IMPERIAL — He may have fumbled the whole Twitter to X thing, but Elon Musk sure knows how to make a cool car, and the teenagers crowding around the Team Tesla demonstration at a local youth summit on Friday, Sept. 29, showed how popular electric vehicles can be.
“The Tesla demonstration was cool. There’s a lot of technology put into it. It’s like a smartphone but in the form of a car,” Central Union High senior Montserrat Carmona said. “I wanted to know how long does it take to develop a car like that.”
Nobody actually got to drive one, but the teens were allowed to sit in the driver’s seat of these electric cars and check out all the features. The Tesla demo was part of a day focused on the future, from clean energy to artificial intelligence and beyond.
New Energy Nexus and the Center for Social Innovation at University of California Riverside hosted the first Imperial Valley Youth Innovation Summit at the IV Fairgrounds for high school juniors and seniors from the Imperial Valley. The summit featured workshops on science, new technology, and business and civic engagement.
The vibe of the summit was electric. The attendees seemed very interested in what the panelists were talking about; inspiration with a lot of information. The music was bumping, and the AI was talking during a call and response between a presenter asking questions of a computer. Breakfast and lunch were served by Panera. The student attendees receive swag bags.
“I wanted to give you a frame of what we’re talking about here today. You are going to get a high-level overview on what we mean when we talk about lithium development and what it would look like to develop lithium here in Imperial County,” said Rebecca Lee, managing director for New Energy Nexus, as she spoke to the young attendees.
“More specifically, about the opportunities and career pathways that exist for you all and the opportunities that exist today for you as students, whether in the form of internships and career pathways that start immediately after high school,” Lee continued.
New Energy Nexus is a global nonprofit that provides funds to clean-energy start-ups and assists them through business accelerator and incubator programs.
The summit’s other organizer, UCR’s Center for Social Innovation, provides research to spur civic leadership and policy innovation focusing on five key areas: civic engagement, economic mobility, immigrant integration, leadership and entrepreneurship, and place making.
The summit was broken down into six different subject groups sessions:
Group A focused on clean energy entrepreneurship, starting a business and design thinking.
Group B focused on an environmental track, centered around environmental advocacy and public policy and Salton Sea’s environmental legacy, and the ongoing collection, integration, analysis, interpretation, and dissemination of data from environmental monitoring and data from human exposure and health effects.
Group C focused on the Lithium Valley leadership track, which concentrated on career pathways in lithium development and advanced battery manufacturing.
Group D was more hands on with clean energy, agriculture, and transport. That group focused more on the future of transportation and electric vehicles. There were demonstrations of electric school buses, cars, and bicycles.
Group E focused more on trades in vehicles and energy tracking, which is the process of collecting electricity data in real time for optimization purposes, and is more for clean energy jobs, solar batteries, buildings’ heating, ventilation and air conditioning, and electric vehicle charging.
Group F was for trades in agriculture and vehicle tracks, which focused on technological innovation in agriculture and environmental management.
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Among the presenters and professionals were, of course, lithium industry bigwigs. The teens heard from EnergySource Minerals, which has been making the rounds during public meetings of late.
“We are the first company who is ready to start construction on our direct lithium extraction. We are the first company who will be extracting lithium out of the Salton Sea Resource Area,” said Carmen Rene, chief financial officer of EnergySource Minerals. “Jobs will be available as soon as 15 months.”
For one Holtville High School student, some of the entrepreneurship sessions caught his attention.
“I liked the clean energy business owner session. I like business. I really like how clean energy works. I’m interested in solar panels also,” Roberto Adame said. “It is not my main interest, but I might be able to make a career out of it. I like it. It’s the future.”
Some of the other businesses and organizations that were present were BHE Renewables, San Diego-Imperial Counties Labor Council, University of California Farm Smart, HAGO Energetics, Imperial County Workforce Development Board, America’s SPDC TigerBotics from Imperial High School, Hot Purple Energy, Mesa Robotics, Snap On Tools, Real Innovation Delivered with Excellence, Imperial Valley Regional Occupational Program, Imperial County Registrar of Voters, the office of Assembly Member Eduardo Garcia (D-Coachella).
In summing up the day’s experience and Imperial County’s place in clean energy transition, New Energy Nexus’ Lee said:
“We’re here to connect the grassroots to the treetops. To connect Imperial County, this ecosystem here to the broader innovation ecosystem of California and beyond. The panelists said one of the sessions just blew their mind. All the things that the kids said with their ideas and thoughts they had to share was amazing conversation.
“It starts here. Imperial County has an important role to play in leading the way to an equitable clean energy transition,” Lee added.
