Sara Baldwin
Director, Electrification
Sara Baldwin is Energy Innovation’s Electrification Director, where she leads the firm’s electrification policy practice area in tandem with the Electricity Program to develop a roadmap for economy-wide electrification. Sara provides guidance to federal and state policymakers across the U.S. along with other stakeholders on policy pathways to support the electrification and decarbonization of buildings, transportation, and industry.
Prior to joining Energy Innovation, Sara served as Vice President of Regulatory for the Interstate Renewable Energy Council (IREC), providing strategic direction for the organization’s regulatory program. In this capacity, she led IREC’s engagement on distributed energy resource regulatory policies in states across the country and supported organizational development, planning, and strategy. Sara has worked on dozens of publications and regulatory policy resources, including A Playbook for Modernizing the Distribution Grid, Making the Grid Smarter: State Primer on Adopting the IEEE 1547™-2018 Standard for Distributed Energy Resources, Charging Ahead: An Energy Storage Guide for State Policymakers, and Optimizing the Grid: A Regulator’s Guide to Hosting Capacity Analyses. On behalf of IREC, she served on the Technical Team for the U.S. Department of Energy’s SunShot Solar Market Pathways Initiative and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s Distributed Generation Interconnection Collaborative Advisory Committee.
From 2004 to 2014, Sara directed and implemented strategic clean energy policy and regulatory efforts in Utah as a Senior Policy Associate for Utah Clean Energy. She was named an “Innovator and Influencer” by Solar Power World in 2017 and one of “Utah’s Enlightened 50″ by the Community Foundation of Utah in 2012, and is a member of GridLab’s advisory board. Sara hosts Energy Innovation’s Electrify This! podcast and is the former host of the Grid Geeks podcast. She earned her B.S. in environmental studies and a B.A. in Spanish from the University of Utah, graduating with honors.