Finalist Team Descriptions

Please find a brief company summary below of the ten finalist teams.

Also attached below are a few of the team's final presentations, please click on The Competitors and scroll down to the bottom to open individual presentations

Blue Power Home Networks  (attached presentation below)
Blue Power Home Networks develops the products and services that encourage home energy conservation, effectively and efficiently reduce peak demand for power generation utilities, and minimize environmental impacts of electricity generation. Blue Power hardware continuously samples and aggregates appliance and total home energy consumption, and relays real-time itemized energy use to consumers through a web- based portal providing monitoring and control. Strategic partnerships with utilities will enable demand response programs, providing further economic and environmental incentives to both consumers and utilities.  The benefits of reduced demand through increased end-use efficiency positively affects consumers, utilities, and the environment.  

Ethanol Boosting Systems LLC  2nd place Professional (attached presentation below)
Ethanol Boosting Systems, LLC (EBS) provides game changing engine technology for fuel efficient cars and light duty trucks. It breaks the paradigm that high efficiency can only be obtained at high cost of by compromising performance. The EBS Approach uses a small amount of separately injected ethanol to enable replacement of present gasoline engines with much smaller, more efficient engines with the same or greater power. It enables an efficiency gain comparable to the diesel and the hybrid at less than one quarter of the incremental cost.  

FloDesign Wind Turbine Corporation  1st place Winners and 1st place People's Choice Award
Today’s wind turbines have nearly reached their maximum possible efficiency and are limited to sites with a narrow profile of wind patterns.  The patented FloDesign FD700 shrouded turbine will outperform existing turbines by a factor of three or more in a much wider range of wind resources. Our teams’ experience applying “mixer-ejector” technology to such projects as the Stealth bomber, Gulfstream II and Comanche helicopter enables migration of mature aerospace methods to wind turbine applications. FloDesign will design, manufacture, and sell the FD700 to wind farm developers, industrial operators and utilities. With FloDesign, there is change in the wind.

Husk Power System  2nd Place Student and 2nd place People's Choice Award
Husk Power Systems (HPS) will provide power to millions of rural Indians in a financially sustainable, scalable, environmentally friendly, and profitable manner. HPS has created proprietary technology that cost-effectively converts rice husks into electricity. The organization produces, owns, and operates 35-100 kW “mini power-plants” that deliver electricity as a “pay-for-use” service to villages of the Indian “Rice Belt.” HPS has successfully implemented pilot projects in two villages (Tamkuha, Dhanaha) and is operationally profitable. HPS uses rice husks, waste product of the rice-milling process, to generate revenue in three ways: selling power to households and commercial enterprises within villages; refining the ash produced by its generation process into pozzolanic material for building materials; and by selling Certified Emission Reductions (CER).  

LiteTrough, LLC
LiteTrough is selling a low-cost, high efficiency solar concentrator in a $5B market for space and water heating in commercial and industrial settings. Recognized by NASA, the patented product performs significantly better than existing systems, and has been independently validated to achieve efficiencies of 65% in real-world installations over several years. The company is now fulfilling State government orders for beta installations, and has also received strong interest from commercial customers in the laundry and cleaning businesses. Management has considerable experience both as entrepreneurs and in the design of sophisticated mechanical systems; LiteTrough therefore believes it is well positioned for nationwide launch, and is seeking $2MM to support this growth.  

Pyrolitix Biofuels  3rd Place Student
Pyrolitix Biofuels will commercialize a novel technology that can convert cellulosic biomass, such as woodchips, grasses and agricultural waste, to aromatics that can be blended with or further converted to green gasoline. By adopting a thermo-chemical approach, as opposed to a biological approach, Pyrolitix Biofuels can keep its costs very low. Biofuel production does not require food-based crops such as corn and sugarcane. Unlike ethanol, green gasoline can be easily distributed through the U.S. pipeline infrastructure. The team consists of a renowned biofuels expert, a Ph.D. candidate and two M.B.A students from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. 

Sequesco 3rd Place Professional
Reliance on fossil fuels leads to a number of problems including rising greenhouse gas levels and rapidly increasing energy prices. Biofuels can address these problems, however current photosynthesis-based approaches require either expensive infrastructure or arable lands, which can lead to disruption of food markets and the environment. Sequesco is developing a technology that converts CO2 into biofuels without relying upon photosynthesis. Sequesco’s technology is a unique solution to the problems of both greenhouse gases and fossil fuels that can sever as a bridge between inorganic and biological renewable energy technologies.
  
Solaflect Energy 
Solaflect Energy has developed a breakthrough low-cost technology for the generation of concentrated solar thermal energy at commercial and utility scale. This technology, the “Suspension HeliostatTM”, is half the cost, half the weight, and constructs in half the time of its competitors. This disruptive, patent-protected technology so significantly reduces capital costs that today it can produce solar energy at prices competitive with fossil fuels. The company has an extraordinary and proven team, including successful serial entrepreneurs, as well as a fast growing pipeline of customers, partners, and prospects to begin the commercialization of its platform technology.  

SweetWater Ethanol (presentation attached below)
SweetWater Ethanol does not produce ethanol, but is a producer of a cellulosic liquid concentrate that lowers the cost, energy, and carbon footprint of producing ethanol. Our product is called CCF and is sold as a liquid feedstock to existing and new ethanol refineries, enabling processing at an advanced stage in the biorefinery and thereby eliminating many of the high energy consuming steps required when processing corn kernels into ethanol. Sweetwater’s patent-pending method and system lowers transportation costs 80% and reduces feedstock-processing energy 67% when compared to today’s’ primary corn-based dry mill production method. 

Windera Power Systems Inc. 3rd place People's Choice Award (presentation attached below)
Windera Power Systems, Inc. develops innovative and highly advanced direct-drive, variable speed generator technology for wind turbines and other clean energy generating applications. A patent-pending prototype generator has been designed, built, and tested. The Windera generator is a cost-effective and high-efficiency retro-fit solution to the aging wind turbine population in California in the 100 kW Class. Windera is presently seeking funding to go into full testing and production of its 100 kW generator and is in the beginning design stages of a megawatt Class generator. For more information about the Company, please visit www.WinderaPowerSystems.com.