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Analysis of ROI within renewable energy as a service portfolio

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Four portrait photos of students arranged in a square

Team members
Reed Findlay, Eli Goodman, John Kirkpatrick, David Madej

Faculty mentor
Prof. James Sweeney

The organization
Metrus Energy, Inc is a startup that provides flexible and scalable financial solutions for infrastructure upgrades and sustainable energy projects. Metrus provides its clients with off-balance-sheet financing solutions, project scoping, advising, and management. Metrus' customers seek out their services for a variety of reasons, including pledges to reach net-zero carbon emissions, deferred maintenance costs, and increased speed of implementing energy-saving upgrades.

metrus energy logo

Project description

The key problem facing Metrus is uncertainty about how future policies that incentivize decarbonization will affect their core business. The company wanted to understand:

  • How likely is it for a federal carbon tax to take hold in the U.S.?
  • What other carbon pricing systems are possible, and how might they be structured?
  • How would carbon pricing affect Metrus’s current portfolio and what new opportunities would it create?

In our report, we addressed these questions and explored how Metrus can build a strategy to take advantage of future decarbonization efforts.

Solutions, techniques, and models used

We assessed Metrus’s portfolio and the impact of potential carbon pricing on 5,000+ individual upgrades across 30+ states. We performed a thorough policy analysis to determine the likelihood and structure of possible public and private carbon pricing schemes in the U.S. We used data analysis tools in R and Excel, leveraging data from Metrus and publicly available datasets. We produced summary statistics, regressions, and a sensitivity analysis to establish the baseline KPIs of Metrus’s current portfolio and analyze how they would change under various carbon pricing scenarios. 

Under a hypothetical but reasonable future carbon tax scenario (a carbon tax of $25 per metric ton of CO2 applied to 100% of emissions), we found potential revenue increases of over 20% in certain states, and revenue increases of over 10% for certain products. The findings of this analysis will help guide Metrus’s long-term go-to-market and project implementation strategies.

Awards

The Metrus Energy team tied for the 2022 first place senior project, as evaluated by MS&E alumni judges.

2022 senior projects