2nd European American Solar Deployment Conference: PV Rollout
Feb. 9 & 10, 2012
Fraunhofer CSE and ISE are again supporting OTTI's European American Solar Deployment Conference, returning to Boston on February 9th and 10th. The technical conference is cochaired by Prof. Dr. Eicke Weber, Director of the Fraunhofer ISE, and Juris Kalejs, Chief Technology Officer of American Capital Energy, with US support coming from Fraunhofer CSE in Cambridge. This conference examines the technical, economic, and political hurdles to rapid and widespread PV deployment.
Learn more and register for the conference.
U-Launch Awardee Wins $150k SBIR Grant
Dynamo Micropower, a Cleantech Open New England winner and recipient of a U-Launch award, has won a $150,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, the Boston Business Journal reports. The company is developing a a gas-powered, 10-kilowatt generator for the home that aims to be one-fifth the weight of the typical 200-pound generator you’d get at Home Depot, for about the same price, according to company co-founder Jason Ethier.
Full story at Boston Business Journal.
New England Partnership Wins $1.25M i6 Grant
The Obama Administration today announced the six winners of the i6 Green Challenge, a national initiative leveraging resources of five federal agencies to advance clean technology commercialization. Among the winners was the iGreen New England Partnership, a consortium of leading New England cleantech organizations that includes Fraunhofer CSE and a network of partners including, but not limited to: The New England Clean Energy Foundation, the Connecticut Clean Energy Finance and Investment Authority, the Maine Technology Institute, the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, the New Hampshire Office of Energy and Planning, the Rhode Island Renewable Energy Fund, the Vermont Agency of Commerce and Community Development, and 40+ other supporters.
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U-Launch Makes Awards through Cleantech Open Northeast
U-Launch, a US Department of Energy-funded grant-based award program that provides funded services to promising clean energy start-ups, recently awarded funded services to seven regional companies as part of the Cleantech Open Northeast business competition. The grants will be used to assist these early-stage cleantech companies in validating, developing and deploying their innovative cleantech solutions.
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ISE, CSE Unveil PV Module Durability Testing Protocol
To further improve testing standards for PV modules, Fraunhofer ISE and Fraunhofer CSE have announced the launch of the PV Module Durability Initiative (PVDI). With the intention to provide additional information for investors, this initiative will offer a more robust testing protocol for a wide range of PV modules, exceeding the demands of IEC standard module certification. It is the first widely available program to generate extensive, quantitative reliability data for modules, relevant for their expected lifetime under different kinds of stress.
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U-Launch Awardee Closes $2.4M Investment
FirstFuel Software, the commercial building energy analytics company selected as a first-round U-Launch grant awardee in March 2011, today announced that it secured a $2.4 million initial round of financing led by Battery Ventures and Nth Power, with participation from individual investors. The company, formerly called iblogix, Inc., will use the financing to quickly scale and accelerate adoption of its Rapid Building Assessment (RBA) platform, which provides zero-touch analysis of the energy performance of commercial buildings.
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CSE Launches Building Partnership Program
Fraunhofer CSE actively seeks partners eager to showcase their deep energy retrofit and sustainable building technologies in Fraunhofer CSE’s flagship research and development facility. In exchange for company participation, CSE is committed to helping partners meet their research validation and development needs. Our objective is to research and analyze our partners' systems and components in a complete building system and use this data to highlight and market leading technologies in sustainable buildings in our living laboratory.
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"A Showcase For Building Green": Boston Globe Covers 5 Channel Center Project
May 16th's edition of the Boston Globe carries a feature article by Erin Ailworth discussing the Fraunhofer Center for Sustainable Energy Systems and its efforts to retrofit the 5 Channel Center property as a building efficiency showcase and living lab. This article comes in advance of the Building Technology Showcase project's official May 17th groundbreaking ceremony, headlined by Boston Mayor Tom Menino.
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CSE Unveils "Living Lab" in Innovation District
The Fraunhofer Center for Sustainable Energy Systems (CSE) today announced that it will develop a sustainable energy research and building innovation center at 5 Channel Center in Boston’s Innovation District. The 50,000-square-foot applied research facility and building technology showcase will serve as a unique factory of innovation in support of established and start-up companies that are developing and demonstrating the next generation of energy efficiency technologies. It will also house Fraunhofer’s technical R&D labs and the TechBridge start-up accelerator group to support clean energy businesses in the Innovation District.
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CSE Joins Fraunhofer Building Innovation Alliance
Fraunhofer CSE is the newest member of the Fraunhofer Building Innovation Alliance (BAU), an industry-focused network of Fraunhofer Institutes exploring research opportunities throughout the construction process chain. The 16 German members of the Alliance address a wide range of industry needs, including product development, construction planning, management and logistics, construction systems, and international projects. Fraunhofer CSE supplements these offerings with advanced capabilities in building envelopes, residential energy management technologies, technology assessment and energy consumption characterization.
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New CFV Solar Testing Laboratory Opens in Albuquerque
To speed entry for solar panel manufacturers into the North American and international markets, a new laboratory opened today in Albuquerque, New Mexico, that offers worldwide certification services from one location. The CFV laboratory offers complete certification and non-certification testing services for PV technologies not readily available at other test locations, including flat panel, thin film and concentrating PV (CPV) testing.
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