Save the Date: 2024 JISEA Annual Meeting Dates Announced
Oct. 30, 2023—Attendees of the Joint Institute for Strategic Energy Analysis (JISEA) annual meeting should plan for cooler weather in the coming year. This week, JISEA Director Elizabeth Doris announced the 2024 JISEA Annual Meeting (affectionately referred to as JAM24) will take place Feb. 26–27 at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL’s) campus in Golden, Colorado, moving it up from its traditional springtime window. The meeting’s theme, “Integrating voices to address complex challenges” highlights the meeting’s focus on crosscutting collaboration and sets the vision for the institute’s forward-looking work in 2024.
A New Slate of Challenges
Over the past year, JISEA has expanded its focus to include four exploratory areas that serve as guideposts for research, innovation, and network development. Climate adaptation, society and technology, and workforce now join its longstanding focus in hard-to-decarbonize industries. These areas will be the themes of the annual meeting’s four sessions, with presentations and discussions centering around the challenges in these areas and how they intertwine.
Along with centering content around these areas, the meeting will prioritize engagement, collaboration, and presenting information from a variety of perspectives. Attendees can expect to interact with presenters and fellow attendees from across research, universities, industries, and nonprofit to share their own insights and questions and build connections that can lead to future partnerships.
“The complex clean energy challenges we’re facing span across sectors and disciplines,” said Doris. “The annual meeting is a chance to bring together diverse backgrounds and perspectives to help paint a holistic picture of these challenges and the paths to addressing them.”
Cutting-Edge Catalyzers
Along with thought-provoking presentations and discussions around the exploratory areas, JAM24 will feature presentations about the cutting-edge work being done by JISEA’s Catalyzers. JISEA Catalyzers are 2 to 3-year seed research projects focused on building expertise, tools, and networks around emerging complex clean energy challenges.
Catalyzers scope out future priority areas for NREL and build the capabilities needed to grow these areas into robust research domains. Annual meeting attendees will hear from catalyzer leads about the latest insights that can help inform the strategic direction of future work in these areas and will be given the opportunity to provide input on topics for future catalyzers.
The upcoming meeting will see presentations from the two newest members of the catalyzer family. The Climate Adaptation and Energy Intersections Catalyzer is investigating how we design and plan for a clean, secure, and resilient grid in the face of climate change. The most recent addition, the Justice Underpinning Science and Technology Research (JUST-R) Catalyzer, is developing an online tool to help integrate energy justice considerations into energy technology research and development, expanding on earlier NREL work in this space.
These new catalyzers join the Green Computing Catalyzer, which is developing pathways to more energy efficient computing. The insights from the meeting will also help inform the development of new catalyzers in 2024.
Preparing for 2024
The registration waitlist for JAM24 is now open and the institute is working with a diverse group from across the government, industry, and nonprofit space to develop an exciting slate of topics and speakers that will be announced throughout the fall. Attendees are encouraged to join the waitlist and will be notified of registration status by early January.
“The JISEA annual meeting is a venue for clean energy information transfer, network building, and collaborative problem-solving.” said Doris. “This is an opportunity for attendees to share their own expertise and see how their work fits into a larger ecosystem, and we look forward to seeing both old and new faces in February.”
Get the latest updates about JAM24 events, speakers, and sessions by visiting the JAM24 webpage and subscribing to JISEA’s newsletter.