SYNTRA wins Rep. Gabe Vasquez’s 2025 Congressional App Challenge in New Mexico’s Second District

When asked what inspired the creation of SYNTRA, the students said, “Our inspiration for SYNTRA came from personal experiences and challenges in general surrounding energy use. Every member of our team knows that our parents have dealt with some sort of sudden spike in electricity bills or even sudden power outages that were quite unpredictable (some of our friends even had to sleep over at our houses because their AC went out). We also realized that, in most households, people don’t believe that they have control over when their power is most expensive or how much strain one neighborhood can place on a grid. Simultaneously, millions of homes are installing solar panels and batteries. Unfortunately, there is no real way to share that energy.

“This growing problem of grid overloads and weather-driven blackouts motivated us, mainly because they have become so common. For example, in June 2024, more than 4,500 residents on the East Mesa of Las Cruces, New Mexico were left without power due to a major outage. Studies also show that over 80% of major U.S. outages are weather-related, and 1 in 4 homes reported losing power in the last year alone. That shows us how vulnerable energy infrastructure is, and why becoming more self-reliant is important.

“SYNTRA takes this problem and turns it into an opportunity for us to grow. Instead of relying only on utility companies, what if communities could predict and even trade energy among themselves? We wanted our app to not only track energy data but also transform this into insights that communities could actually act upon. SYNTRA, overall, aims to empower all of us.”