GE Ecomagination Challenge Winners - Diverse Mix of Smart Grid Innovation

November 19, 2010

This week, General Electric announced the winners of the first round of their Ecomagination Challenge. They announced this initiative back in July, with the intent to drive smart grid innovation via a $200 million pool of seed capital. Most of this money comes from GE, but is topped up with funds from tech VCs like Kleiner Perkins and Rockport Capital.

For this first round of funding, three basic categories were announced, with the bulk going to the top 12 companies selected by a panel of judges. A total of $55 million is being distributed across all the winners, and while it was not announced how much each of the top 12 are getting, it’s reasonable to assume they’ll share in this pot equally.

Aside from these 12 Ecomagination Challenge winners, there were two other categories getting much more modest disbursements. First is the Innovation Challenge Award, with 5 early stage companies each getting $100,000 to help further their development work. Second is an honorable mention award for companies doing notable eco-friendly work in emerging markets. There were also 5 companies in this group, with each receiving $10,000.

Whereas all these awards were driven by judges and those holding the purse strings, it’s worth noting that the challenge also has a popular vote category, with the winner getting $50,000. The winner here was a company called Solar Roadways, who have an interesting idea: embedding solar panels in roads. Am not quite sure how that works during rush hour, but entries like this help the Ecomagination Challenge live up to its name.

Coming back to the bigger winners, the top 12 companies were ClimateWell, Soladigm, SecureRF, O Power, Consert, FMC-Tech, SustainX, Fu Foundation, Scientific Conservation, SynapSense, JouleX and Sentient Energy. You can read more about them in the press release, but I’d like to make some general comments here. First, these companies come from all over the country, as well as two from Europe – Sweden and Ireland. With green energy being a new market, it’s important to note that innovation has not yet clustered into a small number of centers. Good ideas come from all over, which is the best way to ensure diversity and a rich ecosystem for innovation.

Second, the winners represent a mix of relatively established companies and barely-known startups. The key thing here is that this challenge isn’t just for startups or good ideas. Smart grid is for the most part a highly capital-intensive market, and even revenue-producing companies can use GE’s money. Third is the diversity of applications being addressed by these companies. Some focus on renewable energy – ClimateWell and Soladigm, others on energy management – such as O Power or Scientific Conservation, and others on IT management – JouleX and SynapSense. Other winning smart grid applications include security, power line monitoring and energy storage.

Complementing this diversity are the 5 winners of the Innovation Challenge: ElectricRoute and IceCode (both from New Hampshire), GridON and WinFlex (both from Israel), and Texas-based Capstone (News - Alert) Metering. Again, it’s nice to see the geographic mix both within the U.S. and abroad. All are very different, further illustrating the breadth of opportunity for innovation in smart grid. I particularly like WinFlex, who have developed inflatable wind turbine rotors made from composite fabric. This addresses a number of barriers to growth, such as lower cost, lighter weight for shipping, speed of installation, and ease of replacement. Some smart grid challenges are technology-based, but many are more basic issues around product design and functionality.

These results represent the first round of winners, and I’m sure the next batch will be just as interesting. GE received 3,600 online submissions, so there is no shortage of inspiration out there. It remains to be seen just how much of this inspiration is true innovation, but hats off to GE for driving this initiative. On a self-serving level, sure, this becomes a farm system for GE, but this is no different from how deep-pocketed companies drive innovation in other industries. More importantly, private sector initiatives like this keep the momentum going that Obama’s stimulus funding started, and success generally begets more success regardless of who’s behind it.

I can’t help but mention that if your company is looking to benefit from this kind of innovation, you should make plans now to join us at the next Smart Grid Summit in Miami. Building on the success of our Los Angeles summit, we will continue to feature a mix of blue chip players like GE, Siemens, IBM (News - Alert), Cisco, etc., along with emerging companies who are helping define smart grid for all of us. Our program has now been launched, and as our speaking roster fills out, we’ll be highlighting some of these companies in upcoming articles and interviews here.

Jon Arnold is co-founder of Intelligent Communications Partners (ICP), a strategic advisory consultancy focused on the emerging Smart Grid opportunity. To read more of his Smart Grid articles, please visit his columnist page.

By Jon Arnold (ICP)

Founder, Intelligent Communications Partners

Edited by Erin Monda