise in these high-stakes regulatory settings.

“These are increasingly complex issues,” he said. “I concluded that if I could go much deeper to better understand all the key methods for power system modeling, especially for bulk power systems, then I could just be of greater service in these kinds of contexts.”

Already living in Durham, Norris began exploring Ph.D. programs and soon found the ideal match right at home at the Duke Nicholas School of the Environment.

Stars Align for Duke Ph.D.

“Duke is one of a very few Ph.D. programs that offers an interdisciplinary approach to integrate policy, economics and energy. And the opportunity to work with faculty member Dalia (Patino-Echeverri) was the perfect fit,” he said.

His research at Duke grew out of North Carolina’s carbon planning process, where he was involved in a pivotal research question: how quickly solar projects could be connected to the grid. Norris began studying how interconnection policies shape the pace of renewable deployment, an inquiry that quickly expanded nationwide.

In 2023, he co-authored a white paper on rethinking interconnection and load growth, just as artificial intelligence and data centers began driving massive new electricity demand.

“By early 2024, it was clear that something very different was happening,” Norris said. “Large load growth was reshaping energy planning, and that this was going to have very significant implications for the power system.”

Through the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability and with faculty member Tim Profeta, Norris was involved in a Duke convening focused on large load growth. That event led directly to the groundbreaking paper — the most downloaded in the institute’s history.

The paper proposed a paradigm shift: planning the grid around flexible loads, such as data centers that can adjust electricity consumption in response to system needs.

“Sometimes it’s helpful to come in with a fresh, independent perspective and apply first principles thinking. ... If you’re too deep inside an existing system, it can be hard to imagine doing things differently.”

Tyler Norris

“We’ve never planned the system this way before,” Norris explained. “But flexibility could help maintain reliability, control costs and reduce emissions.”

Regulators, utilities and companies across the country have taken notice. Norris  testified on the research before the U.S. House Energy subcommittee of the Committee on Energy and Commerce. “Organizations are now exploring proposals for large-load demand response programs. California has begun scaling similar programs from the distribution level to the transmission grid,” Norris said.

A Bipartisan Path Forward

The idea has found support across political lines. “The full U.S. House passed an appropriations bill calling on the Department of Energy to study large-load flexibility alongside FERC, national labs and universities,” Norris noted. “It’s been gratifying to see that this has maintained a bipartisan posture.”

The paper’s influence, coupled with Norris’s clear-eyed optimism, caught the attention of policymakers, academics and industry leaders. Google offered him a role developing new approaches to clean energy deployment; he begins this month while finishing his Ph.D.

For Norris, the experience underscores the power of entrepreneurship and innovation. “Sometimes it’s helpful to come in with a fresh, independent perspective and apply first principles thinking,” he reflected. “If you’re too deep inside an existing system, it can be hard to imagine doing things differently.”

What started as a Ph.D. research project is now influencing national energy policy and industry practice.

“Honestly,” he said, “I was shocked that no one had done this analysis before. It can be easy to get intimidated by the complexity of an issue, and you might have imposter syndrome, because you think you’re not a deep expert. But I think there’s so much value in bringing fresh perspectives and looking at a problem from the bottom up and trying to think about a different type of solution.”