Two startup accelerators in Cambridge and Somerville received close to $7 million in Mass Leads Act grants to expand their technology base, in a bid to provide more support to entrepreneurs working on mitigating climate change.
Greentown Labs, which bills itself as the world’s largest climate tech incubator, received $4.95 million to establish a small-scale prototype facility for battery manufacturing and testing, to be called the Greentown Commonwealth Electrons Lab, or GCELL. Greentown has three facilities in Somerville and a co-headquarters in Houston. The Engine, a nonprofit incubator in Cambridge started by MIT, received $1.69 million to expand climate-resilient technology for public use.
These grants were part of a set of awards worth $18 million and announced by the Mass Clean Energy Center, a state economic development agency, May 19. Others receiving them were Worcester Polytechnic Institute, the University of Massachusetts Lowell, and Gloucester Marine Genomics Institute. They’re provided by the state’s Testing and Demonstrations Assets Program, an initiative to create shared climate technology infrastructure managed by the Mass Clean Energy Center.
In a press release, Governor Maura Healey said the money “will give startups, researchers, and entrepreneurs access to the tools and infrastructure they need to test new ideas, bring technologies to market faster, and grow their businesses here in Massachusetts.”
Julia Travaglini, named head of Greentown Boston in January, said the idea to open a battery facility came from Greentown’s members, 40 percent of which are energy storage companies. She said Greentown consulted them before applying for the grant last fall. Greentown will partner with its “battery expert” members to ensure the facility’s technology offers the things energy storage companies really need, Travaglini said.
“There isn’t a facility like this within 400 miles of New England,” Travaglini said, noting that energy startups often leave the area to operate closer to a battery testing plant.
It will take one to three years for GCELL to become operational. When it is, it will also be a technician training site, to ensure there are enough battery technicians across the climate industry to run experiments in similar facilities.
The grant will also make the Greentown Resources and Information Database, known as GRID, publicly available. Travaglini said the technology created and improved with all the grants “is really meant to be available to anyone developing energy storage innovation” in the state.
Greentown’s resources include developing methods to reduce waste and emissions in food production called Go Grow and ways to improve sustainability across different manufacturing sectors called Go Make, which will launch its latest initiative June 9.
The Engine adds gears
The Engine will use its grant to modernize and expand its existing equipment, including improvements to its advanced 3D printers, thermal systems, and prototyping capacity. The upgrades “are not incremental improvements. They are core infrastructure [that scientists and engineers] need to move from prototype to pilot” to solve climate’s biggest challenges, The Engine said in a statement to Cambridge Day. It added that advancing its infrastructure should help keep its startups “rooted in Massachusetts.”
Over the next five years, the new technologies, located at The Engine’s headquarters at 750 Main St., will become available to startups, university researchers, and The Engine’s partners.
The constant evolution of climate technology is necessary because “climate change isn’t a single problem with a single fix,” The Engine stated. The solutions are “a set of interconnected engineering challenges: how do we generate energy without burning carbon, … grow food with less water, and pull carbon out of the air we’ve already warmed.”
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