While the move might seem obvious, the trend is in contrast to high-profile companies from yesteryear like Solyndra, which built expensive custom machines to produce their solar panels and had to raise and spend hundreds of millions of dollars on manufacturing. The added expense and complexity of developing new machines and new products just added to Solyndra’s struggles and contributed to its bankruptcy.

The CEO of Alphabet Energy, Matthew Scullin, told me at the Summit this week that his goal from day one was to require all of Alphabet’s products to be made on existing toolsets. Alphabet Energy develops thermoelectric materials and devices, which convert heat into electricity, and the technology can be built on standard chip industry machines. “A startup needs to focus on developing one product in order to be successful, and developing a tool is like developing a second product in parallel. The risk is high,” said Scullin.

Scullin also pointed out that by using traditional semiconductor tools Alphabet can more easily find skilled operators and can also outsource manufacturing to chip foundries, if they choose to do so. For custom machines, “the lack of existing know-how, secondhand equipment, service people, and competition means the cost of doing business is high, adding to risk.”

Battery startup Seeo is using standard machines used to make traditional lithium ion batteries to make its batteries, including its secret sauce: its unique electrolyte. The company employs basic mixers, coaters, and assembly and testing machines at its pilot line factory in Hayward, Calif. and is also using battery cell, module and pack materials that are commonly used to make lithium ion batteries. Later this year the Seeo team hopes to build a larger fab with the same equipment somewhere in the U.S.

Startup Imprint Energy, which is making a zinc battery, uses off-the-shelf  printing equipment from prototyping to scaled production, says Imprint Energy CEO Devin MacKenzie. They haven’t done any customization of the equipment and MacKenzie tells me they do not anticipate requiring any large scale special equipment or significant modifications of commercially-available systems.

Many of the companies in its sustainability portfolio are embracing the practice of using standard plug and play manufacturing machines, Khosla Ventures’s partner Andrew Chung said at the Summit this week. Seeo has raised funds from Khosla Ventures.

Not all energy innovations, by their nature, can use existing machines. Tesla has invested significantly in its factory in Fremont, Calif. that is now churning out the Model S and using programmed robots to assemble the cars in an entirely new way. But Tesla has also long been smart about taking advantage of the cost savings and innovation of the traditional battery sector, as it uses basic Panasonic laptop batteries linked together to power its Model S.

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That’s the whole idea of the ARPA-E program — the small grants are given to high-risk early-stage projects that have the potential to make a big impact, but are likely too early for private investors to support. At the end of the day that means that most of the projects won’t succeed, or as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in a speech on the final morning: probability says most of these projects will flop. But in a year when other forms of government funding, and venture capital funding are drying, up ARPA-E is still giving big energy ideas a glimmer of hope.

As Bill Gates once said: we need crazy energy entrepreneurs. And they were there in full force at the ARPA-E Summit. Here are 5 projects I checked out this week:

1). A breakthrough ultracapacitor: Tesla CEO Elon Musk once said he thought ultracapacitors would one day supercede batteries in electric cars. Ultracapacitors store energy in an electric field, rather than in a chemical reaction, and can survive hundreds of thousands more charge and discharge cycles than a battery can, and can also deliver high bursts of power. ARPA-E grant winner FastCAP makes an ultracapacitor that uses carbon nanotubes to increase the surface area of the electrode — the more surface area of the electrode the more energy can be stored. FastCAP says its ultracapacitor has 5 to 10 times higher energy density than commercial ultracapacitors.

During the ARPA-E Summit showcase FastCAP Director of Operations Jamie Beard told me that an early application that its ultracapacitors are being used for is oil, gas and geothermal drilling. Because the ultracapacitors can be used at very high temperatures they can be used down in deep wells where the temperatures are high and the power needs are high, too. Drill operators don’t want to use standard batteries for this because batteries can catch on fire and explode under high temperatures. Beard says that FastCAP’s ultracapacitors can operate safely between -40 degrees C to 150 degrees C.

