Today is a beautiful and sunny day here in Southern California. Our shop is buzzing with activity and we have a lot to report. In fact, there is so much to report that we will be releasing a series of blog posts in the following days and weeks highlighting several exciting new ventures for Uprise Energy and our Portable Wind Turbine. But for now, here is a brief overview of what is upcoming.
Uprise plasma table at work making custom parts for our turbines.
CEC Grant
In April of 2021, we submitted a proposal for the “MORBUGs” (Mobile Renewable Back-Up Generators) grant through the California Energy Commission. The purpose of the grant is to find clean energy alternatives to diesel generators for emergency response, including “Public Safety Power Shutoffs” (PSPS). PSPS is a relatively new policy enacted by the CEC to prevent wildfires. Essentially, when there is a weather event that poses a fire risk, the Public Utilities (PG&E, SCE, SDG&E, etc.) will be proactively turning off the power grid in order to minimize fire risk. This creates an obvious need for backup power and therefore, the State is looking for innovative renewable energy solutions to handle the task. For anyone that has been following the Uprise journey, our selection should come as no surprise as this RFP was tailor-made for our technology. An exciting element to this contract is that we will be developing our solar hybrid feature that will increase power generation on our mobile platform and we will be demonstrating the Mobile Power Stations with a full 200kWh of LFP battery storage.
We are now under contract to build and demonstrate four of our Mobile Power Stations in a variety of locations throughout the State of California in a vetting process that will lead to mass adoption by the utility power companies that are legally mandated to be prepared for emergency events.
Amazon Web Services Clean Energy Accelerator 2.0
Uprise Energy was selected as one of 12 companies from a pool of nearly 500 applicants representing 56 different countries to participate in the Amazon Wed Services (AWS) Clean Energy Accelerator 2.0. The Accelerator consisted of weeks of intense online workshops culminating in a large-scale event in Lisbon, Portugal, in which Uprise Energy CEO Jonathan Knight flew out to present our product to the world leaders in Clean Energy. This was a very prestigious event and we are grateful we were able to participate.
Official announcement graphic provided by AWS
“The AWS Clean Energy Accelerator is designed as a five-week virtual accelerator program, which supports cleantech startups through expert-led workshops, mentorship, and network access, in addition to helping the startups advance digitally, co-innovate with energy companies, and facilitate potential pilots in various clean energy applications.”
Idaho National Laboratories
Our partnership with the US Department of Energy (DoE) and Idaho National Laboratories (INL) is ongoing. We have received military level feedback on our portable wind turbine that is at INL and are currently integrating their feedback and requirements into our Mobile Power Station. Now that the snow has melted in Idaho, our work is ramping back up with many more updates to come. For a bit of background on our relationship with INL we previously wrote the blog post INL Part 1. For a review of our wind turbine’s performance in Idaho, we documented that with the blog post INL Part 2.
Uprise MPS with a military tow vehicle at INL
D3T
The Defense and Disaster Deployable Turbine (D3T) project is a project run by the US Department of Energy. The purpose is to identify new technology in the distributed wind energy sector which can be utilized in national defense as well as for humanitarian needs. This is led by the major national laboratories in the United States: INL, Sandia, and NREL.
This past Friday, June 17th, NREL and Sandia Labs hosted a D3T workshop and Uprise was a featured presenter. It was exciting to see the level of interest in deployable wind power by the government and military, and really reaffirmed this out-of-the-box idea we had for a commercially sized deployable wind turbine.
We will be covering each of these topics in greater detail in upcoming blog posts. Thank you for following us and feel free to comment if you have any questions or just want to say hi.