GE’s ecomagination Challenge is now complete, with 4,000 ideas submitted, 80,000 comments, and thousands of votes for favorite ideas. Themes from this ideas challenge include water scarcity, solar energy, biofuels, green technology, electric cars, energy conservation, and updating the electric grid. The success of this challenge likely rode on the promise of a $200 million venture capital commitment to take ideas into action, and now the first round of investments have been announced with $55 million going into 12 partnerships.
Among the winners are:
- Sentient Energy, which makes technology to optimize capacity and reliability in the smart grid
- O-Power, which provides an energy management system that integrates consumer demographics with energy consumption data and behavioral analytics to encourage households to make intelligent choices around power consumption in their homes
- Consert, which helps utilities and cities manage electricity loads efficiently
- FMC-Tech, which makes power line monitoring systems
- JouleX, which analyzes and automatically adjusts the energy usage of a network, such as a data center
- Scientific Conservation, which makes commercial buildings more energy-efficient by monitoring and adjusting core energy systems
- SecureRF Corporation, which makes security technologies for smart grid elements such as meters and sensors.
No surprisingly, the bulk of these investments as noted above deal with making networks smarter and more reliable. The bulk of these also focus on systems for monitoring, management, and analysis of network performance, and several have a geospatial component.
GE also announced a new University Challenge that will invest $10 million on academic programs that develop curricula, drive research and build smart energy solutions.
You can view the full list of investments, in this blog post from GE.
