Energy Startup Companies Benefit from ACEP Expertise
Last week marked the end of the second session of Launch Alaska's 2021 , where ACEP researchers Michelle Wilber, Chris Pike and Eloise Brown have been serving as panelists this fall. Launch Alaska, a nonprofit accelerator with funding from the and the U.S. Department of Energy , works with companies from Alaska and across the world to support deployment of innovative climate tech in Alaska.
Tech Deployment Track is an eight-month program that assists companies focused on food, water, transportation and energy, as they explore customer relationships in Alaska. As part of their role as panelists in the program, ACEP researchers agreed to mentor several companies with promising technologies in renewable energy that are interested in finding markets in Alaska.
Wilber and Pike, from ACEP’s Solar Technologies Program, mentored , a Finnish biowaste-to-energy company. Pike also mentored , a startup developing modular nuclear microreactors. Wilber helped to mentor , a Nigerian company that uses solar and phase change materials to run its coolers and freezers completely off grid, and , a software-as-a-service company that helps utilities see and make the most of the distributed resources on their grid.
Brown, from ACEP’s Pacific Marine Energy Center, helped mentor several manufacturers of wave energy converters and river energy converters, collectively known as marine energy. is a company from California with a WEC that is being tested offshore at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and at PACWave, Oregon State University's offshore wave energy test site. is a Swedish company with a commercial-scale WEC in Portugal that will be incorporated into an array of WECs at this site. is a Spanish company with a marine energy converter that produces energy from both waves and rivers that could potentially power a small cabin off the grid or a community microgrid.
For more information on the mentorship, please contact Michelle Wilber at mmwilber@alaska.edu, and learn more about the Launch Alaska Tech Deployment Track at .
CalWave's wave energy converter deployed offshore near Scripps Institute of Oceanography in Sand Diego. Photo courtesy of CalWave.