Image Credit: FLoW
First Look West (FLoW), a public-private consortium of universities, corporations, clean tech incubators, and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), has awarded $200,000 to three winning teams of a business plan competition for clean energy technologies. Teams of university students from Stanford, UC Los Angeles, the California Institute of Technology, and UC Berkeley participated in the National University Clean Energy Business Challenge, developed by the DOE to “accelerate clean tech innovation” as part of President Obama’s Startup America initiative. FLoW is the regional competition for students in Alaska, California, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, American Samoa, and Guam and final judging took place at CalTech on April 30 and May 1, 2012.
First place winners Stanford Nitrogen Group from Stanford University received $100,000 for their work developing a treatment process which removes nitrogen from wastewater. Coming in second and receiving $60,000, Greenbiotics is made up of students from UCLA and Caltech developing a robot to automatically clean solar panels. And receiving the third place award of $40,000, Xite Solar from UC Berkeley is working on technology enabling the production of solar cells from non-toxic materials. Winning teams were automatically accepted into the Green Technology Entrepreneurship Academy at UC Davis where they will have access to insight from venture capitalists, faculty members, and industry pros.
The National University Clean Energy Business Challenge is a $2 million, six-region, three-year program designed by the DOE to encourage the development of clean energy-related startups and technologies. Winning teams from all six regions will participate in a final competition in June 2012 at the headquarters of the Department of Energy in Washington, D.C.
[via SoCalTech]