FastCAP is backed by the Chesonis Family Foundation, the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, and angel investors. The company has 30 or so people, a 18,000 foot factory in Boston, and a 40-foot-long custom-built pilot line for making its ultracaps.

2). A natural gas tank that works like an intestine: Saul Griffith’s Otherlab is working on a natural gas tank for vehicles that uses small tubes that can conform to the shape of the vehicle. Mimicking how an intestine has boosted capacity in the body, the tubes of the natural gas tank could have maximum storage capacity. Otherlab’s Tucker Gilman pitched the intestinal natural gas tank to investors on the opening night of the Summit. ARPA-E gave the project a $250,000 grant.

3). The waste annihilating molten salt nuclear reactor: This nuclear project isn’t backed by ARPA-E, but Transatomic Power co-founder and CEO Russ Wilcox pitched the technology to investors at the beginning of the summit. Transatomic is designing a new type of nuclear reactor that can run off of nuclear waste and also produce significantly less waste than the traditional lightwater nuclear reactor. Wilcox is the former CEO and co-founder of display-maker E Ink.

Two other Transatomic co-founders are Leslie Dewan and Mark Massie (shown in the video) who are both PhD students at MIT’s nuclear engineering department. Transatomic also counts advisors Todd Allen, Director for the Advanced Test Reactor National Scientific User Facility at Idaho National Laboratory, Michael Corradini, president of the American Nuclear society, and Regis Matzie, who was the former CTO for Westinghouse. Kleiner Perkins’ David Wells gave the company the feedback that while the company and executives are impressive, the project is “out of the range of the VC funding model.”

4). Tweaking E.Coli to solve our problems: Founded in 2007 by synthetic biologist Yasuo Yoshikuni, Bio Architecture Lab uses synthetic biology and enzyme design to convert seaweed into biochemicals and biofuels. It’s tweaked E.coli to be able to turn kelp into fuel. The company received an ARPA-E grant in 2010 to work on a project with DuPont to turn seaweed into isobutanol. DuPont is actively looking to partner with startups in various areas — check out my interview with DuPont’s CEO Ellen Kullman.

Ginko Bioworks is another startup that is focused on using synthetic biology to tweak E.coli — it’s developed a strain of E.coli that can directly use carbon dioxide to produce biofuels. Ginko Bioworks researcher Jason Kelly told me during the Summit that the company doesn’t plan on doing any production of the actual fuel and compared the startup to “biological software developers.”

5). Magnetic algae – say what?: There’s a type of bacteria in the soil that have cells filled with magnetic crystals, and this enables the bacteria to move along magnetic fields. Yeah, that’s pretty weird on its own. But researchers at Los Alamos National Labs are genetically engineering a gene in these bacteria and placing it in algae, creating magnetic algae which can be manipulated using magnets. The technology could theoretically be used in algae biofuel production and fuel use.

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The video shows Fluidic’s batteries installed under what looks like a radio or cell phone tower, and Friesen said that the company’s batteries are already being tested in the field in developing markets where the grid is unreliable as a replacement for diesel generators or lead acid batteries. Friesen said that using the “tens of millions of cell hours in the field,” the company plans to target the grid market in the U.S.

FLUIDIC: Metal Air Recharged from DOE ARPA-E on Vimeo.

A battery is usually made up of an anode on one side and a cathode on the other, with an electrolyte in between. Fluidic’s battery uses zinc as the metal for the anode, air as the cathode, which is drawn in from the environment, and a liquid electrolyte. Air batteries have long been attractive to researchers because oxygen is abundant, free, and doesn’t require a heavy casing to keep it inside a battery cell.

Reporter Tyler Hamilton wrote some details about Fluidic’s technology in an article back in 2009. Hamilton wrote that one of the key innovations is that Fluidic’s battery uses an ionic liquid (liquid salt) for its electrolyte, instead of an aqueous solution that is made up of water. Water-based electrolytes can evaporate and tend to decompose when the voltage gets too high in metal air batteries.

