On June 2, 2026, students from across Dartmouth—undergraduates, graduate students, and doctoral researchers—wrapped up the inaugural year of Energy Ventures by doing what entrepreneurs do best: making their case to an audience of peers, mentors, and experienced entrepreneurs who had put in the work to be there. More than 100 students and 25 teams began the process. With grit, 24 teams made it across the finish line to pitch ideas. The problems they addressed ranged from rare earth mineral recycling to rural electrification to the hidden chaos inside enterprise AI systems.
"This program is new for the Irving Institute, and this mode of teaching is new to Dartmouth," said Irving Institute Faculty Director Professor Geoff Parker. "We are genuinely co-creating something here. What happened today was the result of real work, taken seriously, by people who rose to the occasion."
Energy Ventures launched in January 2026 as a concept-to-market experience designed to equip the next generation of energy and society entrepreneurs with the mindset, tools, and skills to build and launch promising ventures. This year, the program ran across the Winter and Spring terms, with weekly in-person sessions and hands-on coaching from practitioners who have founded companies and turned bold ideas into impact. Where accelerators take promising ventures and speed them up, this program starts earlier, with raw ideas and first principles.
Josh Creamer, Head of Entrepreneurship at the Irving Institute, led the program alongside a network of experienced mentors. Together, they guided participants through the full arc of early-stage venture creation: identifying a meaningful problem, developing a potential solution, conducting primary market research, defining a beachhead market, and building toward a viable business plan.
The cohort was deliberately cross-disciplinary, spanning engineering, computer science, business, environmental studies, and more. That spread is crucial to the learning experience because energy and society challenges are not solved by any single discipline, and the teams reflected that reality.
The breadth of challenges addressed by the teams reflected both the urgency of the energy transition and the creativity of the students engaged in it. Teams took on problems ranging from grid reliability and energy storage, to sustainable fuels infrastructure, rural electrification, fleet decarbonization, and community engagement in renewable energy development.
Some teams were building software platforms. Others were designing hardware systems. A few were proposing marketplace models to connect fragmented supply chains. Nearly all had defined a beachhead market, identified early potential customers, and proposed a path toward either initial revenue or a seed raise.
One team tackled the challenge of grid data accessibility, proposing an AI-powered analytics platform described as a "weather channel" for energy decision-makers—making complex grid data interpretable and actionable for a broad range of users. Another focused on the logistics of sustainable aviation fuel feedstock, working to connect waste producers with biofuel buyers through a trusted, verified platform.
A team of PhD students proposed a biosensor solution for tissue engineering that illustrated how the program's cross-disciplinary nature extended well beyond traditional energy boundaries, into adjacent markets with significant implications for sustainability and society.
Another group addressed the looming challenge of decommissioned wind turbines, focusing on the recovery and remanufacturing of the rare earth permanent magnets inside them—a critical materials challenge with significant geopolitical dimensions.
Teams came with varying levels of technical readiness. Some had working prototypes. Others had validated a problem but were still defining their go-to-market path. Several had already engaged in early conversations with potential customers, partners, or investors, and a few were proposing seed raises ranging from under $200,000 to several million dollars. What united them was not a uniform stage of development, but shared commitments to rigor and purpose.
Among the most instructive moments of the day came from a team that chose not to pitch a company at all. After investigating the market for energy contract optimization—specifically, opportunities to help consumers in deregulated electricity markets like Texas find better rates—the team made a decision that took real intellectual honesty: they walked away. Their primary market research had revealed that while the problem was genuine, it wasn't acute or frequent enough to support a new venture, particularly given a dominant incumbent with over a decade of brand trust, meaningful regulatory complexity, and constrained returns on capital.
"This is not failure. This is success," said Creamer. "This is exactly why you do primary market research. You don't want to spend years building something, only to learn then that it won't work."
Behind each team was a network of coaches and mentors who gave their time and experience generously throughout the year. They were practitioners embedded in the process — pushing teams to sharpen their problem statements, pressure-test their market assumptions, and think carefully about what a beachhead customer actually looks like.
"What's really under the hood of this program is seasoned entrepreneurs who care enough to give their time," Parker said. "These students challenge them, and they excite them. That exchange is what makes the program work."
Creamer was characteristically direct in his closing remarks. "Today was incredible," he said. "I knew the presentations would be solid. They were better than solid."
The program is just getting started. Teams that presented are eligible to continue their work through a paid Summer 2026 Venture-Build Internship, an immersive accelerator designed to fast-track the most promising ventures through deeper customer discovery, rapid prototyping, and business model refinement.
The team is already planning a second cohort, launching Fall 2026—what they're calling V-2. The program is open to Dartmouth undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers across all disciplines. No prior entrepreneurial experience is required. What is required is curiosity and a genuine interest in solving problems that matter.
"This is V-1," Creamer said. "V-2 starts in the fall. You get better, you come back, and you keep building. There is so much opportunity here. We want to see what this community can do with it."
While Dartmouth has a strong tradition of entrepreneurship, Energy Ventures represents something new: a program dedicated to early-stage ideation and incubation, focused on energy and society. The problems it is aimed at—grid reliability, grid decarbonization, critical materials, sustainable fuels, rural access to clean energy— are not abstractions. They are the defining challenges of the next several decades.
Dartmouth now has a program committed to producing people equipped to tackle them.
If you are interested in joining Energy Ventures V-2, express your interest here.