Upcoming Events
2024 Macro Energy Systems Workshop
Princeton University will be the 2024 MES Workshop host. Similar to the 2022 MES Workshop, this 2-day in-person Workshop will include lightning sessions highlighting cutting edge research in MES from multiple disciplinary and topical perspectives in both the domestic and international space; keynote speakers; a highly interactive set of working sessions to develop a policy-relevant research agenda relevant to MES; and a community meeting to help set the agenda for the community in the coming years. This workshop will feature multiple networking opportunities and a reception.
MES Speaker Series: Sustainable Finance and Macro-Energy Systems
How can developments in the field of sustainable finance connect to the study of macro-energy systems?
MES Speaker Series: Communicating Uncertainty in Macro-Energy Systems to Decision Makers
How can we quantify and communicate uncertainty from energy system modeling to decision-makers at different levels?
2022 Macro Energy Systems Workshop
Hosted in-person at Stanford University, the 2-day Workshop will include lightning sessions highlighting cutting edge research in MES from multiple disciplinary and topical perspectives; two keynote speakers; a highly interactive set of working sessions to develop a policy-relevant research agenda relevant to MES; and a community meeting to help set the agenda for the community in the coming years. It will also include a reception and plenty of opportunities for networking.
MES Speaker Series: Beyond the Least Cost Paradigm
How do conventional energy system optimization models, with a least-cost objective, fail to capture the complexities of the clean energy transition? What alternative formulations should be considered?
MES Speaker Series: Modeling Deep Decarbonization in Developing Countries
How does modeling deep decarbonization pathways in developing countries differ from developed countries? What considerations are new or different?
MES Speaker Series: Justice and Equity
What work has been done to incorporate energy justice considerations into energy policy analysis, and moving forward, what metrics and objectives that we should be thinking about when designing policy with energy justice in mind?
MES Speaker Series | Policy Mechanisms
How can macro-energy systems analysis do a better job of capturing the diversity of policy approaches available to policy makers, and what modeling practices can best support policy change?
MES Workshop
We held an invitation-only workshop on Macro-Energy Systems in September 2020 via Zoom. In August 2019, we published a paper in Joule outlining the need for a recognized discipline and academic infrastructure supporting research and researchers focusing on large scale energy systems and the energy transition, a discipline that we named Macro-Energy Systems. This workshop represented the next step towards the realization of the vision we laid out in this paper. Additionally, a recorded seminar discussing Macro-Energy Systems and some thoughts about next steps can be found here.
There were two key objectives of the Macro-Energy Systems workshop: first, to bring together the key participants of this community to discuss and identify the boundaries, key unanswered questions, and foundational knowledge of the field encompassed by Macro-Energy Systems; second, to create ongoing support for the academic infrastructure that can sustain Macro-Energy Systems (MES) as an active community. Key sessions of the workshop addressed topics such as ‘What are the frontiers of MES research currently?’, ‘What are major critiques of MES work and how have we or might we respond to them?’, and ‘What are the skills students need to learn to be successful in MES?’. The small workshop was held via Zoom meetings with sessions conducted as highly interactive panel discussions.