Fluidic’s other innovation, reported Hamilton, is a metal electrode architecture that uses different sized pores to combat a problem with batteries where sharp needles called dendrites are formed. These needles occur because the metal isn’t plating across the battery uniformly and can ruin the battery.

The combo of these innovations are supposed to deliver a metal air battery that can be recharged, has high energy density (amount of energy that can be stored), and is inexpensive. If the battery was used in an electric car, it could have 400 to 500 mile range for the price of a lead acid battery. The ARPA-E site says the battery is shooting for 5,000 charge and discharge cycles. Friesen says in the video that the battery is the first proven, high-cycle rechargeable metal air battery out there.

Fluidic has a $5.13 million grant from the Department of Energy, and a $3 million grant from ARPA-E. A couple weeks ago Fluidic closed on a round of $13.8 million, in 2011 raised $33.4 million and in 2009 raised $1 million. This article in Phoenix Business Journal says inverter manufacturer Satcon and Chevron Energy Solutions are investors.

At one point in 2011 former First Solar President Bruce Sohn had joined Fluidic as CEO, but he only stayed on for about 8 months. Former WalMart CEO Lee Scott was sitting on the company board as of last year, and raved about Fluidic at the ARPA-E Summit in 2012.

Other companies developing metal air batteries include IBM, working with Japanese chemical companies Asahi Kasei and Central Glass, Eos Energy Storage, and PolyPlus. Metal air batteries have been under development for decades, and some think the technology is overhyped.

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Don’t miss this! It’s one of the only live, free online events for the show. ARPA-E is a program created by the Department of Energy to give small grants to early-stage, high-risk energy technologies that can be game-changers. Here’s to moonshots! They need some powerful stories. Watch to find out why. (If we’re running a few minutes late, be patient, we’ll start soon).

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The two events seem about as different as when the Consumer Electronics Show used to coincide with Adultcon in Vegas. But the clean energy and energy efficiency industries could use some of the cheerleader’s glitter and cheer spirit right about now.

Following the close of a year which saw the politicization of clean energy technologies, the struggles of dozens of solar manufacturers and electric car companies, and a “cleantech cliff” that saw investments in cleantech startups drop by a third, the 2013 ARPA-E Summit will likely be a pretty sober affair.

As MIT Tech Review wrote recently, government energy R&D spending in 2013 is facing a fiscal cliff, and venture capitalists won’t likely flock back to pumping money into energy companies this year. Both of which mean funding for entrepreneurs, innovators and researchers that have bright ideas for things like next-generation batteries, low cost biofuels, or futuristic solar materials will be difficult to get this year. Or at least it’ll be a lot harder to find money for these technologies than it was a few years ago.

The silver lining of money being tight is that only the most promising technologies will get funding, and there will be less “dumb money,” so to speak. As a seatmate of mine on the flight over this morning put it: the state of clean financing is awful but it inevitably had to correct itself at some point.

Altaeros Energies High Altitude Wind Turbine shown off at ARPA-E 2012

But in the face of these more difficult times, another way to look at the ARPA-E program — which gives small grants to early stage projects and was modeled on the Defense Department’s DARPA program — is perhaps it could be the energy industry’s bit of glitter and cheer. It’s one of the few funding programs from the Department of Energy that has bipartisan support, will likely be able to maintain its current annual budget and is widely celebrated by entrepreneurs, politicians and academics alike.

The ARPA-E Summit itself draws some of the bigger names in technology and politics as speakers — this year New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. In previous years Bill Clinton, Bill Gates and Arnold Schwarzenegger have given rousing speeches.

ARPA-E 2013 will be one of the last places that we’ll be able to hear from soon-to-be-leaving DOE Secretary Steven Chu. Chu has been one of the biggest influences on the U.S. Department of Energy over the last several decades.

I’m personally looking forward to moderating a discussion between IDEO’s David Blakely and Otherlab’s Saul Griffith about the importance of storytelling and narrative for early stage energy technologies (we’ll be live streaming it here for free on Monday at 4:30 PM EST). Particularly in difficult times, creating compelling narratives for next-gen clean energy technologies that could be decades from commercialization will be crucial.

