IEOR Blog Post #13

Taking all of the feedback received last week my team and I re-vamped our final pitch. This time we included more in-depth analysis of the finances and took another look at the business plan to ensure that licensing the technology was the most efficient business model vs actually manufacturing the flywheel and selling them ourselves. We decided that licensing the technology was the most efficient route to go. The last thing that we need to finalize this week is our ask because we are still unsure of what that should be.

In addition to this, I had a very interesting phone call with Leslie Eudy of National Renewable Energy Laboratory. She pointed me to an interesting website that detailed the market growth for renewable energy in various bus transit companies all over the country (including data about AC Transit used here in the bay). The data showed us that there is definitely a trend towards flywheels/hydrogen fuel cells in the future and showed us that AC Transit aims to implement a zero emissions policy in their bus system by mid-2017 and I think the flywheel would be useful in implementing that. There were also multiple publications on the website that detailed the financial trend towards flywheels/hydrogen fuel cells because although the price for implementing flywheels is currently slightly increasing this cost is expected to go down by mid 2017 and actually end up saving money for AC Transit within the nest few years. According the Eudy, the only reason why there is a slight trend in increase of funds currently is because there is required training for bus drivers to operate these new cars, required training for mechanics to understand how to fix any problems that could be caused by the implementation of this new system and also because AC Transit has invested in new buses.

The website can be found at this link: http://www.nrel.gov/hydrogen/proj_fc_bus_eval.html