Houston university students earn top honors at global energy-poverty competition

dream team

Competing virtually against 145 teams from 34 countries, the students, known as The Dream Team, won third place for their plan to address energy poverty in Egypt and Turkey. Photo courtesy of UH

A student-led team from the University of Houston and Texas A&M University took home top prizes at last month's Switch Energy Alliance Case Competition.

Competing virtually against 145 teams from 34 countries, the students, known as The Dream Team, won third place for their plan to address energy poverty in Egypt and Turkey. They were awarded $5,000 in prize money.

The competition challenges student teams to solve real-world energy problems to "drive progress towards a sustainable and equitable energy future," according to the Switch competition's website.

“The Switch competition tackles major issues that we often don’t think about on a daily basis in the United States, so it is a really interesting and tough challenge to solve,” Sarah Grace Kimberly, a senior finance major at UH and member of the team, said in a statement from the university

Kimberly was joined by Pranjal Sheth, a fellow senior finance major at UH, and Nathan Hazlett, a finance graduate student at TAMU with a bachelor’s degree in petroleum engineering.

The Dream Team developed a 10-year plan to address Egypt and Turkey's energy poverty that would create 200,000 jobs, reduce energy costs and improve energy access in rural areas. Its major components included:

Developing rooftop and utility-scale solar farms and solar canopies over irrigation canals
Expanding wind power capacity by taking advantage of high wind speeds in the Gulf of Suez and Western Desert
Deploying cost-efficient technologies along the Nile for rural electrification

“People in the United States should be extremely thankful for the infrastructure and systems that allow us to thrive with power, food and water,” Sheth said in the statement. “Texas went through Winter Storm Uri in 2021—people were without electricity for weeks, and lives were lost. It still comes up in conversations, but certain regions of the world, developing nations, live that experience almost every day. We need to make that a larger part of the conversation and work to help them.”

Team Quwa, a team of four students from the University of Texas at Austin, took home second place and $7,000 in prize money.

“This journey was both intellectually enriching and personally fulfilling,” Mohamed Awad, a PhD candidate at the Hildebrand Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering, said in a statement from UT. “Through the case competition, we had an opportunity to contribute meaningful ideas to address a critical global issue.”

Team Energy Nexus from India earned the top prize and took home $10,000, according to a release from Switch.

Switch Energy Alliance is an Austin-based non-profit that's focused on energy education. The Switch competition began in 2020. Teams of three to four students create a presentation and 15-minute video. The top five teams present their case studies live and answer questions before a panel of judges.

More than 3,200 students from 55 countries have competed over the years. Click here to watch the 2024 final round.

Kids’ Meals will use the gift toward its new campus, a 50,000-square-foot facility in Spring Branch. Photo courtesy of Kids' Meals

ExxonMobil donates $3 million to Houston nonprofit that feeds hungry kids

helping hand

At its annual Harvest Luncheon last week, Kids’ Meals, a a nonprofit combatting childhood food insecurity and hunger, received a huge boost: a $3 million gift from ExxonMobil. The gift makes a milestone for the organization.

“We are incredibly grateful to ExxonMobil for the generous $3 million donation, which is the largest corporate donation Kids’ Meals has ever received, both in size and in impact,” CEO Beth Harp said in a statement.

The nonprofit will use the gift toward its new campus, a 50,000-square-foot facility in Spring Branch. Kids’ Meals broke ground on the project in June.

The new building will nearly triple the size of its current headquarters, further helping Kids’ Meals achieve its goal of serving 26,000 children each weekday by 2031. The organization currently serves over 9,000 children every weekday through its 18,500-square-foot headquarters in Garden Oaks. The new building will carry Exxon-Mobil’s name.

“In establishing the Kids’ Meals ExxonMobil Campus, we will be able to expand our programs, reach more children in need, and make a lasting impact on the lives of countless families in the Houston area,” said Harp. “Together, we’re feeding the future and providing hope.”

