As the originator and head of the project, Taraborelli works with high school students to take the energy-intensive bedroom community of Highlands Ranch "off the grid" by 2020. It's nothing if not ambitious. Metro District Highlands Ranch puts the population of the "bedroom community" at more than 90,000, most of whom live in homes. And, as Taraborelli freely admits, "everyone in Highlands Ranch drives a car."

It's a nightmarish starting point for a journey to energy independence but by borrowing some of the best minds Thunder Ridge High School has to offer and aggressively courting green energy startups, Taraborelli thinks it can work.

For the past two years, he's met weekly with teams of TRHS seniors, and been helped by science teacher Wilbur Sameshima and parent volunteer Paul Clukies, to help research and plan out the vision: amending the state constitution to allow for a new kind of city incorporation for Highlands Ranch to build, own and operate the Cleantech Incubator, a research lab that would offer its facilities at reduced price for clean energy startup companies and provide business consulting to get them off the ground. In return, the city would reap funds from royalties on sales and patents. Taraborelli envisions that some companies would see an incentive to make their move out of the incubator a short one and settle into the light industrial park zoning next to the incubator's proposed location.

The end result would be a low-overhead city built on fostering energy companies and attracting their business to Highlands Ranch and using their technology to reduce the city's reliance on fossil fuels.

It's also empowering for the students he works with, he says. "Quite a few seniors were interested in engineering prior to joining the project and after they learned more about energy, they decided to study environmental engineering."

The project is also shoving students into the real world to tackle interactions most wouldn't have to handle until after college. "They are tasked to contact outside professionals, local politicians and energy experts," Taraborelli says. "They learn public speaking skills through this."

All of this, he hopes, will culminate in the incubator project, incentives for natural gas vehicles sold by a local Burt dealership and improved wind and solar power in Highlands Ranch.

"I think you'll find in the next five or six years through nanotechnology storage collection for solar technology is going to take leaps and bounds. Conventional thinking is it's high cost and there's no battery that can retain the energy but there's a new generation of panels coming out today, now, next-generation solar technology where you can actually print your panel off a printer. ... "It's really energy empowerment for the residents," Taraborelli said.