2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

With a theme of "Engineering Educators Bringing the World Together” for the 2025 ASEE Conference, it seems fitting to share the collaborative work being accomplished by three academic institutions to decarbonize the campus and the surrounding community while shifting the academic paradigm to equip energy engineers for the accelerating global energy transition.
This work-in-progress paper documents the collaborative work being done at three, different academic institutions, strategically supported by an outside entity. The first is a large, multi-campus college located in Ontario, Canada, the second is a two-year community college located in Michigan, and the third is a small, private university located in New York.
To date, the first two institutions have successfully achieved rapid initial decarbonization of their campuses and both are on the pathway to complete decarbonization. The first has also branched out to support the surrounding community’s energy transition efforts. The third university is beginning the decarbonization process building from the lessons learned and best practices at the first and second colleges.
In addition to the decarbonization plan, there is a need to shift the academic paradigm. The first two institutions continue to analyze the factors that facilitated their own rapid decarbonization, with the aim to guide the adaptation of both the content and targeting of educational programs to accelerate the overall rate of institutional and community decarbonization.
Their joint preliminary findings indicate the need for relevant, integrated multi-disciplinary energy transition education, structured around real-world scale projects that are large enough to represent the challenges of holistic decarbonization, and are structured for rapid replication. They also show the need to be constantly open to incorporate technical and other best practices from anywhere in the world. Both institutions are entering detailed program design.
The third university has recognized both the opportunity and urgency of the challenge presented by the US Federal Sustainability Plan and its net-zero emission goals. This institution is adding an Energy Engineering Concentration to the BSME degree. They recognize this is a useful step within the current system, but obviously raises the question as to whether it is sufficient to meet the urgent challenge of accelerated decarbonization. Through collaboration and sharing with the other two colleges, the university looks to more comprehensively embrace this opportunity with the necessary urgency. Lessons learned and best practices towards designing new curriculum will be shared to help other universities develop similar programs.