A Colorado-Wyoming partnership on Monday landed $15 million over two years from the National Science Foundation to launch a climate solutions and clean energy innovation hub aimed at expanding startup ideas to measurably cut greenhouse gases.
Colorado state leadership and the Congressional delegation, which said the hub will be based here, said the initial funding is matched “nearly 2 to 1” by federal, local and private spending. The NSF has said hubs making progress toward high-impact solutions could get up to $160 million total over 10 years.
The inaugural “Regional Innovation Engines” will screen and channel grants to startups working on carbon-capture, clean energy and methane-reduction solutions with promising results, Colorado officials said. The grants are a bridge for small companies, academic consortiums or public-private partnerships that lack the measurable proof their idea can have a significant impact on emissions that contribute to climate change.
A federal injection is needed in part because “your fleece-vest laden tech bros” with venture capital won’t fund such ideas at the earliest stages, said Bryan Willson, executive director of the Energy Institute at Colorado State University, one of the partner institutions that make up the “engine.”
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The science foundation is known for publishing rock-solid science, Colorado officials say, and these new grant engines are intended to “shorten the distance between science solutions and scale,” Willson said.
Grant support through NSF and the hub will provide a “signal to investors,” said Eve Lieberman, chief of Colorado’s Office of Economic Development and International Trade. Anyone seeking a grant must also demonstrate how they will create jobs and train workforce from underserved communities, and those most heavily impacted already by climate change, Lieberman said.
While specific ideas have not been funded, and the website only went live Monday, Colorado innovators have already advanced ideas that could scale up in similar fashion, officials said. Those include precise measurement of methane leaks from oil and gas operations, carbon capture and sequestration on forest lands, or keeping carbon in the soil on agricultural land, Willson said.
Startups often need help to precisely measure their impact and prove it can help on a global scale, Willson said. The engine grants are about adding “more value to these solutions that would help with climate and resilience,” he said.
More jobs, investment and possible climate solutions
The local effort stems from a failed bid for a “Build Back Better” federal grant in 2022 that was organized by Innosphere Ventures, a Fort Collins organization that’s spent two decades collaborating with tech entrepreneurs and university researchers to commercialize innovations from the brains of Coloradans.
When the NSF grants came along, Innosphere already had a team in place and expanded the proposal to include more than 40 partners.
“When this came out, we realized we’d really built the core infrastructure to go after another transformative grant of the same size. And actually, this one’s bigger and we didn’t have to start from ground zero,” said Mike Freeman, Innosphere’s CEO as well as CEO of the Colorado-Wyoming Climate Resilience Engine. “The message here is that it takes a massive amount of local coordination to win a product like this.”
The local proposal, dubbed Rocky Mountain Innovation Initiative, tapped a lot of big-name companies for support, a commitment that will help solidify the industry. Organizers estimate that with the initial federal investment, the climate-tech ecosystem could create more than 22,000 climate-tech jobs, train or reskill another 2,000 and add $1.5 billion to the regional economy over the next 10 years.
Private companies like computer-graphics chipmaker Nvidia Corp., aerospace company Lockheed Martin and data firm Palantir Technologies are among the partners lending support with technology and hiring interns or future workers, as well as professionals who can mentor startups and serve on an advisory board, Freeman added.
“When I was talking about extreme weather, guess what Lockheed and Nvidia do? Palantir has data integration and large data sets and AI. This is right in their wheelhouse. If you look at soil carbon, Mars Inc., Shell, Trimble, every technology we are pursuing has a very strong corporate identification in those technology areas,” Freeman said. “That was the reason we picked them.”
Specific projects have not been announced, but business partners hope to advance on what they’re already doing. Trimble, the Westminster technology company known for its digital mapping technologies, hopes to work with other private and public
“We’ve committed to working with the CO_WY Engine as a workforce partner and will seek opportunities to co-create technologies with the Engine carbon emissions reductions in agriculture, construction, plus transportation and logistics,” said Dietmar Grimm, Trimble’s vice president of corporate strategy and sustainability solutions, in an email.
The NSF grants are also one of at least three large federal funding programs to come out of the CHIPS and Science Act, which provides incentives to lure tech manufacturers back to the U.S. Last October, Colorado was named one of 31 U.S. Tech Hubs, with a focus on quantum technology. The $1 billion Build Back Better challenge did not have a Colorado winner.
Other regional engines award winners included an intelligent water recovery system in the Great Lakes region, an agricultural technology investment in North Dakota, and aerospace and defense manufacturing in New Mexico and Texas.
“These are literally transformative funding events. It’s critical for regions that are really trying to advance their science and technology ecosystem, frankly, to win one of these,” Freeman said. “I don’t know if there will be anything like this anytime in the near future.”
This story was updated at 10 a.m. on Jan. 31, 2024, to correct the spelling of Bryan Willson’s name.