Energy competitions spur student creativity

Universities and businesses are teaming up around the United States to promote clean-energy ventures that get students out of the laboratory and into the business world, marketing much-needed solutions to the nation's energy woes.

As concerns about dependence on foreign oil, climate change and fuel supplies rise, so have programs to help businesses and researchers develop new technologies to address these problems. Now stakeholders are eyeing a new segment of the population -- students -- as a potential powerhouse in moving these efforts forward.

"Most fundamental research (on green energy) is being done at universities as corporate America has moved into much more focused … applied research," said Paul Kirsch, program manager for entrepreneurial studies at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. "As such, many green ideas will be explored initially in motivated labs by talented faculty and students."

However, some of these ideas never go beyond the lab because students graduate and move on to other things. Some companies and universities want to change that, including DTE Energy, a diversified energy company. DTE partnered with the University of Michigan and other corporate sponsors to create the Clean Energy Prize, a competition for renewable-energy business ideas formulated by students at universities and colleges in the state. The top team wins $65,000 to start their business, the runner-up gets $21,000, and the third- and fourth-place teams receive $3,400 each.

"This is a low-cost way to have a lot of students and faculty start thinking about the sort of problems we as an industry are wrestling with," said Knut Simonsen, senior vice president of DTE Energy Resources. "Many energy companies spend millions of dollars each year; $100,000 in prize money is a small investment that will go a long way toward creating solutions to the very difficult problems we face."

Perhaps the most important function of clean-energy competitions is that they help recruit students to work in the energy field.

"There are lots of aspiring students out there who have other options, like going to Wall Street," said Geoff Horst, a doctoral student at Michigan State University and a member of the team that recently won the 2009 Clean Energy Prize. "If you can lure them away with a little bit of money, you can get some of those smart MBA-types to work with science folks like me."

That's exactly what the strategy is at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where a specific class, called Energy Ventures, matches students up in teams of five, containing two business students, two engineering or science students and one student with a focus on public policy.

"Energy entrepreneurship is different. You can't treat it the same as other types of entrepreneurship," said William Aulet, senior lecturer at MIT, which sponsors an annual $100K Entrepreneurship Competition that includes a clean-energy award.

It's much more difficult to create an energy business than most other start-ups, Aulet said, because the energy entrepreneur has to be able to use and develop complex, scientific technologies, understand the business world and be able to market a product and have a background in policymaking because energy is such a politically charged issue.

"You need to teach energy differently," Aulet told United Press International.

Fueled by the monetary incentives these competitions offer, students have come up with some promising ideas. For example, Algal Scientific, the grand-prize winner of DTE's Clean Energy Prize, plans to sell a system that simultaneously treats wastewater and creates a feedstock for green fuels.

If left untreated, the nutrients in wastewater breed large algae blooms, which make it impossible for anything else to grow, creating large dead zones like the one in the Gulf of Mexico.

"Instead of letting the algae grow out in the lakes and oceans where people don't want it, we're doing it in a controlled way in facilities and then removing it," said Jeff LeBrun, team member and current MBA student at the University of Michigan.

That removes all the nutrients, making the water clean and safe to release, and the leftover algae is a valuable commodity as well.

"We're designing the algal biomass to optimize it for production of biofuels, like ethanol," said Robert Levine, a doctoral student in the University of Michigan's chemical engineering department. "Other algae-fuel companies are just focusing on energy production, whereas we're looking at treating wastewater and producing energy."

Water and energy usage are closely linked: The country currently uses 4 percent of its electricity to treat wastewater, for example, according to the Electric Power Research Institute. Businesses like Algal Scientific offer a much-needed solution to the two issues.

Other competitions have yielded a variety of creative technologies and businesses, including EarthGuard, a team that invented an environmentally-friendly plastic, and GreenFlight, which created a technology to produce jet fuel from crops. These technologies both won prize money in previous years from the Cleantech Venture Challenge, a competition sponsored by the University of Colorado at Boulder, the city of Denver and CORE Colorado, an association that promotes sustainable business practices.

Some companies sponsoring these competitions hope the winners will not only provide future energy solutions but will help jump-start their local economies while they're at it.

"We hope that these businesses will establish operations in Michigan," said John Austerberry, DTE Energy spokesman. "That will provide jobs and economic stimulus for the state."

For more information about the first-place winner of the Clean Energy Prize, visit algalscientific.com.

For information on the energy competitions, visit:

dteenergy.com/businesses/cleanEnergyPrize.html

mit100k.org

leeds.colorado.edu/Centers_of_Excellence/index.aspx?id=548

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(rwestenskow@upi.com)