Best Venture winners at the 27th NREL Industry Growth Forum on October 28–29 in Denver were, from left, Craig Hartwig, Lutz Henckels, and Guy Foster of HiQ Solar, which built a new-generation photovoltaic string inverter that promises to reduce the cost of commercial solar installations. Award winners will receive in-kind commercialization support from NREL to help increase their chances of becoming commercially successful. Photo by Dennis Schroeder

The Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) will be the hub of the new Lab-Corps, partnering with five other national labs—Argonne National Laboratory, Idaho National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

Building Clean Energy Ecosystems

Hosted by NREL, the 27th Industry Growth Forum was the ideal setting to announce Lab-Corps, as the Forum attracts 30 companies a year competing for the top prizes, and dozens of others pitching their ideas to venture capital firms, large corporations, philanthropies, and national labs.

The global clean energy market is valued at $250 billion this year, but will expand to a multi-trillion-dollar market in the next decade, Danielson said. If the United States is to play the leading role, it will need to rely on its strengths — innovation and entrepreneurship — and avoid «short-term-ism» thinking by venture capitalists and others in the financial community.

This will require effort from all sides, Danielson said.

• Venture capital firms should try to look more long term — saying yes to great ideas that may take a few years to bear fruit, rather than focusing on safer, but less innovative, bets.
• All players need to think about energy integration: how to layer devices, communications, and energy sources in such a way that larger loads of renewables can be seamlessly added to the emerging smart grid. He noted that NREL’s new Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF) is the place where utilities and their vendors can test-drive the future electric grid.
• Philanthropic organizations should try to step up with some cash to help great ideas get over the commercialization hump, he said. Partnerships and cooperative research and development agreements should expand.
• Startups and entrepreneurs need to form more partnerships with national laboratories to tap into the labs’ equipment, expertise, and mentoring opportunities, so they can prove a concept or demonstrate a pilot project for $1 million instead of $20 million. Slowing the burn rate until the company has a product for the marketplace is essential in an era when easy money for clean energy has dried up.

The Energy Department can — and will — help out in all these areas and will be the «glue» that helps hold together the new clean energy ecosystems, he said. «I’m confident that together we can build this new model, engaging corporations and philanthropy like never before, stepping up investments from government, helping venture capital find that sweet spot where they can make money while still supporting these technologies at the crucial stage,» Danielson said. And national labs need to both generate and support innovations, speeding them to the marketplace.

The Energy Department’s Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, David Danielson, announces that NREL will be the leading lab for the newly funded Lab-Corps pilot program to accelerate the transfer of clean energy technologies from the national laboratories to the marketplace. Photo by Dennis Schroeder, NREL

No Excuses, Says Best Venture Award CEO

While news of the Lab-Corps announcement rippled through the Forum, it was business as usual for the inventors, entrepreneurs, investors, and venture capitalists looking to join forces to create the next big thing in clean energy. This year, the Forum’s Best Venture award went to HiQ Solar for a solar inverter that weighs about one-third of typical inverters of the same power rating, costs less, and packs inside all the safeguards, reliability, and convenience that the solar industry is looking for.

HiQ CEO Lutz Henckels said he was born in Germany and doesn’t like that Germany is ahead of the United States in percentage of renewables installed to date. «I don’t buy the excuse that Germany has a newer infrastructure,» he said. «America can absolutely regain the lead. The financing might be against us right now, but we have the innovators and entrepreneurs. We value startups.»

Henckels said he has been to many similar industry growth forums, and the NREL-hosted one stands out because of the talent it attracts from both the public and private sectors. «Not many events compare to this…it’s the best I’ve seen.»

One Outstanding Venture award went to ClearCove Systems of Rochester, New York, which takes energy out of waste water in such a way that harvests more organics with four times more gas potential than other methods. «We use half as much power to treat waste,» said CEO Gary Miller, who described his firm as «a blue-collar high-tech company.»