About NEMS Connect
NEMS Connect is a collaborative initiative dedicated to expanding access to the National Energy Modeling System (NEMS). We bring together decades of experience in energy modeling, policy analysis, and data interpretation to help researchers and institutions use NEMS more effectively.
Making the Nation’s Premier Energy Model Accessible
Our Mission
Enable better energy decisions by making NEMS easier to understand, access, and apply.
Our Vision
A research ecosystem where advanced energy modeling tools are accessible to a broad community of scholars, analysts, and decision-makers.
Our Values
Transparency. Promoting open understanding of complex modeling systems.
Accessibility. Lowering barriers to advanced analytical tools.
Collaboration. Supporting partnerships across institutions and disciplines.
Clarity. Translating complex outputs into actionable insights.
About our Team
A. Michael Schaal
A. Michael Schaal, PE, PMP, is President and co-founder of NEMS Connect. He is an engineer, economist, and former member of the U.S. Senior Executive Service with more than three decades of experience in energy market analysis, integrated modeling, infrastructure, and federal energy policy.
Mr. Schaal previously served in senior leadership at the U.S. Energy Information Administration, where his work supported the Annual Energy Outlook, International Energy Outlook, and energy analysis for senior government decision-makers. His work has focused on the use of integrated modeling to understand how energy markets, infrastructure, technology, policy, and economic growth interact across the full energy system.
At NEMS Connect, he focuses on building the institutional partnerships, research pathways, and practical support structures needed to make NEMS more accessible to universities and other public-interest users. His role is to help translate NEMS from a specialized federal modeling system into a usable platform for teaching, research, scenario analysis, and policy-relevant energy insight.
Dr. Peter Whitman
Dr. Whitman has over two decades of experience as a developer or user of the EIA’s National Energy Modeling System (NEMS). He modified or developed modules of NEMS including those for emissions, electric utility, coal, hydrogen and biofuels. As one of the original integration team at EIA, he developed systems integration and configuration management tools for NEMS, and recently acquired substantial experience installing and configuring NEMS outside the EIA environment.
Dr. Whitman was a Senior Policy analyst in the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Policy and Systems Analysis, specializing in biofuels policy, and an Operations Research analyst in the Office of Energy Policy and Innovation of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, where he researched price formation issues. He holds a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Maryland, College Park.
