Department of Energy launches startup-friendly program
U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu announced a new national program intended to spur clean-energy innovation, in remarks at a forum at MIT on Tuesday.The Department of Energy program, dubbed “America’s Next Top Energy Innovator,” would drastically reduce the costs for startup energy companies of licensing any of the roughly 15,000 patents held by the federal government’s National Laboratories, where basic scientific research is done. “We’re challenging entrepreneurs to move technologies invented in our National Laboratories out of the lab and into the marketplace,” Chu said. Examples of those technologies, he noted, range from software that helps reduce energy use in buildings to ways of converting solar power into thermal energy on demand. The program allows startups to license up to three National Laboratories patents for just $1,000 each, between May 2 and Dec. 15. Normally those patents cost from $10,000 to $50,000 to obtain. The plan would also...