The Dartmouth Climate Collaborative brought its biggest delegation yet to Climate Week NYC last month, convening scholars, nonprofit and industry leaders, and policymakers across seven events that drew more than 800 registrants.

“Dartmouth hosted three days of inspiring programming around our climate future and made the case for why working together both inside and outside the university walls is the only way we can solve the climate crisis,” says Barbara Will, vice provost for academic and international affairs.

Events were organized by the Dartmouth Climate Collaborative in partnership with the Sustainability Office, the Institute of Arctic Studies, and the Arthur L. Irving Institute for Energy and Society. The week’s programming spanned local resilience workshops, panels on energy justice and the Arctic, and a four-part Irving Institute series exploring the energy transition’s toughest pressure points.

“The array of Dartmouth-hosted events exemplified our action on climate—from supporting local resilience efforts to facilitating challenging conversations about the impacts and opportunities of the energy transition,” says Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences Meredith Kelly, faculty director of the Dartmouth Climate Collaborative. “These events also highlighted Dartmouth work, from student projects to alumni career paths.”

The week opened Sept. 22 with a hands-on workshop for local leaders from government and nonprofit organizations, followed by a panel on community-based energy transitions. Moderated by Sarah Kelly, head of Dartmouth’s Energy Justice Clinic, the panel brought together Jasmine Graham of Mid-Hudson Energy Transition and Mark James of Vermont Law and Graduate School to explore what justice actually requires in practice.

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The array of Dartmouth-hosted events exemplified our action on climate—from supporting local resilience efforts to facilitating challenging conversations about the impacts and opportunities of the energy transition.

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Meredith Kelly, faculty director, Dartmouth Climate Collaborative

The group outlined the pillars of energy justice and offered illustrative examples of what works in building a community-centered energy transition. They contrasted a successful community solar project, which cut electricity bills by around 20% for participants and is expected to return more than $1 million to a community resiliency fund, with another community solar program where participants waited more than a year to see any savings. 

The lag between subscription and receipt of benefits bred enough frustration and distrust among early subscribers that the program had to pause new enrollments to avoid further damage. As one speaker put it, trust “takes a long time to build and seconds to destroy.”

Following that session, students had their first-ever showcase at Climate Week NYC, presenting research from the Energy Justice Clinic and the Dartmouth as Living Lab initiative. Leonela Espinoza Campomanes ’27 discussed her work assessing solar feasibility for an Indigenous community in Chile, work rooted in her own experience growing up with unreliable power access in Peru.

On Sept. 23, the Institute of Arctic Studies partnered with the University of the Arctic and the Consulate General of Finland for an invitation-only dialogue featuring a keynote from former Finnish President Tarja Halonen. The discussion, moderated by IAS Director Melody Brown Burkins, examined how Indigenous knowledge and circular-economy principles can inform climate resilience far beyond the Arctic. 

The Irving Institute anchored the week’s second half with two double-panel events exploring what Faculty Director Geoffrey Parker called the energy transition’s “actual pressure points: intelligent grid operations, supply-chain resilience, capital formation, and transmission financing.”

The first, co-hosted with SAP, paired a discussion on AI and grid intelligence with a panel on critical minerals and energy security. In the AI and grid intelligence panel, energy and policy experts described a system built for one-way power flow now straining to accommodate distributed energy resources, bidirectional electricity flows, data silos, and cybersecurity risk. Their conclusion: while the technology is evolving fast, the systems of accountability and collaboration needed to govern it must move even faster.

The minerals panel confronted an uncomfortable truth: there is no clean energy transition without expanded mining and recycling, forcing a reckoning between climate goals and resource extraction.

The second Irving-sponsored event focused on the capital required for the energy transition. A panel moderated by Tuck’s Charlie Donovan—featuring Parker, Andrew Beebe ’93, and Giulia Siccardo ’12—asserted that speculative capital and genuine breakthroughs are often inseparable. 

One panelist recalled standing on the roof of Solyndra the day before the solar manufacturer declared bankruptcy, one casualty among many from the billions poured into “Clean Tech 1.0,” which spanned the period of 2006-2011. That boom-bust pattern, sometimes called the “solar coaster,” unfolded over three decades to help drive a 90% drop in solar costs, making it among the cheapest energy sources in many markets today.

A companion panel on transmission financing moderated by Distinguished Industry Fellow Abigail Ross Hopper ’93 brought together former Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Willie Phillips, Southern California Edison’s Caroline Choi ’90, Greenbelt Capital Partners’ Chris Murphy ’07, Tuck ’13, and CTC Global’s Theodore Paradise. They said that the U.S. has the technology to expand grid capacity—what’s missing is the financing, regulatory alignment, and public trust to deploy it at the speed and scale needed.

“The throughline is capital discipline,” Parker says. “Investment without transmission is stranded; transmission without disciplined capital allocation is unaffordable.”

Taken together, Parker says, the Irving Institute’s four panels were designed to position Dartmouth “not just as a commentator on the energy transition, but as an active participant—bringing the right people into the room, spurring new research ideas, and contributing to durable solutions.”

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Read recaps of Irving Institute’s four Climate Week panels and the Dartmouth Climate Collaborative’s community-based energy transition panel.