Stanford Engineering
Energy Modeling Forum

Industry Affiliates

Benefits of Affiliation

An Energy-Environmental Network

Forum studies typically engage 100 or more leading experts and advisors from many different institutes, universities, companies, national laboratories, and agencies around the globe. This international network provides multiparty connections among providers of analyses and decision makers that create a valuable window for understanding how future energy and environmental events might influence corporate strategies and public policies. Organizations learn about what issues they should be addressing internally and which groups are doing the most innovative and useful work.

Improve Corporate Decisions

Most energy-producing and energy-using companies have made their biggest mistakes in defining their market environments too narrowly and not anticipating how future events could dramatically alter their strategic plans. Modeling and other structured frameworks will not allow organizations to "predict" the future but they will promote an awareness of which strategies appear more robust to alternative conditions. Many forum affiliates find that access to a range of different models is more productive and less expensive than supporting their own in-house model.

Improve Public Policy

Policy-evaluation frameworks influence public decisions in very pronounced ways. The Forum seeks to apply these methods to real and important problems and to improve their use by understanding their strengths as well as limitations. A major research university supports a non-partisan process that disseminates key findings broadly to important policy advisors and decision makers through reports, Congressional testimony, and participation by government staff in Forum activities.

Other benefits of affiliation include:

  • invitation to the EMF Annual Conference, held on campus for affiliates, featuring Stanford energy experts and key working group members from the EMF studies;
  • exposure to specific concepts and findings that may be applicable to in-house analysis and planning efforts;
  • interaction between member Affiliates from energy and automobile companies, utilities, and government agencies;
  • active interaction with a broad-ranging set of experts in the energy analysis and policy communities in the U.S. and abroad;
  • closer professional interactions with Stanford faculty, staff and students conducting energy modeling and policy analysis;
  • timely engagement with the Forum's staff and research when the results of the studies are published; and
  • feedback on methods and assumptions used by the affiliates in their energy modeling.

EMF Funding

Our studies are supported by grants from the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in addition to contributions from private companies and other organizations with a large stake in understanding key energy and environmental issues.
Financial support to the EMF is highly leveraged. Working group participants and modelers offer their services gratis because they find the process stimulating and very productive. Moreover, many government and research organizations orient their own research agenda around the analysis being done by an EMF working group. This process expands the total resources available for the study well beyond that supported by direct funding of the Forum. 

Becoming an Affiliate

In order to maintain a high-quality program, the Forum is asking corporations who wish to become affiliate members to contribute $20,000 annually to the Energy Modeling Forum.  Affiliate members represent a broad and diverse set of companies that produce fuels, electric power, or energy-using equipment.

Current Affiliates Program members are:

  • American Petroleum Institute
  • Electric Power Research Institute
  • Environment and Climate Change Canada
  • ExxonMobil

Organizations that have recently participated in The EMF Affiliates Program include:  

  • California Energy Commission
  • Canada Energy Regulator
  • Chevron
  • CRIEPI (Japan)
  • Southern Company Services

 

Affiliate Program members may provide additional funding. All research results arising from the use of the additional funding will be shared with all program members and the general public. Affiliate Program members may request the additional funding be used to support a particular area of program research identified on the program’s website, or the program research of a named faculty member, as long as the faculty is identified on the program website as participating in the Affiliate Program. In either instance, the director of the Affiliate Program will determine how the additional funding will be used in the program’s research.

The Energy Modeling Forum Affiliate Program may sometimes develop and use software, and it is the intention of the Energy Modeling Forum Affiliate Program that any software it develops will be made available under an open-source model.

Please contact  Professor John Weyant for more information about joining the affiliates program and participating EMF activities

For information about Industrial Affiliates and policy details at Stanford please refer to the following link: Establishment of Industrial Affiliates and Related Membership-Supported Programs