Friday, February 24, 2012

SolidEnergy takes first ever MIT ACCELERATE contest

By Don Seiffert, Correspondent

A company which has developed battery technology that can work in the extreme heat of downwell drilling operations, as well as at room temperatures, has won a $12,000 prize in the first MIT ACCELERATE contest Wednesday.

SolidEnergy is a startup made up of four MIT students, advised by Professor Donald Sadoway. Sadoway has worked in energy storage and is a co-inventor of SolidEnergy’s technology. Previously, Sadoway helped devise a new technology for a liquid metal battery that could one day be used to improve consistency of renewable energy on the electric grid.  He is also a past recipient of a grant from the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation for a proof-of-concept for a novel battery using a supervalent technology to move energy density beyond the limitations of lithium-ion batteries.

In an interview Thursday, Sadoway said the technology used in SolidEnergy is a solid polymer with low volitility. That means the battery won’t bulge and leak like liquid-core batteries do, with the potential of catching fire when used at the high temperatures common in drilling thousands of meter below the surface. The material itself was invented in the late 1990s, said Sadoway, but an application for it hasn’t been found until now.

Houston-based drilling company Weatherford International Ltd. approached Sadoway more than a year ago looking for a safer battery for drilling. Sadoway put them in touch with Qichao Hu, a graduate student in applied physics at Harvard who is doing his research at MIT.

“When I met (Hu), he had a bachelor’s degree in physics, working on some very nerdy stuff,” said Sadoway. “Who knew he had an entrepreneur inside?”

Hu, a 2007 graduate of MIT, said on Thursday that in addition to being safer at high temperatures, the patented technology has potential for laptops, vehicles and everyday electronics. It has more than twice the energy density of a regular lithium-ion battery.

While Hu’s planning to defend his Ph.D. thesis in March, then graduate from Harvard in May, he and another member of the winning team - Louis Beryl, a graduating masters student at Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School - will be working to incorporate the company and seek funding.

“The most exciting thing is to spend five years working on a technology, then introducing it to the market and have people like it,” said Hu.

The two other student members of the team, Mike Hagerty, a graduating Masters student at MIT Technology and Policy Program, and Vishwas Dindore, an MIT Sloan Fellow with experience in the oil and gas industry, will stay on as consultants.

Judges in the contest were Rich Miner, a partner at Google Ventures; Seth Priebatsch, founder and chief ninja of SCVNGR Inc., a social location-based gaming platform for mobile phones; Chris Gabrieli, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners; and Maura O’Neill, chief innovation officer of USAID. SolidEnergy beat out 28 other teams spanning such diverse sectors as life sciences, mobile, and energy.