New York City’s Urban Future Lab is offering a $25,000 prize for a microgrid startup project or other smart grid solution to a city energy problem.
Applications are due August 14. Winners will have chance to pitch their solutions to a jury of investors, market partners, and successful entrepreneurs.
The competition also will offer a second $25,000 prize to a startup with an idea for a smart cities project, possibly involving urban infrastructure and resiliency, transportation and transit, Internet of Things, sensor networks, or analytics.
Winners in both categories will also join the ACRE incubator, a smart cities and cleantech incubator housed at the NYU Urban Future Lab.
The competition is meant to foster pilot and demonstration opportunities with industry partners and sponsors to encourage the startup companies to establish themselves or expand in New York City.
“With the nation’s largest municipal markets in energy, transit, water and waste, New York City offers a living lab for companies to deploy their sustainable urban technologies,” said Pat Sapinsley, managing director of cleantech initiatives at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering. “New York’s ambitious Reforming the Energy Vision (REV) initiative has created an unprecedented market opportunity for smart cities and cleantech startups to thrive.”
Sapinsley added that because ACRE is located in REV territory, it is “a natural test bed for the innovative technologies and business models needed to realize New York’s ambitious targets and to deploy market-based solutions at scale to make New York City – and cities around the world – smarter, more efficient, and more resilient for current and future urban dwellers.”
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The NYU Urban Future Lab announced the competition June 14 at New York Energy Week 2016.
Competition jurors include:
- David Gilford, senior director of client strategy at Intersection Co.
- Daniel Hullah, director of ventures at National Grid
- Margarett Jolly, director research and development at Con Edison
- Micah Kotch, managing director of Urban-X and former director of the NY Prize
- Lila Preston, partner at Generation Investment Management
- Jun Shimada, founder and chief executive officer of ThinkEco
Further details about the competition are available at Urban Future Labs.
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