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MHT's Efrain Viscarolasaga: Tech companies may have to wait for stimulus funds
MHT's Efrain Viscarolasaga: Preparing the smart grid for more power
MHT reporter Efrain Viscarolasaga on NECN: Green tech brings jobs back to Mass.
For the past six years, Michael Raab and his team of researchers have been investigating better ways to break down plants to make ethanol and other biofuels.
The research, focusing on genetically engineering plants to produce enzymes that will eventually eat away at the plant’s innards, has mainly been fed by federal agricultural and other grants. But last week the company, Agrivida Inc., learned that it received a highly competitive, stimulus-backed grant to continue its energy research.
“I think a lot of the technical issues in terms of feedstock have been resolved and we’re really driving toward development,” said Raab, founder and president. “It’s really going to allow us to grow our crop-processing stream as well as expand the number of crops we’re working on. It definitely will be a big help in filling positions.”
Agrivida is among the five companies and one academic institution in Massachusetts to receive funding through the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy program, an elite class of 37 entities out of 3,700 applicants conducting what U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu calls “truly transformational solutions to the energy problem.”
A look at the local awardees indicates the program, at least initially, is less about providing startup capital to early-stage ventures and more about shining a spotlight on interesting technologies irrespective of their funding status. Three of the five startups are known to have received Series A venture financing, and most had their roots at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Yet clean-energy leaders say the program’s spotlight is just as important as the funding to spur companies and research institutions to think big when it comes to cleantech.
“(The DOE) is knighting a handful of companies and saying, ‘Here’s a prize to get you to the next level of commercial development,’ ” said Nick d’Arbeloff, executive director of the New England Clean Energy Council.
The local winners come from generation technologies well known to clean-energy watchers: solar, wind, biofuels and batteries. The challenge for each company is to develop systems that are more efficient, and ostensibly cheaper, than incumbent technologies.
For 1366 Technologies Inc., ARPA-E funding is another step in the transformation of the company to a solar manufacturing company from solar panel maker. The company launched in 2008 with backing from Polaris Venture Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners with the mission to make a solar panel with the same per kilowatt production cost as a new coal plant. But company officials soon discovered the difficulties in competing in the solar market and have now focused on building higher efficiency manufacturing equipment to sell to solar makers.
The company received $4 million in DOE funding to develop a solar cell manufacturing process that eliminates the need to cut thin wafers out of large blocks of multi-crystaline silicon.
“You do all this work and you throw half (of the silicon) away,” said 1366 CEO Frank van Mierlo. “We have a manufacturing innovation that allows you to make solar cells directly from the molten silicon. This new process is arguably the most risky development we’ve come up with.”
Funding is also helping some companies scale up operations in the development stage. FloDesign Wind Turbine of Wilbraham received $8.3 million to continue honing the design of its shrouded wind turbine, which is based upon the structure of an aircraft jet engine.
FloDesign CEO Stanley Kowalski III did not respond to calls for comment, but the award is not the first prize for FloDesign. Last year it won the $200,000 MIT Clean Energy Prize and $100,000 in cash and services in the Ignite Clean Energy competition.
Clean Sweep
The Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy program awarded $151 million nationwide, including $33 million to the following companies in Massachusetts:
1366 Technologies Inc. (Lexington)
$4M
Technology to produce solar cells directly from molten silicon
Agrivida Inc. (Medford)
$4.6M
Cell-wall degrading enzymes inside plants to make biofuels more efficiently
FloDesign Wind Turbine Corp. (Wilbraham)
$8.3M
Wind turbine design based on jet engines
FastCAP Systems Corp. (Cambridge)
$5.3M
Energy storage device that produces much more power and lasts longer than traditional batteries used in vehicles and electrical grid storage
Sun Catalytix Corp. (Cambridge)
$4.1M
Technology that uses the sun to split water into hydrogen and oxygen
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
$6.9M
All-liquid metal battery for low-cost, large scale energy storage
Source: U.S. Department of Energy
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