Reflecting on the Rice Cleantech Innovation Competition
The Challenge: Come up with a solution for one of the greatest problems facing our electricity grid
Electricity demand across the country is rising at paces we haven’t seen before due to data center growth and electrification of commercial infrastructure, homes, and vehicles. The energy challenge of this century will be to meet this rising demand while simultaneously decarbonizing our grid to achieve net-zero goals. The case challenge for this year’s Rice Cleantech Innovation Competition(RCIC) was to develop an investment thesis for grid infrastructure to address the issue of rising electricity demand across the country. Teams were asked to leverage existing and innovative technologies to develop a clear, realistic investment model for implementing their proposed solutions.
The Team: Joining forces and sectors to meet the challenge
We formed a team of four superstars to tackle the challenge. Monica Gronseth and Spencer Burget, both first-year joint degree students at SOM and YSE, joined forces with Arjun Kumar (read his reflection here) and Alex Dial, two second-year students at SOM. With a breadth of experience spanning electricity market trading, vehicle electrification policy, renewable energy development, and financial modeling, we were ready to tackle the challenge.
Our Solution: Electric freight meets curtailed wind and solar
Our team identified two critical trends contributing to the crisis facing the electricity grid. First, on the supply side, a massive amount of renewable electricity is wasted across the U.S. every day because of mismatches in supply and demand. When renewable generation outpaces demand, or we don’t have the infrastructure to get it where it needs to go, that renewable electricity is forced offline through a process called curtailment. Simultaneously, on the demand side, the transportation sector is rapidly electrifying, and these new vehicles need significant amounts of electricity to charge.
We saw an opportunity to match the rising electricity demand from charging electric vehicles to the excess renewable energy that is being wasted through curtailment. We decided to focus specifically on electric freight trucks, a rapidly growing market with staggering electricity demands. Freight trucks also have the added benefit of regularly traveling through the remote, rural areas where renewable generation is concentrated, making them prime candidates to utilize this otherwise wasted energy. To unlock this potential opportunity, we devised a business model to match electric freight trucks needing to charge with renewable power producers facing curtailment.
The second part of our solution was to leverage this network of trucks charging at our stations to deliver mobile batteries to commercial and industrial customers in areas of constrained demand. Through this solution, we believed we could deliver otherwise wasted electricity from areas of renewable resource abundance to customers facing grid constraints and rising electricity prices.
We would pitch this two-part investment opportunity to the RCIC judges.
The Experience: Bringing home second place through teamwork, innovation, and grit
For the first round of the competition, we submitted a presentation of our proposed solution and waited to hear if we would proceed to the second and final round. The RCIC committee received 34 team submissions from graduate schools across the country. Our team was one of only five finalists invited to Rice University to pitch their solutions in front of a panel of live judges. With support from the Yale Center for Business and Environment (CBEY), we booked our flights and were on our way to Houston!
Against all odds (namely an ironic power outage at the Houston airport that temporarily stranded two team members in Atlanta), our full team arrived in Houston in the early morning of pitch day. Finally, after hours of team practice, we stepped into the auditorium at Rice University and pitched our idea to a panel of 24 judges. After a 25-minute presentation, we had to endure 15 minutes of Q&A in the so-called “barbecue pit” where judges grilled us on every aspect of the business. These were experienced energy professionals from across the industry and we certainly felt the heat, but we fended off each question to the best of our ability.
After an evening of decompressing and debriefing with the other finalists, we returned the next day for the award presentation at the Rice Energy Finance Summit. We anxiously awaited through a morning of keynotes and panels before the lunchtime reveal. When the organizers finally announced the results, we were proud to take home second place and continue Yale’s tradition of finishing on the podium at the competition.
Reflections:
This experience was truly rewarding. Engaging in solutions for a real-world environmental problem, with students who are all passionate about the energy transition, was a unique experience that you can’t find in the classroom. The competition brought together teams from schools across the country and the knowledgeable judges pushed us to think critically about realistic implementation of our solution through their Q&A. The process of turning a case prompt into a potential business idea expands your entrepreneurial intuition and the act of verbally pitching an idea is a valuable skill that this competition helped us to refine.
The competition was also an incredible opportunity to meet new people in energy. We got to hear other students’ ideas for the future of the electric grid, chat with high-powered judges looking to hire graduate students, and attend a top-tier energy conference free of charge. In a city that is at the heart of the U.S. energy industry, we had the opportunity to hear from a diverse set of stakeholders from all sides of the energy sphere, including oil and gas executives. Stretching our learning beyond the Yale ecosystem was especially valuable in its own way. To reach net zero, collaboration across geographies and opinions is critical. While it can be easy to become polarized, it is crucial to understand all views and learn how to engage with the full range of stakeholders in the energy transition.
A Sincere Thank You to CBEY
We thank CBEY for supporting and sponsoring our attendance. Without their financial support, our full team would not have attended. It evidences CBEY’s belief in applied learning, to bridge the classroom to real-world environmental challenges. The case competition pushed us to outline innovative solutions for one of the greatest challenges facing the energy sector today. The case and the conference were also both valuable in presenting various perspectives within the energy sphere. This was a truly memorable experience and highlight of our time at Yale. Thank you, CBEY!