As the energy geeks wake up on Monday morning ready to talk about kilowatts and sunshots with their peers, the cheerleaders will have mostly gone home. But perhaps, in a strange way, they don’t have so little in common after all.

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The announcement is interesting for at least two reasons. About a year ago Google announced that it would be shutting down its clean power research projects through Google.org, called RE<C. I didn’t think it was all that big of a deal at the time, given Google has invested close to a billion dollars into clean power projects, but the move was widely seen as Google cutting some philanthropic research that was outside of its basic territory.

But with Majumdar joining Google.org, clearly Google will be launching some new projects, or investing some new resources, into energy innovation and research. That’s exciting. Despite the fact that Google is not an energy company, it has been one of the bright spots in the private sector by funding new energy technologies through investment in startups, through brainstorming ways to buy clean power to run its data centers, and by being a test case for new energy technologies like Bloom Energy’s fuel cells.

Majumdar oversaw the DOE’s ARPA-E program, which puts small grants — from hundreds of thousands to several million dollars — into early stage, “moonshot” research that could deliver a breakthrough, but is too early for private investment. The ARPA-E program has been one of the most successful and least controversial projects under the DOE and has delivered dozens of projects that have found follow-on private financing.

It’s also worth noting that Majumdar will now be joining the private sector, so will be able to use Google’s balance sheet to fund energy innovation. ARPA-E’s budget ever year is in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Majumdar hails from Lawrence Berkeley National Labs and the University of California at Berkeley.

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Today Wessells is the CEO and co-founder of a half-year-old startup called Alveo Energy, which is looking to develop and commercialize a battery made out of water, Prussian blue dye — which is used to color things like blue jeans, crayons and paint — iron and copper. The battery is meant to be ultra low cost and long lasting, and if successful, could help deliver breakthrough energy storage technology for the power grid.

Start of the journey

For now, the company is just getting started. Wessells co-founder is Stanford Professor Robert Huggins, and the small team works out of office space in Palo Alto, Calif. They plan to round out the team to just four people over the next couple of months, and perhaps double that over the next three years. So, yeah, they plan to stay lean.

Alveo Energy is one of just a few early stage battery startups that’s emerged from the Valley in 2012. I came across the company last week because they managed to snag a $4 million grant from the Department of Energy’s high risk early stage program called ARPA-E. They won one of the largest grants out of the 66 projects that were funded.

Wessells, a first time CEO, called the grant “a validation of their technology,” and an incredibly important milestone for them. The company will probably bring on another investor to round out the seed round in the coming months, but the ARPA-E grant will make up most of the company’s planned seed round.

The funding environment on Sand Hill Road has been really challenged this year for cleantech companies, said Wessells. Investors that might have done a promising battery deal out of Stanford two years ago, today are being dissuaded by their limited partners to fund early stage cleantech firms. They see the risk as just too high.

And perhaps VCs are smart to be more risk averse this time around. Alveo Energy is still in the protoype and R&D phases. They’ve created version one of their prototype, and they published data on that technology about a month ago. Version two of the battery is what they’re working on now and hoping to scale up in size and performance. Currently generation two can provide battery power without degradation (batteries degrade over time) for between one and two calender years — the team hopes that the eventual commercialized battery will provide closer to five to ten years of battery life.

Power grid applications

Unlike some lithium ion batteries that are being used in the next-generation of electric cars, Alveo Energy’s batteries aren’t meant to provide intense bursts of power to move large objects. They have a lower voltage and deliver a smaller charge than typical lithium ion batteries — about one tenth the energy, one third the voltage, and one third the charge, said Wessells.

That’s because only one sixth of the ions in the Alveo batteries’ structure are electrochemically active. Alveo’s battery is made by taking Prussian blue dye and adding in some iron and copper to optimize a battery structure that can use a water-based electrolyte — the optimal structure just chemically works out that way.