Founded in 2006, Kids’ Meals serves children ages five and under, and is the only organization in the country that delivers free, healthy meals to the doorsteps of Houston’s hungriest children. Since its inception, the organization has delivered more than 14 million meals to children in 56 Houston-area zip codes. After delivering a record-breaking 2.4 million meals in 2023, the nonprofit is on track to deliver 2.7 million meals in 2024.

The Harvest Luncheon is the nonprofit’s biggest event of the year. The event raises funds to provide more than 500,000 meals for preschool-aged children. Houston Mayor John Whitmire’s daughters, Sarah and Whitney, chaired the event. Best-selling author Bob Goff served as keynote speaker.

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This article originally ran on CultureMap.

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Gold H2 harvests clean hydrogen from depleted California reservoirs in first field trial

breakthrough trial

Houston climatech company Gold H2 completed its first field trial that demonstrates subsurface bio-stimulated hydrogen production, which leverages microbiology and existing infrastructure to produce clean hydrogen.

Gold H2 is a spinoff of another Houston biotech company, Cemvita.

“When we compare our tech to the rest of the stack, I think we blow the competition out of the water," Prabhdeep Singh Sekhon, CEO of Gold H2 Sekhon previously told Energy Capital.

The project represented the first-of-its-kind application of Gold H2’s proprietary biotechnology, which generates hydrogen from depleted oil reservoirs, eliminating the need for new drilling, electrolysis or energy-intensive surface facilities. The Woodlands-based ChampionX LLC served as the oilfield services provider, and the trial was conducted in an oilfield in California’s San Joaquin Basin.

According to the company, Gold H2’s technology could yield up to 250 billion kilograms of low-carbon hydrogen, which is estimated to provide enough clean power to Los Angeles for over 50 years and avoid roughly 1 billion metric tons of CO2 equivalent.

“This field trial is tangible proof. We’ve taken a climate liability and turned it into a scalable, low-cost hydrogen solution,” Sekhon said in a news release. “It’s a new blueprint for decarbonization, built for speed, affordability, and global impact.”

Highlights of the trial include:

First-ever demonstration of biologically stimulated hydrogen generation at commercial field scale with unprecedented results of 40 percent H2 in the gas stream.
Demonstrated how end-of-life oilfield liabilities can be repurposed into hydrogen-producing assets.
The trial achieved 400,000 ppm of hydrogen in produced gases, which, according to the company,y is an “unprecedented concentration for a huff-and-puff style operation and a strong indicator of just how robust the process can perform under real-world conditions.”
The field trial marked readiness for commercial deployment with targeted hydrogen production costs below $0.50/kg.

“This breakthrough isn’t just a step forward, it’s a leap toward climate impact at scale,” Jillian Evanko, CEO and president at Chart Industries Inc., Gold H2 investor and advisor, added in the release. “By turning depleted oil fields into clean hydrogen generators, Gold H2 has provided a roadmap to produce low-cost, low-carbon energy using the very infrastructure that powered the last century. This changes the game for how the world can decarbonize heavy industry, power grids, and economies, faster and more affordably than we ever thought possible.”

Rice University spinout lands $500K NSF grant to boost chip sustainability

cooler computing

HEXAspec, a spinout from Rice University's Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, was recently awarded a $500,000 National Science Foundation Partnership for Innovation grant.

The team says it will use the funding to continue enhancing semiconductor chips’ thermal conductivity to boost computing power. According to a release from Rice, HEXAspec has developed breakthrough inorganic fillers that allow graphic processing units (GPUs) to use less water and electricity and generate less heat.

The technology has major implications for the future of computing with AI sustainably.

“With the huge scale of investment in new computing infrastructure, the problem of managing the heat produced by these GPUs and semiconductors has grown exponentially. We’re excited to use this award to further our material to meet the needs of existing and emerging industry partners and unlock a new era of computing,” HEXAspec co-founder Tianshu Zhai said in the release.

