Dive Brief:
- CBRE and Schneider Electric are among 10 organizations chosen for the first cohort of a program to develop and commercialize scalable decarbonization technologies.
- The Scalable Tech Track program seeks to address demand-side market barriers to clean technologies and increase their adoption, according to a news release Tuesday. It’s part of the Wells Fargo Innovation Incubator, offered with Overlay Build and co-administered by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
- By providing evidence-based support for such technologies, “NREL helps building operators overcome barriers such as performance uncertainty and integration challenges, offering a proven blueprint for broader industry adoption,” said Sarah Derdowski, Innovation Incubator manager at NREL.
Dive Insight:
The Scalable Tech Track program aims to support corporate and public-sector efforts to meet sustainability goals by providing guidance on practical implementation of and access to validated technologies.
Despite mounting pressures to decarbonize, many organizations aren’t adopting clean technologies fast enough, Derdowski said.
Andrew Scherbauer, vice president of operations, digital building systems & service at Schneider Electric, explained that “the overarching challenge building operators face in clean technology adoption is pushing past the status quo and becoming educated on the resources available to them to effectively decarbonize their building stock.” Building owners typically see the initial investment costs of clean energy technologies and potentially delay their installment to avoid overhead costs, Scherbauer said.
The Scalable Tech Track program will help participants identify pain points, create clearer implementation pathways, collaborate with peers and receive third-party validation from NREL while prioritizing equity and environmental justice, Innovation Incubator program officials said.
“Through pilot projects with NREL and their own real-world implementations, participants will provide valuable proof of concept, facilitating the scaling of clean technologies and setting a benchmark for widespread adoption of sustainable building practices,” Derdowski said. NREL will lean on its channel partner network to “refer in additional technologies, pulling from more than 60 incubators and accelerators representing 6,000 startups across North America,” Derdowski added.
With the Scalable Tech Track program, Schneider Electric will “take a direct part in NREL’s advancement of education surrounding sustainable energy materials,” such as how to optimize integrated energy pathways and energy storage, Scherbauer said.
CBRE’s participation is focused on technologies that simplify complexity, boost energy efficiency and expedite the decarbonization of real estate portfolios at scale, according to the press release.
In addition to Schneider Electric and CBRE, the first cohort consists of Avangrid, Southern Co., the University of Colorado-Boulder, Intermountain Health, Prime Data Centers, Digital Realty, Galvanize Climate Solutions and Coconino County, Arizona.
The program will provide workshops between now and December to help participants develop a strategy for implementing innovative technologies. The participants will then compete for up to $250,000 for conducting pilot projects with Innovation Incubator startups or other partners.
The incubator program is accepting applications from cleantech startups poised for large-scale pilots with at least a year of post-revenue traction, per the release. Details of the pilot projects and the startups that will be matched with each organization will be announced in January.
Correction: A previous version of this story had an incorrect date for when the press release was issued. It came out Tuesday, Aug. 20.
