Internship update

My summer internship with GE’s Renewable Energy Leadership Program is coming towards its end. I have about a week left and my final report-out is on Tuesday. The report-out is conveniently scheduled during “renewable energy week”, the week in which the leaders of GE’s renewables business fly to Schenectady from around the globe to do strategic planning and re-sync with one another. All six interns are going to present in an auditorium setting to about 80 people, including the VP of renewables. That scale of presentation will certainly be a first for me and is certainly a little intimidating, but it’ll certainly be a huge learning experience and a perfect opportunity to sell what we think is a really great idea to the key decision makers. My definition of success:the entire audience rises to their feet in applause and the VP handing us an oversized check to fund our project. I can hope, eh?

The overall experience has been amazing. I went through all of the phases that one goes through in a new professional experience—curiosity, overconfidence, frustration, and finally productivity. I’ve found everyone that I’ve worked with to be intelligent, thoughtful, driven, and very willing to help out whenever I had a question. I also got very lucky with my manager, who has given generously of his time and allowed Colin and I plenty of free reign to explore the problem witihout being led to any conclusions.

The work itself has been fascinating. We were thrown into a new product introduction (NPI) effort and have defined the solution, quantified the customer value, and figured out two potential business models that GE could use to capture a portion of that value. We talked to site technicians and executives, engineers and customer resolution managers, marketing and operations. We spent several weeks analyzing a dataset consisting of hundreds of thousands of turbine faults looking for patterns. We built consensus among key executives. We helped write product requirements document. And we built a straightforward set of financial projections based on reasonable assumptions combined with hard survey data that we collected.

And our project NPV is positive. How could I have asked for more?

Well, I suppose the one thing I would’ve liked is to get a better feel for how the industry operates at a more macro level. How saturated is the US grid? How does the grid regulate voltage and how does renewable energy penetration impact that? What are our competitors’ priorities? Where will wind be in five years (beyond a pure megawatt number)?

That said, 10 weeks is a very short amount of time, and the focus has definitely been on getting the interns to roll up their sleeves and get dirty. And I’ve really appreciated that. Over the past 10 weeks I have managed to develop the concepts behind what could be a pretty cool new product. If I read about it on greentechmedia in two years that’ll be pretty darn satisfying.

Comments

[Joe]

Congratulations on your successful completion of your RELP internship at GE.
I have a couple of questions on the REDP I hope you could answer.
1. Is the full time REDP a paid internship?
2. Is there Anything 'special' an international student from Africa (with a passion for renewables) should do to get accepted into the program?

-Thanks!

[Tristan Handy]

Great questions. I can answer the first one. There is an REDP summer internship and an REDP full-time program. These are separate (but obviously related) programs. As to the second one, I really have no insight into this--apologies!