Vice President visits NREL, unveils clean energy winner

America’s Next Top Energy Innovator crowned at NRELAs the U.S. struggles to free itself from fossil fuels and to recover from the economic crisis, the government has played a vital role in advancing clean energy and the jobs it creates. Today Vice President Joe Biden visited the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), where he announced that a Boulder, Colo.-based e-Chromic LLC, a startup, was the first company to win the agreement under the DOE’s America’s Next Top Energy Innovator challenge.

The challenge is the latest in a series of efforts the DOE and President Barack Obama’s administration has created to spur on new technologies to speed-up the adoption of clean energy. Under this program, patents won by national labs like NREL are being offered for $1,000 each to companies that will take the technology and commercialize it.

This initiative, the innovator challenge, was designed to speed up the development of new technologies in a bid to create new companies and jobs. It started offering the heavily discounted patents to entrepreneurs on May 2. The patents usually went for much higher prices—between $10,000 and $50,000.

In this case, e-Chromic will use electrochromic technology developed at NREL to create a new thin-film window material that reflects sunlight on demand. The window will be more energy efficient and help to reduce owners’ cooling costs, according to a White House press release. In addition, e-Chromic will be eligible to participate in other DOE incentive programs.

During Biden’s speech he named other companies, among them was Colorado’s Abound Solar, that have benefitted from governmental support that has helped bring new technologies out of the lab and into the marketplace. Abound worked with and still works with NREL, according to Abound Senior Vice President of Operations Bob Grier.

“For the right opportunities, it’s great to have the support of the government,” Grier said. “We were part of the Solar Incubator program a couple years back. That helped us move forward at a more rapid rate.”

The company also received a loan guarantee that helped Abound attract other financing to support the company’s production ramp-up.

“It allowed us to expand more rapidly than just having to deal with private equity funding,” Grier said.