In partnership with the Rutgers Business School, doctoral student Jubilee Prasad Rao has been rewarded for his alternative Energy project that is designed to harnesses the power of waves, which are more predictable than solar and wind.
The tidal power project, spearheaded by Rao and supervised by Professor Francisco Diez, was developed as part of the Collaborative for Technology, Entrepreneurship and Commercialization and inspired by an interest in applying engineering to the environment and renewable energy.
The CTEC is an innovative partnership between the Business School and the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department, which pairs “engineering researchers with MBA students to help bring research to the marketplace and build businesses around promising technologies.”
Rao says the interdisciplinary nature of the CTEC course pushed him into exciting and unknown territory that he believes will prove useful in the real world: “I’m an engineer, but I like to learn new things and I thought this would make me well rounded. To get things done in the real world, you need management skills as well as technical skills.”
Part of his newfound management acumen includes consumer research to determine if there is a market for an idea. “Part of the challenge is knowing what the market wants and the problem that can be solved with your product. If it doesn’t add value to the market, it’s worthless.”
Rao’s idea took the $15,000 second place at the Department of Energy’s Launch R clean energy competition this past April. While the prize money will certainly come in handy, Rao knows “there may be 3-5 years of research still to do before tidal power might be put into use as an alternative power source.”
Rao says he hopes his new start-up, XTREAM Energy Technologies, will address one of the major obstacles to tidal power, which is to develop technology that makes energy production “inexpensive enough to attract users” with a more efficient turbine design.
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