About the Conference

Featuring Nobel Prize Winning Keynote Speaker; Daniel M. Kammen!

The Center for Advanced Energy Studies' Energy Policy Institute is proud to host the 2012 Western Energy Policy Research Conference, the premier energy policy research conference held in the Western United States.  WEPRC will take place August 30-31, 2012, in scenic Boise, Idaho. The Grove Hotel, Boise's only AAA rated 4-Diamond hotel, will host the event. Located in the heart of downtown Boise, the Grove Hotel stands amid the city's finest dining, shopping, and nightlife destinations.

WEPRC is a conference for academic and professional energy policy researchers.  Presenters are required to submit papers and discuss their research to advance the state-of-the-art, analyze policies, and foster research collaborations dealing with an increasingly carbon-constrained economy and regulatory environment. 

This conference is for you if you are seeking to present or discuss energy policy research with participants and panelists from academia, think-tanks and research institutes, NGOs, national laboratories, industry, and government.

Nobel Prize winning scientist Daniel M. Kammen will be the Keynote Speaker at the conference luncheon. Kammen is the Class of 1935 Distinguished Professor of Energy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he holds appointments in the Energy and Resources Group, the Goldman School of Public Policy, and the department of Nuclear Engineering. Kammen is the founding director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory (RAEL) and the co-Director of the Berkeley Institute of the Environment. He recently returned to the university after serving as the World Bank's Chief Technical Specialist for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency. He received his undergraduate (Cornell A., B. '84) and graduate (Harvard M. A. '86, Ph.D. '88) training is in physics. Daniel Kammen is a coordinating lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.  He hosted the Discovery Channel series 'Ecopolis, and has appeared on NOVA, and '60 Minutes' twice.

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The 2011 Western Energy Policy Research Conference (WEPRC) was a huge success. More than 110 researchers and participants from the United States and Canada attended the conference, which had 12 research panels with 37 presenters from 17 universities, two national laboratories, and stakeholder groups.

Keynote speaker Roger Pielke Jr. and WEPRC were profiled in an article on meeting the challenges of the future.

Participants were required to submit papers for the conference.  Many are not available due to their draft form and the authors' desire not to release them to the public at this time.  The presentations that accompanied the papers, and in some cases the papers themselves with the permission select authors, are available here.