If you're an investor, entrepreneur or any business looking for innovative energy-efficiency and renewable energy technologies, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is now hosting a Technology Commercialization Portal that houses more than 200 marketing summaries for new technologies available for licensing.
The online resource tool identifies opportunities to invest in work being conducted by DOE laboratories and participating research institutions. The DOE goal is to accelerate the process of moving discoveries from the laboratory to the private sector.
Technologies featured on the Portal come from DOE Labs and participating research institutions, and are organized into 14 technology categories. Categories are:
--Advanced Materials
--Biomass and Biofuels
--Building Energy Efficiency
--Electricity Transmission and Distribution
--Energy Analysis Models, Tools and Software
--Energy Storage
--Geothermal
--Hydrogen and Fuel Cell
--Hydropower, Wave and Tidal
--Industrial Technologies
--Solar Photovoltaic
--Solar Thermal
--Vehicles and Fuels
--Wind Energy
The site also features a streamlined search for specific technologies, and allows the user to browse by subject area and sign up for e-mail updates.
These summaries explain technologies from a market opportunities perspective. They offer a description of a technology, highlight the potential benefits, applications, advantages, and stage of development, and can connect investors and organizations to the proper licensing contact.
As an example, scientists at NREL have designed a new solar process, called Black Silicon Etching, which has a confirmed conversion efficiency of 16.8 percent in a cell without conventional anti-reflection coatings. NREL says this surpasses the previous black silicon record by 2.9 percent. In addition, this new technology could lower the levelized cost of energy (LCOE), or the lifetime cost per unit of energy, by 2.5 percent.
DOE says the Technology Commercialization Portal, supported by the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), is one of the most effective ways for investors and companies to use the resources of the DOE Labs.
EERE's Commercialization Team focuses connecting research and development activities with the venture capital funding and marketing necessary to move technologies to the marketplace. The team's goal is to increase the rate and scale of energy efficiency and renewable energy technology market penetration.
