Energy. Innovation. We’re There.
Christina Briggs
Economic Development Director
Earlier this month, at the U.S. Department of Energy’s arpa-e Energy Innovation Summit, more than 2,000 technologists, entrepreneurs, investors, industry experts, and government thought leaders gathered to discuss America’s most pressing energy issues. The end goal is to move promising new energy technologies out of the lab and into the market.
Speakers like Ratan Tata, Janet Napolitano, and Bill Gates provided their viewpoints on the future of energy and on what they are doing as leaders to promote innovation in this sector. Under a general umbrella of renewed optimism for clean energy, themes that floated to the surface included the market adoption of a maturing energy storage sector, increased innovation in clean-tech financing, and the growing phenomenon of democratizing energy.
This year, I was particularly struck by the prominence of several Fremont companies at the event. These companies span the smart grid value chain (EVs, LEDs, power generation, and energy storage) and illustrate the ongoing importance of arpa-e as a funding and collaboration resource related to scaling for future growth.
Cogenra Solar designs, manufactures, and delivers high-reliability solar systems at the lowest cost for large commercial and utility-scale applications. Working with the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Cogenra received an arpa-e grant to work on a full-scale concentrator system based on its T14 product, which incorporates field-tested active-cooling technology and low concentration optics for the lowest-cost PV system available today.
In partnership with the Pew Charitable Trust’s Clean Energy Initiative, FreeWire Technologies showcased its mobile electric vehicle (EV) charging and energy storage units at the summit. Each Mobi™ carries 48 kWh of second-life EV batteries, is capable of Level 2 or Level 3 Fast Charging, and is linked to a full-featured software platform. This mobility, along with a companion app, allows customers to avoid high infrastructure costs and underutilization that plague traditional fixed charging stations while also delivering a cost-effective solution to quickly scale up capacity. In addition, FreeWire is using second-life EV batteries, saving them from disposal and encouraging greater EV adoption with the additional charging capacity. FreeWire’s Mobis™ and software platform can also be used for pure energy storage applications, including commercial energy management, storage of renewables, backup power, and disaster recovery.
As Fremont’s largest LED company, Soraa Inc., has received two arpa-e awards and was displaying its winning projects at the summit’s technology showcase. Both projects address a new cost-effective, scalable technique for manufacturing gallium nitride (GaN) substrates for power electronics and LEDs. These substrates enable improved LED and power electronics applications that represent markets of more than $30 billion per year and could reduce electricity consumption by 30 percent.
The summit concluded with a fireside chat between Lyndon Rive, CEO of Solar City, and Nancy Pfund of DBL Investors. This was particularly interesting and timely for Fremont given the recent announcement that Solar City has leased a facility in Fremont to house its Silevo R&D operations. Rive explained that its acquisition of Fremont-based Silevo offered one of the only domestic opportunities to invest in second-generation panel technology, which will dramatically reduce cost of the entire balance of system.