A team of MBA students from UCLA’s Anderson School of Management won first place last month in the Renewable Energy Case Competition (RECC) at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.
Competitors included MBA candidates from top schools in the US and internationally.
This year’s case study centered around an issue that is facing the renewable energy industry – that of the development of community solar projects. Community solar provides retailers and consumers with the opportunity to purchase a portion of a solar “garden” which is shared among people who aren’t able to install solar panels of their own due to the expense or to the nature of their property ownership.
Teams in the RECC were challenged to form a startup company that would fill this niche in the solar energy industry. They were asked to make two presentations to a group of venture capital investors in advance of the competition.
PerfectStorm, Anderson’s team, was comprised of three first-year full-time MBA candidates, Makibi Takagi, Dan Komula and Akhil Modi, and two second-year FEMBA candidates, Manoj Rawat and Alex Wehrmann. The team’s solution to the case study was to enlist retailers such as Target and Walmart in states that provide renewable energy credits to their residents. The proposal involved the retailers installing solar gardens on the rooftops of their stores and allowing customers to purchase portions of the energy from them. The team noted the mutual benefit to customers and the retailers themselves, who would drive up loyalty through this unique program. “[Installation of the solar gardens] would also demonstrate [the retailers’s] corporate social responsibility to the customer and allow the customer to benefit from this,” notes an article on Anderson’s blog.