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Design a town’s energy plan in this two-week clean energy academy for high school students at Dartmouth.
Course Description
A town needs electricity when people use it, including when the wind drops or a heat wave pushes demand higher. Design a plan that can meet those needs without losing sight of cost and emissions.
Your class will work as an engineering consulting firm with one client request: a clean, reliable, and affordable energy plan for a town. Four teams take responsibility for demand, supply, reliability and storage, and mobility. Real data and spreadsheet models help you estimate hourly needs, compare technologies, and see how one team’s choice affects the others. Optional Python work offers another way to explore the models.
Campus energy-infrastructure tours and conversations with practicing engineers connect the analysis with systems people use. Cross-team check-ins help you fit the pieces together, while stress tests examine outages, extreme conditions, and affordability. The final presentation brings one integrated plan to a panel of guests. Explain the assumptions behind it, the tradeoffs you considered, and what the results suggest about serving a real community.
This two-week full-day academy for high school students is part of Dartmouth Precollege Summer Scholars in Hanover, New Hampshire. Students focus on one academy for the full campus program. Beyond class, students connect focused academic work with campus life, growing independence, and clearer direction about what they may want to study or pursue next.
What Will You Do?
• Estimate a town’s hourly energy needs using real data
• Build spreadsheet models to compare generation, storage, and mobility choices
• Coordinate demand, supply, reliability, and mobility plans across four teams
• Tour campus energy infrastructure and hear from practicing engineers
• Stress-test a plan against outages, extreme conditions, and affordability measures
• Present and defend an integrated energy plan to a guest panel
Learning Outcomes
By the end of the course, students will be able to:
• Explain how generation, delivery, storage, and use connect within an energy system
• Build and test models comparing energy technologies under stated assumptions
• Defend an integrated plan by evaluating cost, reliability, emissions, and fairness
You’ll leave with your team’s energy models and integrated plan, with clearer questions about engineering, energy systems, and further study.
Why Energy Systems Skills Matter
An energy model connects an assumption with a result. Changing demand, a technology choice, or a reliability target can affect several parts of the plan at once. Students practice identifying those relationships and testing a design rather than treating a model’s output as a final answer.
Working across teams adds another responsibility: a good subsystem still has to fit the whole system. Explaining the tradeoffs to a nontechnical audience requires clarity about cost, emissions, reliability, and who benefits. These habits support engineering analysis, collaborative projects, and decisions where technical choices affect a community.
Who Should Attend?
For students who have completed 9th, 10th, 11th, or 12th grade.
If you’re interested in engineering, climate, infrastructure, or how communities use energy, this academy gives you a concrete planning problem to investigate. You’ll work with real data, build spreadsheet models, coordinate with classmates, and explain a design to a guest panel. Students should be ready to compare alternatives and revise an assumption when it changes the result. Python is an optional modeling route. The full-day format keeps the class focused on one integrated project.
Energy Systems in Action
An energy planner has to consider a system that keeps operating as conditions change. Electricity demand rises and falls, different technologies produce power at different times, and a disruption can reveal a weakness that an average-day model missed. Communities also need to understand how the choices affect costs and access.
The academy introduces that work through a town plan with connected subsystems. Students can continue exploring electrical or environmental engineering, energy policy, data analysis, or transportation planning. The project gives them an example of how technical models, teamwork, and a clear explanation can support a decision with several competing goals.
After successfully finishing this course, you will be awarded a certification completion for your accomplishment.
*This is a preview, not what you will receive