In November last year, the Fall 2025 Hackathon brought together the smartest students at the University of Houston and tasked them to solve some of the most pressing challenges facing the energy transition now. And the students delivered! Working on a very tight deadline, the multidisciplinary teams, each with participants from 2 or more different schools, came up with solutions that impressed industry mentors with their extensive research, rigor, and creativity.
Along with the winning teams, for the first time, the Fall 2025 Hackathon, recognized three more teams with Mentors’ Choice Awards. The awards, each of $1200, celebrated the teams’ exceptional work that focused on using innovation to make real-world impact. “The COOGS for Energy Hackathon addresses various aspects of technology development all rooted in teamwork,” said Debalina Sengupta, Chief Operating Officer of ETI. “However, those technology aspects can reach different stages of fruition based on a team's ability to come up with solutions. These can be due diligence for background information gathering, complete prototype development, or finding the most challenging technical solution.”
Team Energy Coalition received the Mentors’ Choice Award for due diligence. Their challenge statement was “Securing Future Supply of Critical Minerals Including Lithium”, one of the most important supply chain challenges that will decide the success of the clean energy era. The team brought an impressive level of breadth in their research and the depth of their analysis of lithium and critical mineral sourcing was evident to everyone. The team evaluated hybrid modular systems, marine extraction technologies, and recycling as means of meeting the expected future growth in the demand of critical minerals.
Team Energy Coalition presenting their prototype
The team’s comprehensive research and analysis, and clear delivery of the proposed scalable pathways were lauded by the mentors.
Team Watt’s was awarded the Mentors’ Choice Award for complete prototype for their work on the challenge statement “Mapping Urban Heat Island Impacts at the University of Houston”. Tasked with developing an affordable and deployable system to map urban heat island effects across the university campus, the team proposed building a heat grid and identifying heat trails, suggested creating a heat predict network, and generated spatial heat maps to visualize “feels-like” temperature variations. Using real-time data collection and proven technologies, they worked on human-centered and low-cost solutions.
Heat sensor prototypes developed by Team Watt's
Mentors recognized the team’s effort at prototype development with working sensors, creating a cyber-physical system, developing a detailed data collection and analysis process, collecting information and validation with user inputs, and delivering the solution within the short timeframe.
The Mentors’ Choice Award for technical solution to the challenge statement “Participation of the Datacenter to Grid Stabilization” went to Team Watt-the-Hack. As power demand grows as a result of widespread adoption of AI, grid stability is becoming one of the defining technical challenges of modern power systems. Team Watt-the-Hack addressed this head-on by exploring how datacenters, which require immense amounts of power to operate, can also actively support existing grids. Their analysis demonstrated how datacenters can modify existing infrastructure to promote intelligent power use and pitched a new approach to connect them to microgids through renewable energy, battery storage and flywheel storage, and proposed using job scheduling with multi-objective constrained optimization. Mentors applauded the team’s efforts in collecting information and validating them with inputs, building a technically sound optimization model, and providing analysis and delivering the solution within a short timeframe.
Team Watt the Hack with their mentors
The Hackathon platform has proven successful time and again in sparking bold ideas and preparing future energy leaders to collaborate across disciplines, mirroring industry practice. The Fall 2025 Hackathon showcased the excellence students bring to the table when challenged with real problems and guided by expert mentorship to innovate freely.