When Greg Rieker started developing a new technology for continuous detection of methane leaks seven years ago, “there was no market opportunity for quantitative, continuous emissions monitoring in oil and gas. The world was just starting to realize that intermittent, large emissions drive a majority of total emissions from the oil and gas sector, and investors hadn’t yet placed heavy pressure on industry to clean up,” said Rieker, speaking at the closing session of the ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit on May 27.

Today, Rieker is co-founder and CTO of the company built on his initial research, LongPath Technologies, which is now ready to commercialize its methane monitoring system with the help of a $5 million SCALEUP grant from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E).

Short for Seeding Critical Advances for Leading Energy technologies with Untapped Potential, SCALEUP is aimed at spurring the development of domestic supply chains for cutting-edge clean energy technologies — a key element of President Biden’s climate agenda. Launched in 2020, the program has awarded more than $75 million to a first cohort of 10 startups, represented at the closing session by Rieker and three other CEOs who received SCALEUP grants.

Jigar Shah, director of the DOE’s Loan Programs Office, led a discussion that provided insight into the current energy innovation landscape and the role federal funding can play in helping companies take new technologies from the lab and pilot demonstrations to full commercialization.

Rieker and Colin Wessells, CEO of storage start-up Natron Energy, said their grants have been a catalyst for attracting private investment.

“There’s a lot of talk about `we need homegrown technologies; we need manufacturing here; we’re going to scale it here in the U.S. and build this economy together,’” Wessells said. With SCALEUP, he said, DOE and ARPA-E are “putting their money where their mouth is.”

LongPath

An early ARPA-E grant in 2015 helped Rieker and a team of researchers at the University of Colorado, Boulder, begin to take “a room-size, Nobel Prize-winning laser that took an army of researchers to operate and [shrink] it to the size of a desktop computer that can run autonomously in the field,” he said.

LongPath was founded in 2017, with Rieker coming on as CEO in 2019, according to the company website. The system now ready for commercialization is “akin to a methane radar that sweeps out a 17-square-mile region with a single instrument and can locate and quantify leaks as small as a quarter of your breathing rate right now,” Rieker said.

The SCALEUP grant has already provided LongPath with a level of validation for potential customers and investors, even before the company has received a cent of the money, Rieker said. “We work in an environment where we’re introducing a completely new technology that is almost hard to believe. We’re catching tiny leaks from three miles away that people in the field say, ‘That’s not possible.’”

Rieker said current regulatory frameworks based on finding and fixing leaks during quarterly inspections must change. “We need to be able to prove to regulators that the idea of going after the largest emissions fast and focusing on total emissions reduction, not leak reduction, is key. You can only do that at scale.” Rieker said.

Natron Energy

Similar to LongPath, Natron was a spin-off from university research, in this case, by scientists and entrepreneurs at Stanford University. The company has developed a battery technology based on Prussian blue — formally iron hexacyanoferrate — and sodium-ion. Historically used as a pigment for paints, inks and textiles, Prussian blue’s cell structure allows very fast charging and discharging cycles with minimal degradation of capacity, as well as lower cost and improved safety, according to the company’s website.

The company, which has also attracted some high-profile investors, including Chevron (NYSE:CVX), is targeting “data centers, telecom networks and EV fast-charging services,” Wessells said. “These are customers with large and volatile electric loads to the grid.”

Wessells said the $19.9 million SCALEUP award will allow the company to set up high-volume production in the next 18 months.

“That means several million battery cells per year,” Wessells said. “That’s a high-enough volume to achieve cost structure, and then cash flow and a sustainable business …  Higher-volume cell assembly, that’s the building block we would copy exact into a gigafactory where instead of one line you might have 20.”

Wessells sees federal funding for startups as a supplement to a strong business plan. Asked what advice he might give other startups preparing a SCALEUP application, Wessells said, Natron did not really prepare. “We were running a business plan that turned out to be compatible with the objectives of the agency for a certain program. In essence, our heart was already in it, and this is what we cared most about doing.”

Ionic Materials

Ionic Materials is also pioneering an alternative to lithium-ion batteries, in this case, a solid polymer that can transmit ions at room temperature, improving battery safety and performance, and lowering costs, it says. In addition, the polymers have potential applications in telecommunications, electronics, and food and medicine packaging, according to the company’s website.

CEO Michael Edelman said the company’s $8 million SCALEUP award will “de-risk” product development and bridge the traditional “valley of death” startups often face between early-stage and later investment.

“It’s one thing to develop something really interesting, really cool in the lab,” he said. “But how do you get it to a point where you can manufacture cost effectively, at the right quality consistently, so your customers will buy it?”

Manufacturing at commercial scale can also lead to further innovations, he said. The grant “is helping us validate some of this larger production and validate actually new methods that we wouldn’t normally consider in the lab — production technologies that are really new in our industry.”

SkyCool Systems

Like LongPath, SkyCool’s passive technology for cooling data centers, grocery stores and other buildings with high air-conditioning costs sounds scarcely possible. Based on what CEO Eli Goldstein calls “radiative cooling,” the company has developed an optical film that both reflects light and emits thermal radiation into the upper, cooler layers of the atmosphere.

Installed in rooftop panels that are about the same size as photovoltaic solar panels, the technology can improve the efficiency of air conditioning and refrigeration systems and cut electricity use and costs. One pilot project at a California grocery store reduced electricity use by about 100 kWh per day, resulting in estimated annual savings of $5,800, according to a case study on the company website. In another case study, a pilot project at a convenience store, also in California, trimmed daily energy use about 15%.

For Goldstein, the core value of SkyCool’s $3.5 million SCALEUP grant “is about validation with partners — end customers, channel partners, installation partners, as well as manufacturing partners. It will allow us to do deployments with third-party [measurement and verification] and do them with large entities that can purchase our system in the future,” he said.

The grant will also help with training installers, hopefully by leveraging the existing solar workforce, he said.

Echoing the other CEOs on the panel, Goldstein underlined the critical role SCALEUP grants can have for attracting longer-term private investment for domestic clean energy supply chains.

“Having customers that can be referenceable to investors is likely going to be one of the bigger next steps we’ll need to have for the next round of funding,” he said. “As a developer of a new hardware technology, our goal is to have our product out there for 10 to 15 years. Right now, our customers are taking our word for that; developing that data will be incredibly important.”