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The University of Washington has opened a new facility aimed at accelerating the clean-energy innovation – exactly the sort of thing Gov. Jay Inslee loves and President Trump isn’t wild about.
Located in a former sheet metal fabrication facility behind University Village, the 15,000-square-foot Washington Clean Energy Testbeds will be operated by the Clean Energy Institute (CEI) to connect researchers and clean-tech businesses with state-of-the-art technologies.
With all that computing and processing power under one roof, scientists can share expensive tools and develop their groundbreaking work. Scientists at the testbed are working on developing cheap, thin solar cells and electronic devices, building new, high-performance battery systems and testing energy management software for clean-energy grids.
Each of these tools represents big possibilities for the clean-energy field but can be viewed as financially risky.
“The process of taking a clean-energy research discovery and making a prototype, then rigorously testing and refining it for market readiness, requires equipment and expertise that is expensive to acquire and rarely available when and where you need it,” CEI Director Daniel Schwartz said.
“As a result, too many startups have great ideas, but fail before fully demonstrating their technology. Amazingly, lack of easy access to facilities and expertise is often a barrier for big companies, too.”
With tools like high-precision screen printing or materials analysis already available at CEI, scientists can work better and faster, say supporters.
“If each of these (tools) were separated by a half-hour, hour, or hours of plane ride, that’s a big barrier that really slows down the feedback loop of progress,” said Devin MacKenzie, technical director of the testbeds.
It’s an $8,750,000 investment in research, and clean energy in particular, that some worry will be scarce in the coming years. Though Trump has been contradictory about his plan for clean energy to date, he has promised to roll back programs like the Climate Action Plan that President Obama enacted while in office.
A project like the CEI testbeds, which received about $8 million from the state Legislature (with the final $750,000 coming from the Washington Research Foundation), is exactly the sort of advancement that could be in danger if there’s a loss of federal funding for clean energy technology. But Inslee said he’s not going to let it get in the way of the state’s commitment to and reputation as one of the most innovative states in the clean-energy industry.
“We know one thing, it’s certainly not going to slow us down,” Inslee said Thursday. “We have such a head of steam in clean energy research in this state; our clean energy fund, as you saw today, has created these technologies not just in the laboratory bench, but actually developing manufacturing systems.
“There are some things that we hope can continue to move forward with federal investment; we certainly hope the president doesn’t retard or reduce that because this is a job creator. In the United States one of the most rapidly growing segments of job creation in the whole country is in renewable energy and clean technology.”
Those creations could go directly back to businesses, said McKenzie. While they’re naturally concerned about funding for research and Department of Energy grants, they foresee a future in which industrial partners renting equipment help shoulder the cost. Whether it’s printing with nanosize precision or a lightweight, film-like solar panel, proponents think revenue-generating models like that can be a win-win for a facility like WCET.
“We welcome everybody, but the people who benefit from this the most are startup companies and small businesses,” MacKenzie said.
“They’re the ones who are capital-constrained; they’re not going to have the resources to buy this equipment at all. Bigger companies might have some of it, but for small companies this is really going to be such an incubator. This will be their home base to get started — hopefully grow into companies and create clean-energy jobs in the region.”
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