Using Value of Solar to Pick the NCAA Winner

In 2013 we used solar savings to predict the NCAA march madness tournament. It didn’t go so well!

What we said before the tournament

Never before has a 15 seed won the NCAA tournament but if you trust the solar gods (and we do), this year is the year!

Some people fill out their March Madness brackets based on mascots, others use team colors.  At Genability, we’ve picked each game based on the highest Solar Avoided Cost, or the amount of energy that you avoid buying from the electric utility because it’s provided by your solar system.  Using our Value of Solar tools, including Likely Tariff and baseline profiles, we’ve calculated the Avoided Cost of Power for each school and used that figure in determining the winners.  You can see our full bracket below.

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If we leave it to the powers of solar, this year’s NCAA champion will be 15 seed Iona College of New Rochelle, New York with an Avoided Cost of Power of 19.62 cents.  It was a nail bitter with Iona upsetting UCLA in the final game at 19.62 cents versus 15.58 cents.

Stay tuned and we’ll let you know how our solar bracket matches up.

What we blogged after it was all over

In case you haven’t been following our bracket, Genability put together a March Madness bracket based solely on the school’s Solar Avoided Cost figure.  Using our Value of Solar tools, we calculated the Avoided Cost of Power for each school’s location and used that number to determine each matchup winner.

It was a bit of a long shot, but we had #15 Iona College of NY upsetting UCLA in the final game with an Avoided Cost of Power of 19.62 cents versus 15.58 cents. On the “bright” side, we did select one of the Elite 8 Winners.  Thanks to Michigan with an Avoided Cost of Power of 13.48 cents, the Solar gods didn’t lead us totally astray.

You can see the status of our bracket below.  Luckily we didn’t have any money on this!

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