HEXAspec was founded by Zhai and Chen-Yang Lin, who both participated in the Rice Innovation Fellows program. A third co-founder, Jing Zhang, also worked as a postdoctoral researcher and a research scientist at Rice, according to HEXAspec's website.

The HEXASpec team won the Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship's H. Albert Napier Rice Launch Challenge in 2024. More recently, it also won this year's Energy Venture Day and Pitch Competition during CERAWeek in the TEX-E student track, taking home $25,000.

"The grant from the NSF is a game-changer, accelerating the path to market for this transformative technology," Kyle Judah, executive director of Lilie, added in the release.

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This article originally ran on InnovationMap.

Houston renewable energy retailer expands nationally and more news to know

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Editor's note: The top Houston energy transition news of June 2025 includes Rhythm's national expansion, CenterPoint's grid resiliency efforts, and an exciting research discovery. Get the details on the most-read EnergyCapitalHTX stories from June 15-30 below:

1. Houston's Rhythm Energy expands nationally with clean power acquisition

PJ Popovic, founder and CEO of Houston-based Rhythm Energy, which has acquired Inspire Clean Energy. Photo courtesy of Rhythm

Houston-based Rhythm Energy Inc. has acquired Inspire Clean Energy for an undisclosed amount. The deal allows Rhythm to immediately scale outside of Texas and into the Northeast, Midwest and mid-Atlantic regions.

Inspire offers subscription-based renewable electricity plans to customers in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Ohio, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. By combining forces, Rhythm will now be one of the largest independent green-energy retailers in the country. Continue reading.

2. CenterPoint reaches agreement on SRP to significantly reduce outages

CenterPoint says it will cut storm-related outages by 1 billion minutes with its new Systemwide Resiliency Plan. Photo via Getty Images

CenterPoint Energy has reached a settlement agreement with parties to its 2026-2028 Systemwide Resiliency Plan (SRP), which will represent the largest single grid resiliency investment in CenterPoint's history.

The plan is expected to reduce storm-related outages by 1 billion minutes for its 2.8 million customers by 2029 and build on the first two phases of the company's Greater Houston Resiliency Initiative (GHRI). This SRP is designed to further address the impacts of extreme weather threats. Continue reading.

3. Enbridge activates first solar power project in Texas

Enbridge Inc. is now generating 130 megawatts of energy from its Orange Grove solar project near Corpus Christi. Photo courtesy Enbridge

Canadian energy company Enbridge Inc., whose gas transmission and midstream operations are based in Houston, has flipped the switch on its first solar power project in Texas.

The Orange Grove project, about 45 miles west of Corpus Christi, is now generating 130 megawatts of energy that feeds into the grid operated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT). Orange Grove features 300,000 solar panels installed on more than 920 acres in Jim Wells County. Construction began in 2024. Continue reading.

4. Texas drivers continue to pump the brakes on EVs, shows new report

Texas falls among the middle of the pack when it comes to EV adoption, according to a new report. Photo via Unsplash

Even though Texas is home to Tesla, a major manufacturer of electric vehicles, motorists in the Lone Star State aren’t in the fast lane when it comes to getting behind the wheel of an EV.

U.S. Department of Energy data compiled by Visual Capitalist shows Texas has 689.9 EV registrations per 100,000 people, putting it in 20th place for EV adoption among the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Continue reading.

5. Houston team’s discovery brings solid-state batteries closer to EV use

Houston researchers have uncovered why solid-state batteries break down and what could be done to slow the process. Photo via Getty Images.

A team of researchers from the University of Houston, Rice University and Brown University has uncovered new findings that could extend battery life and potentially change the electric vehicle landscape.

The team recently published its findings in the journal Nature Communications. The work deployed a powerful, high-resolution imaging technique known as operando scanning electron microscopy to better understand why solid-state batteries break down and what could be done to slow the process. Continue reading.

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