2025 Global Energy Managers Workshop:

The seventh annual Global Energy Managers (GEM) workshop was held on November 13, 2025. This virtual workshop brought together facilities personnel, energy managers, engineers, researchers, students and faculty to discuss the latest developments in energy management. This year’s workshop focused on carbon reduction strategies and energy efficiency projects across the University of California. This year, the audience of over 150 attendees joined from regions spanning from the continental US to India and Japan. 

With an agenda stacked with a keynote, panel discussions and short features, the day had something for everyone. Josh Morejohn, Executive Director of Utilities & Engineering welcomed attendees alongside UC Davis Professor Kurt Kornbluth, and served as a moderator on the keynote and opening session.  The opening session featured a lightning round update on energy projects from each UC campus and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. As host campus of the event, UC Davis featured many internal speakers, including: 

• Eric O’Brien, Director of Sustainability  

• Hiroko Masuda, Energy Project Engineer 

• David Trombly, Director of Utilities Energy Operations 

• Joe Yonkoski, Superintendent, Central Heating & Cooling Plant 

The speakers highlighted current projects to reduce energy in campus buildings through ongoing commissioning, an upcoming project utilizing state of the art heat recovery chillers, and optimization of the Central Heating and Cooling Plant (CHCP) through real-time pricing. Each session dove deep into technical concepts yet tied their presentations into real-life examples of operations issues and resolutions. This format allowed attendees to gain actionable insights and learn strategies to apply similar programs or equipment to their own campus energy systems.  

To plan for this year’s event, the committee started preparations in June to explore potential themes and create a speaker list. Taking feedback from previous years and their background in the energy field (operations, administration and research), the team spent several meetings brainstorming on which topics would be most useful to the audience and applicable to their roles at universities and in industry. Next, the group utilized their vast connections to consider work worth featuring and inspiring speakers to invite as presenters. The planning team featured four representatives from UC Davis and one from UCOP.  Alex Malm, Engineering Project Manager in FM: Utilities & Engineering has been a planning committee member for the last 3 years.  The goal of this year’s program was to bring presentations that had a relevant, realistic and tangible application to current energy management issues. As a result, the agenda highlighted projects at each UC campus and shared strategies to make them successful within our current budgetary climate, including funding mechanisms through federal incentive programs or ways to utilize technology and AI to save time and money. 

A recording of the conference and links to presentations are available on the GEM website: https://energy.ucdavis.edu/global-energy-managers-workshop-2025/. Though the workshop has been held virtually for the last few years, the conference planning team hopes to plan an in-person event in 2026 at UC Davis or another UC campus.