Events
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The 2026 Macro Energy Systems Workshop was held at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
MES Monthly Meeting: Faculty Search Roundtable
September 18 from 2-3 PM EST (11 AM - 12PM PST)
The Macro-Energy Systems Fellows are excited to announce the next edition of M3 (MES Monthly Meeting). The September M3 meeting will be an MES focused faculty search 'tutorial'. The tutorial will feature Associate Professor Benjamin Leibowicz (UT Austin), Assistant Professor Jackie Dowling (University of Iowa), and incoming Assistant Professor Anthony Cheng (Georgia Tech.). Each will share a brief presentation on navigating the interdisciplinary field of MES and their personal experience in navigating the academic job market, followed by an extensive period for Q&A. Look out for our October M3 as well, where we will focus on approaching MES-related industry opportunities!
We are honored to welcome our panelists:
Benjamin Leibowicz (The University of Texas at Austin)
Jackie Dowling (University of lowa)
Anthony Cheng (Georgia Institute of Technology)
Please register for the event here.
We look forward to seeing you there.
MES Expert Panel Series: Energy Systems Modeling under Policy Uncertainty
30 April 2026, 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM
This session will center on how energy systems planning and modeling can inform decision-making under policy uncertainty and potential reversals, including how policy instruments and institutional constraints shape technology pathways, system costs, and long-term decarbonization outcomes.
We are honored to welcome our panelists:
John Bistline (Watershed)
Wei Peng (Princeton University)
Alicia Zhao (Center for Global Sustainability, UMD)
Robert Lempert (RAND School of Public Policy)
The discussion will be moderated by John Bistline.
Please register for the event here:
https://princeton.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_i-acmwcVRvSKR0T1u_rjHw
We look forward to seeing you there.
MES Monthly Meeting: Early Career Research Seminar
March 3rd, 2026 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM EST (9:00-10:00 AM PST / 6:00-7:00 PM CET)
We are excited to welcome MES President Jacqueline Dowling as well as early career researchers Wilson Ricks and Nils Angliviel de la Beaumelle. They will present their research on long-duration energy storage, offshore wind, and enhanced geothermal power, respectively.
Please register for the event: here
We look forward to seeing you there.
MES Monthly Meeting: PUDL Hands-on Tutorial
January 30, 2026 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM EST (8:00 AM PST / 5:00 PM CET)
The first M3 meeting will be a hands-on tutorial with folks from the Catalyst Cooperative’s Public Utility Data Liberation (PUDL) project. They will be discussion their key datasets and how to use them. This meeting is targeted towards anyone who is looking for and using public electricity systems data.
Please register for the event here: http://tinyurl.com/MESPUDL
We look forward to seeing you there.
MES Speaker Series: Supply Chains in Energy Systems
This session will focus on "Supply Chains in Energy Systems." We will explore how macro-energy systems analysis can better capture critical supply chain risks, such as mineral constraints and geopolitics, and what modeling practices can best inform policy for a resilient energy transition.
We are honored to welcome our panelists:
Karan Bhuwalka (Stanford University)
Michael Davidson (UC San Diego)
John Helveston (George Washington University)
Beia Spiller (Resources for the Future)
The discussion will be moderated by Gang He (Baruch College, CUNY).
Please register for the event here: https://umich.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_xaD85ZZvTDSdMf_dWosjgw
We look forward to seeing you there.
MES Speaker Series: The Role of Advanced Technologies in a Future Energy System
Join us for the first entry of the 2025 MES Speaker Series! Panelists Gregory Nemet, Geoffrey Blanford, and Ozge Kaplan will join moderator John Bistline to discuss our latest topic: understanding the role of advanced or emerging technologies in future energy systems.
Register at: https://umich.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_CYKOikhpTqeOGOTYJnwKng#/registration
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.