Wessells says Huggins first raised the idea of using Prussian blue dye, which is electrochromic, back around the Christmas of 2009 — before that Wessells was working on trying to use lithium. The next two years were spent on devising the structure of Prussian blue dye, iron and copper. Alveo itself is a word that is related to the Latin for something like channels or honeycomb.

The structure also meant that Alveo’s batteries are relatively large and meant, mostly, to be stationary. They’ll be about three to four times bigger than a standard car battery, said Wessells, and will eventually be developed into a 1 kilowatt, 50 kilogram, prototype.

The potential low cost of such a battery is the real breakthrough for Alveo, and the reason why they’re willing to concede on voltage and charge. Wessells says that they’ll be able to make the battery for below $100 per kilowatt hour. Lead acid batteries, which are far cheaper than lithium ion batteries, are being made for around $150 to $200 per kilowatt hour. Lithium ion batteries are far, far more expensive.

Holy grail for clean power

Wessells says that such a low cost battery could be used for a variety of applications for the power grid, including providing storage for variable clean energy like solar and wind. Big battery farms could be built right onto solar and wind farms, to bank power during the night, and when the wind dies down.

A growing amount of companies, large and small, are working on this clean power problem, using both chemistry and software as a solution. One of the more well known startups is Ambri (formerly Liquid Metal Battery), which is also looking to use dirt cheap materials to make power grid batteries, and which is backed by Khosla Ventures and Bill Gates. Other startups like GELI, are looking to create a battery operating system that can better utilize batteries for the power grid.

Alveo Energy has a long road ahead of it. Even though it’s got an ambitious road map, don’t expect a commercialized version for at least three years from now, if not longer. And at that point Alveo also has a lot of options for how it can make its batteries at scale. It can raise money to just build out a factory, which is in the model of a company like A123 Systems — though, A123 Systems went bankrupt this year and is a cautionary tale. Alveo could also license, or straight out sell, its technology to one of the world’s massive battery makers. That would be a safer, less risky, way to go.

Eventually one of these startups or battery conglomerates — whether its backed by venture capitalists or not — will deliver a breakthrough in battery technology that cracks that fundamental problem with clean power. The future of making clean power low cost and mainstream, depends on it.

Image courtesy of Jurvetson, stevendamron, First Solar.

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The ARPA-E program is one of the DOE’s lauded programs, which has managed to gain bipartisan support and avoid controversy. In contrast, the DOE’s loan guarantee program and battery grant programs allocated large funds to single companies, and when a few of those companies went bankrupt, the DOE received significant criticism.

The ARPA-E program, on the other hand, only gives grants of small — hundreds of thousands to single digit millions — amounts and doesn’t expect to get a return back. It’s funding for basic scientific research. The program also backs so-called “moonshots,” which are innovations that could be transformational, but are at a very early stage — a very small amount of these technologies will probably ever be commercialized. The folks at ARPA-E now say they’ve backed 285 projects for a total of about $770 million in funding.

There were fewer startups in the mix than I’ve seen in recent years. It’s a lot harder to be an entrepreneur in this space these days. Some of the more interesting sounding projects in this crop include:

• Energy beets: Say wha? A company called Plant Sensory Systems, has received a $1.8 million grant to engineer a beet with enhanced energy density that can be turned into biofuels, and which can also be grown with less water and fertilizer.
• Waste natural gas to fuel: A company called Ceramatec was granted $1.7 million to build a reactor that can convert natural gas unearthed at remote oil field sites into fuel in one step. This natural gas is usually flared off and wasted.
• Smart window coatings: Lawrence Berkeley National Labs will use a $3 million grant to low cost coatings for windows that will control light and heat.
• Portable building mapping tech: LBNL received another grant, this one for $1.9 million, to make a device that senses and maps the internal and thermal characteristics for a building. Using this technology, you can see where heat loss is occurring. Sounds like Essess.
• Cool roofs: Stanford University is looking to develop a low cost coating for roofs, buildings and cars that reflects sunlight and enables passive cooling. ARPA-E gave Stanford $400,000 to build the tech.
• Smart grid security modelling: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign received a $1.5 million grant to create a modelling and analysis tools to make the smart grid more secure.
• Gas-based tech for high voltage power lines: The traditional way to control electricity over high voltage transmission lines is using silicon-based switches. GE’s Global Research division received a $4.1 million grant to work on a gas-based switch that can lower the cost of transmission lines, improve grid reliability, and help with clean power deployment.
• Super wires: A startup called Grid Logic is working on low cost and high temperature superconducting wires. ARPA-E gave the company a $3.8 million grant.
• Transmission line analytics: Pacific Northwest National Labs received a $1.6 million grant to develop analytics to find unused space on transmission lines and increase efficiency of the use of transmission lines by 30 percent.
• Big data grid collection: The University of California, Berkeley, along with the California Institute for Energy and Environment, have received $4 million to develop “micro” synchrophasors to collect real time grid data. Are these even smaller versions of the synchrophasors out there? Not sure, I’ll do some research on it.
• Water wing: Brown University will work on an “oscillating underwater wing” that can capture energy from flowing water in rivers and tides. They’ll control it with software. I feel like a lot of companies who make these design really nice ones, but the problem is in making sure it lasts years while being battered by water and the elements. Brown received $750,000 for this project.
• Fabric wind blades: GE has quite a few projects in here. Another one is a project to create wind blades made out of fabric stretched across a frame. GE says such blades could enable wind turbines to be “manufactured in sections and assembled on-site, enabling the construction of much larger wind turbines with higher efficiency and lower cost.”
• Energy from dust devils: Here’s a weird one (for @go2cleanbreak’s book). The Georgia Institute for Technology wants to use a $3.7 million grant to capture energy from wind vortices by harvesting a thin layer of hot air along the ground created by the sun. Like a manufactured, controlled dust devil. I don’t know what to say about that one.
• Mini mirror solar field: San Francisco’s own Otherlab is working on developing solar projects with small mirrors that will focus light onto towers. Usually these types of fields (like Ivanpah) use large mirrors.
• New Valley battery startup?: A startup called Alveo Energy won a $4 million grant for a battery for grid storage that will use Prussian Blue dye as the active material in the battery. They were founded in 2012, based in Palo Alto and their CEO is Colin Wessells, according to Google searches (they don’t have a website). If anyone knows more about this company, ping me.
• Magnetic energy storage: Here’s a new one. The Tai Yang Research Company wants to create a device that stores energy in superconducting cables, by increasing magnetic field strength of the cable.
• Solar fuel: The Georgia Institute of Technology received $3.6 million to build a solar reactor to produce solar fuel. Sounds like what Joule has been working on … by the way, whatever happened to them?
• Printed batteries: The Palo Alto Research Center got close to a million dollars to develop printing technology for lithium ion batteries

Image courtesy of Peyri, and rosmary.

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The Chicago-based company has engineered a high-performance “switched reluctance motor” and says it has solved the noise and vibration problem that has crippled efforts in the past to commercialize it, according to Heidi Lubin, CEO of HEVT. The motor presents an alternative to conventional induction and magnet motors, which require rare earth elements that can be hard to secure.

The term “rare earth” is something of a misnomer because of many rare earth elements are actually abundant in the Earth’s crust. Seventeen elements are classified as rare earths, the USGS says. But these materials are less likely to become concentrated deposits like other common metals and are generally difficult to mine at a commercial scale, so they have largely come from only a handful of sources.

China provides an abundant and cheap supply of these rare earth materials partly because its production is a by-product of iron mining. In fact, China is the world’s largest producer of rare earth elements, and its past effort to impose restrictions on exports stirred an outcry from countries such as the U.S. and Japan. China eased the export restriction this past summer, but that move didn’t damper concerns about the country’s tight grip on the materials, which also are used for making wind turbines, LED lighting and other green tech products.

