EMH Annual Forum 2026: Where Models Meet Reality

Now in its 5th Edition, the EMH Annual Forum 2026 is where Canada's energy modelling, policy, economic, and industry communities come together to address how analytical insights translate into real-world choices and infrastructure. This year's theme, Where Models Meet Reality, reflects the central challenge of moving ambitious visions for electrification, decarbonisation, and grid expansion from paper to implementation, and of knowing where current models give clear guidance and where critical analytical and practical gaps remain.

Over two days, attendees will examine seven core thematic areas:

• Evaluating Transition Strategies: Assessing federal and provincial electricity strategies to determine if proposed build-outs are deliverable, least-cost, and aligned with long-term energy security.
• Identifying Model Blind Spots: Surfacing systemic gaps in how models capture market dynamics, consumer behaviour, and unexpected demand shocks.
• Interprovincial Transmission: Examining the political economy, governance, and cost-allocation mechanisms needed to turn "optimal" interties into built infrastructure.
• Industrial Capacity & Supply Chains: Exploring plant-floor realities, heavy industry decarbonisation, and value chain constraints across critical sectors.
• Grid Reliability & Demand-Side Management: Balancing affordability and reliability while accounting for rapid load growth from data centres and AI.
• AI in Energy Modelling: Evaluating how artificial intelligence can streamline data processing and model workflows without compromising transparency or trust.
• Decision-Making Under Uncertainty: Developing robust, adaptive frameworks for long-term policy decisions when different models yield diverging results.

Participants can expect structured panel discussions, keynote addresses, poster pitch competitions, and dedicated exhibition spaces. Designed to foster candid dialogue rather than standard presentations, the forum pairs modellers and social scientists directly with policymakers, regulators, and industry operators to confront the practical realities of Canada’s energy transition.

Registration Note: : This is the first year the EMH Annual Forum 2026 has included a modest registration fee. Given the Forum's funding structure, the fee covers food and catering for the event. If cost is a barrier to your attendance, please contact [email protected] to discuss options.

Info: An outward-looking opening that frames energy as a question of competitiveness, security, and economic sovereignty, and sets the scale of the challenge the next two days respond to.

Info: Governments across Canada are putting forward competing visions for the electricity transition, from the federal Powering Canada Strong strategy to provincial plans. This session asks what our models actually tell us about those paths, whether they are the right ones, and where analysis can and cannot yet speak to them.

Info: This session asks where our models fall short of seeing the vision clearly. Drawing on multi-model comparison and recent methodological work, it surfaces what the models systematically miss on demand, behaviour, markets, and more, and what it would take to close those gaps.

Info: Interties are the clearest case of a model result meeting reality: modellers have shown for years that interprovincial transmission is "optimal," yet little gets built. The first of two deep-dives, this session asks what modelling must incorporate to produce results that are buildable, not just optimal, and brings economists, regulators, and transitions experts into the room to say what's missing.

Info: The second deep-dive turns from moving power to building industrial capacity. Decarbonizing heavy industry and building the value chains the transition depends on, from critical minerals to components, are where competitiveness and opportunity are most at stake. This session puts industry practitioners alongside modellers to ask where Canada can build real strength, where the gaps are, and what the models capture about industrial reality.

Info: The second outward-looking voice: the human and economic reality of delivery, labour, supply chains, and affordability, and what it asks of analysis.

Info: A deeply electrified system has to be affordable and reliable, and how much we need to build depends heavily on the demand side. This session asks how demand management, flexibility, and efficiency reshape what a reliable grid actually requires, and how the costs and benefits land across regions and households.

Info: AI is changing how modelling gets done, from preparing and filling data to running models faster to interpreting and communicating results. This session asks where AI genuinely strengthens the modelling workflow, and where it introduces risk.

Info: The closing session turns from results to judgment: what models can justifiably claim, and how to decide well when they disagree and the future is genuinely uncertain. When the path ahead is contested, this is the discipline that keeps decisions honest, and it underpins every other session on the agenda.

Event venue & nearby stays

Richcraft Hall, 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, Canada

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