Does IIT Madras have answers to New York City’s energy dilemma?
Three students Aashish Dattani, Sriram Kalyanaraman and Vinayshankar Kulkarni were the big winners in Mayor Bloomberg’s NYC Next Idea Global Business Plan Competition, winning over teams from ten leading business and engineering schools in Europe, Asia and Latin America. The criteria were for the business concepts to have a connection to NYC and be commercially viable.
The team, Greenext Technology Solutions, came up with a creative solution to allow utility companies like Con Ed to store and distribute energy through remote sites, and possibly save the city billions of dollars. The plan was selected by a panel of judges from New York City’s venture capital community to receive a $20,000 cash prize. The other finalists were Biofont from INSEAD Business School in Fontainebleau, France, and NYCycling from IESE Business School of the University of Navarra, Spain.
The NYC Next Idea competition was initiated by Mayor Bloomberg to strengthen New York City’s entrepreneurial community, and was administered by the New York City Economic Development Corporation and supported by Columbia Business School.
“Cities around the world hope to be a place of innovation where entrepreneurs want to go to launch businesses,” said Bloomberg. “New York City doesn’t have to hope – we are that place. But it’s not enough to be place entrepreneurs want to go; we also have to make sure our city – and our country – is a place they can go.”
He gave a plug for immigration: “That’s why we are committed to working with the Obama Administration to pursue sensible immigration reform. No one can say for sure whether the finalists’ ideas will translate into successful job-creating businesses. What a shame, though, if they and countless others are denied the opportunity even to try.”
Not only did the winners get $20,000 but also free space within one of New York’s new business incubators for two years. They got to meet with venture capitalists and also check out NYC, which many were visiting for the first time, and see the popular Broadway show ‘Wicked.’
A summary of the winning proposal:
GREENEXT TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS
- University: IIT: Indian Institute of Technology Madras – INDIA
- Team members: Aashish Dattani, Sriram Kalyanaraman and Vinayshankar Kulkarni
Greenext Technology Solutions is clean-technology proposal that is pioneering specialized software and hardware solutions to utility companies, renewable energy producers, energy storage manufacturers, and energy traders. Their product, XEstor, serves as a common interface to store energy from any source across New York City into large battery storage sites. The product communicates with the electric grid and combines real-time consumer demand information with current energy prices to charge or discharge electricity into the grid. This flexible mechanism to produce or store energy based on demand can act as a backup power source to bridge supply gaps and maintain the grid’s reliability through ancillary services such as regulation and emergency response.
The Greenext Technology Solutions team strongly believes that today’s challenges in the energy sector can be addressed through clean-technology solutions such as smart grids that hold the potential to meet growing energy demands. Greenext Technology Solutions team is convinced that with energy demand continuing to rise rapidly on the one hand and both energy availability and supply efficiency struggling to meet it on the other, financial incentives and deregulation of electricity markets will make their solution a highly viable one in the future. And New York City is a prime locale for such technology because of its burgeoning population and energy needs, as well as an electric grid in need of innovative upgrades.