The U.S. Department of Energy has funded projects to develop materials and components that won’t need rare earth elements. HEVT is part of a team, led by the University of Texas at Dallas, to design a switch reluctance motor with nearly  $3 million from the DOE’s ARPA-E program. Rare earth mining and processing also can be environmentally unfriendly.

HEVT was founded in 2005 within the Illinois Institute of Technology to target electric hybrids and plug-in electric cars and trucks. But that market is hard to crack. The pace of electric car adoption hasn’t taken off as quickly as some proponents would’ve liked to see, and some battery makers in particular have had trouble meeting their sales projections. So HEVT wants to tackle the more established electric bicycle market first.

“One of the reasons we like the electric bike market is because it’s a high-volume, high-churn market, so that we can reach scale quickly,” Lubin said.

Lubin says the startup has signed purchase orders and letters of intent from customers for up to 7,000 units of its electric motors, though she declined to disclose the customers’ names. HEVT, which will hire manufacturers to make its motors, is counting on these early customers to help it scale up production. Production will be critical for cutting costs and compete effectively with makers of magnet motors. Once the company hits the 10,000-unit goal, said Lubin, then it will be able to reduce its production costs significantly.

To crank up production, the company will need money. HEVT wants to raise a $5 million series A and hopes its newly minted title as the winner of the Cleantech Open will help its fundraising effort. The startup won $250,000 in the competition.

Switched reluctance motor is made up of a rotating disc inside a stationary disc. Each disc has poles that come in contact with each other in a way that allows the stationary disc, which is partly outfitted with copper wire to create a magnetic field, to move the rotating disc and create mechanical energy.

The motor promises a high torque and a wider range of speed over conventional motors. But it also has been bedeviled by problems with noise and vibration, which led to a jerky motion, in the past. HEVT has since modified the physical design of the motor and developed software to help fix the problem.

Aside from the electric bike market, HEVT also wants to see its motors in appliances and industrial equipment, from heating and cooling systems to pumps for oil and gas operations.

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Primus Power’s flow battery

The Department of Energy’s program that gives grants to early-stage energy projects — called ARPA-E — has allocated another $43 million for 19 battery projects, including grants for futuristic batteries made of new chemical mixes, using brand new architectures and utilizing nanotechnology. The ARPA-E program has been aggressively funding next-generation battery technologies over the years, and though these are small grants, the amount of innovation happening is substantial.

The funds go to projects that are very early stage, and are supposed to help bring disruptive R&D closer to commercialization. While Japanese and Korean conglomerates dominate the industry of producing small format lithium ion batteries for laptops and cell phones, these next-gen batteries are mostly targeted for electric cars and the power grid. Some of these projects also aren’t strictly traditional batteries, and a couple are flow batteries, which are large tanks of chemicals that flow into a containerized system and provide energy storage for the power grid (see Primus Power’s flow battery pictured).

Notable winners of the funds include big companies like Ford, GE, and Eaton, small startups like Khosla Ventures-backed Pellion, and projects out of the labs of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Battelle Memorial Institute, and Washington University in St. Louis.

Here’s some of the winners (for the full list of 19 go here):

• Ford: $3.13 million for a very precise battery testing device that can improve forecasting of battery-life.
• GE Global Research: $3.13 million for sensors thin-film sensors that can detect and monitor temperature and surface pressure for each cell within a battery pack.
• Eaton: $2.50 million for a system that optimizes the power and operation of hybrid electric vehicles.
• Pellion Technologies: $2.50 million for the startup’s long range battery for electric vehicles.
• Sila Nanotechnologies: $1.73 million for the startup’s lithium ion electric car battery that it says has double the capacity of current lithium ion batteries.
• Xilectric: $1.73 million to “reinvent Thomas Edison’s battery chemistries for today’s electric vehicles.”
• Energy Storage Systems: $1.73 million for a flow battery for the grid, with an electrolyte made of low cost iron, and using a next-gen cell design.
• Battelle Memorial Institute: $600K for a sensor to monitor the internal environment of a lithium-ion battery in real-time.

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