In March 2026, the Arthur L. Irving Institute for Energy & Society led a delegation of more than 30 Dartmouth faculty, staff, fellows, students, alumni, and collaborators to CERAWeek in Houston — one of the world's foremost annual gatherings on energy, markets, and innovation, drawing more than 11,000 energy leaders from around the world.
Dartmouth's speakers brought perspectives spanning engineering, economics, and data systems. Irving Institute Faculty Director Geoff Parker presented alongside collaborator Professor Boris Otto, Director of Fraunhofer ISST in Germany. Associate Professors of Engineering Vikrant Vaze and Junbo Zhao, along with Assistant Professors Cong Chen and Yan Li, contributed expertise ranging from grid systems to machine learning. The Irving Institute also sponsored eight graduate students from Thayer School of Engineering, Tuck School of Business, and Guarini's Master of Energy Transition to participate in CERAWeek's NextGen Program.
The articles collected below reflect the ideas Dartmouth's delegation brought to CERAWeek 2026. One theme surfaced consistently across panels and presentations: artificial intelligence has moved from promise to reality in the energy sector. It has arrived — but the organizations, data systems, and markets surrounding it are still catching up. Dartmouth's researchers are working at precisely that frontier: building the modeling tools to protect grids from wildfire risk, designing pricing structures that unlock the potential of distributed energy resources, harnessing large language models to anticipate customer behavior, and asking how institutions must reorganize themselves to turn data into insight at scale.
A digest of Dartmouth's CERAWeek sessions
Geoff Parker, Professor of Engineering
Geoff Parker, Professor of Engineering
Cong Chen, Assistant Professor of Engineering
Junbo Zhao, Associate Professor of Engineering
Vikrant Vaze, Associate Professor of Engineering