Colorado School of Mines engineering students are hurling themselves into what they see as the ultimate, relevant senior project: creating an electric vehicle burly enough to endure the Baja 1000 off-road race through unforgiving Mexican desert.

“The electric vehicle market has blown away expectations of deployment over the last years,” says Morgan Bazilian, director of the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines.

Ian Lange, an associate professor of economics and business at the Colorado School of Mines who specializes in energy and natural resource economics, said a number of forces are working together to create volatile energy market.

“If we have heat waves that increase demand, that is when that loss of hydro becomes really important,” said Adrienne Marshall, a computational hydrologist at the Colorado School of Mines.

“It’s an insane number,” said Jordy M. Lee, a program manager at the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines. What’s more, it might even be too low.

“The potential to recover rare earths from acid mine drainage and other streams in the coal production and combustion process represent an example of a broader set of potentially unconventional but transformative sources for securing access to rare ....

That’s the case in Europe too, despite the current surge in demand as it moves off Russian coal, according to Ian Lange, who directs the mineral and energy economics program at the Colorado School of Mines.

Morgan Bazilian and Simon Lomax of the Payne Institute for Public Policy wrote this opinion piece about how a complaint by a California company could delay Xcel Energy's exit from coal.

“It’s our largest low- or no-carbon emissions energy source that we can turn on and off when we need it,” Adrienne Marshall, an assistant professor of geology and geological engineering at the Colorado School of Mines, said.

“Having a more highly educated population in your state is going to be a good thing for your economy and society in general, in the long run,” said Paul Johnson, president of the Colorado School of Mines.