Clean Energy Dollars Find Home in San Francisco Bay Area

When it comes to research, the universities of the San Francisco Bay Area are some of the finest institutions devoted to that task. Due to this incredible amount of advancement in a geographically small area, many businesses have developed in fields of scientific advancement, thus giving graduates a place to apply their skills. The U.S. Department of Energy recently approved a $151 million dollar stimulus package for transformational energy research projects, and the San Francisco Bay Area received a sizeable portion.

Companies and universities in the San Francisco Bay Area will receive 10% of the total stimulus amount, with Stanford University taking a third of that with 5 million. The funds will go to help the university conduct research in the field of building efficiency, using different methods to track how humans use electricity and how that amount can be lowered.

The rest of the stimulus money in the bay area goes to four other projects that deal with: energy storage, desalinization, wind power and carbon capture.

At the Argonne National Laboratory in Hayward, Envia systems is conducting researching on Lithium-ion batteries that can store up to 3x more energy than their current counterparts.

NanOasis Technologies Inc., in Richmond, California is focusing on developing new ways to reduce the cost of desalinization, which historically quite expensive. Using new green methods they hope to lower the costs, creating more water that can be used for human and crop use.

In San Rafael, PAX Streamline is working on a new kind of wind turbine technology. Using federal stimulus money, they are developing an improved airfoil that can maximize power despite weather conditions. This new airfoil will also cost a fraction of what one traditionally costs today.

Porifera Inc., working with UC Berkeley at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are working on ways to create cheaper carbon by using carbon nanotubes with polymer membranes. This would capture more carbon.

We can see that the stimulus money is trickling down to green startups and that green businesses are getting a chance to sprout.