EST&P Students participated in the 2017 Economist and NRG Case Competition

EST&P students Ashwin Kumar Balaji, Saurabh Mishra, and Akshay Patil participated in an annual Case Competition sponsored by the Economist and NRG in April 2017. The case study sought to forecast financing on emerging energy technologies such as renewables, energy storage, etc. NRG’s challenge was to create a financial model that enabled the development of any one of four given energy systems – a 5 MW hospital, a 25 MW university in California, a 40 MW community in New York and a 30 MW data center in Texas. Furthermore, teams were tasked to incorporate distributed energy technologies like PV solar, wind turbines, fuel cells, biomass, battery storage, etc. into their case prompts.

The student team chose to work on the 40 MW community project in New York. They considered a business model that incorporated multiple variables to create a detailed DCF model for estimating a stock price. Additionally, they structured their model so the community members are included as shareholders while providing shares at a reasonable price. From this analysis, they were able to provide dividends to the community in terms of lowered electricity tariff from the current rate of 17-c/kWh to approximately 9-c/kWh.  Their case study was featured on the Economist website.