Energy Tech Nexus announces international startups to pitch at Pilotathon

Ready, Set, Pitch

20-plus companies will pitch at Energy Tech Nexus' Pilotathon during Houston Energy & Climate Startup Week. Photo via Getty Images.

Energy Tech Nexus will host its Pilotathon and Showcase as part of Houston Energy & Climate Startup Week next Tuesday, Sept. 16, featuring insightful talks from industry leaders and pitches from an international group of companies in the clean energy space.

This year's event will center around the theme "Energy Access and Resilience." Attendees will hear pitches from nine Pilotathon pitch companies, as well as the 14 companies that were named to Energy Tech Nexus' COPILOT accelerator earlier this year.

COPILOT partners with Browning the Green Space, a nonprofit that promotes diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in the clean energy and climatetech sectors. The Wells Fargo Innovation Incubator (IN²) at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory backs the COPILOT accelerator, where companies are tasked with developing pilot projects for their innovations.

The nine Pilotathon pitch companies include:

Ontario-based AlumaPower, which has developed a breakthrough technology that converts the aluminum-air battery into a "galvanic generator," a long-duration energy source that runs on aluminum as a fuel
Calgary-based BioOilSolv, a chemical manufacturing company that has developed cutting-edge biomass-derived solvents
Atlanta-based Cultiv8 Fuels, which creates high-quality renewable fuel products derived from hemp
Newfoundland-based eDNAtec Inc., a leader in environmental genomics that analyzes biodiversity and ecological health
Oregon-based Espiku Inc., which designs and develops water treatment and mineral extraction technologies that rely on low-pressure evaporative cycles
New York-based Fast Metals Inc., which has developed a chemical process to extract valuable metals from complex toxic mine tailings that is capable of producing iron, aluminum, scandium, titanium and other rare earth elements using industrial waste and waste CO2 as inputs
New Jersey-based Metal Light Inc., which is building a circular, solid metal fuel that will serve as a replacement for diesel fuel
Glasgow-based Novosound, which designs and manufactures innovative ultrasound sensors using a thin-film technique to address the limitations of traditional ultrasound with applications in industrial, medical and wearable markets
Calgary-based Serenity Power, which has developed a cutting-edge solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) technology

The COPILOT accelerator companies include:

Accelerate Wind
Aquora Biosystems Inc.
EarthEn
Electromaim
EnKoat
GeoFuels
Harber Coatings Inc.
Janta Power
NanoSieve
PolyQor Inc.
Popper Power
Siva Powers America
ThermoShade
V-Glass Inc.

Houston-area sustainable steel company emerges from stealth with $17M in VC funding

heavy metals

Conroe-based Hertha Metals, a producer of substantial steel, has hauled in more than $17 million in venture capital from Khosla Ventures, Breakthrough Energy Fellows, Pear VC, Clean Energy Ventures and other investors.

The money has been put toward the construction and the launch of its 1-metric-ton-per-day pilot plant in Conroe, where its breakthrough in steelmaking has been undergoing tests. The company uses a single-step process that it claims is cheaper, more energy-efficient and equally as scalable as conventional steelmaking methods. The plant is fueled by natural gas or hydrogen.

The company, founded in 2022, plans to break ground early next year on a new plant. The facility will be able to produce more than 9,000 metric tons of steel per year.

Hertha said in a news release that its process, which converts low-grade iron ore into molten steel or high-purity iron, “doesn’t just materially lower cost and energy use — it fundamentally expands our capacity to produce iron and steel at scale, by unlocking a wider range of iron ore feedstocks.”

Laureen Meroueh, founder and CEO of Hertha, says the company’s process will fill a gap in U.S. steel production.

“We’re not just reinventing steelmaking; we’re redefining what’s possible in materials, manufacturing, and national resilience,” Meroueh says.

Hertha says it’s in talks with magnet producers — which make permanent magnets and magnetic assemblies from raw materials such as iron — to become a U.S. supplier of high-purity iron. In its next stage of growth, Hertha will aim to operate at a capacity of 500,000 metric tons of steel production per year.

The company won the Department of Energy's Summer Energy Program for Innovation Clusters (EPIC) Startup Pitch Competition last summer. Read more here.

Hertha Metals, based in Conroe, won first place at the 2024 Summer Energy Program for Innovation Clusters (EPIC) Startup Pitch Competition. Photo via DOE

Houston-area energy tech startup wins DOE competition's $100,000 prize

1st place

Four startups from across the country won over $160,000 in cash prizes from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Technology Transitions earlier this month, and a Houston-area company claimed the top prize.

Hertha Metals, based in Conroe, won first place at the 2024 Summer Energy Program for Innovation Clusters (EPIC) Startup Pitch Competition. The program honors and supports clean energy innovators nominated by clean technology business incubators.

“The EPIC Pitch Competition is a unique opportunity for start ups to highlight their technology, get on the main stage, and receive direct funding,” DOE Chief Commercialization Officer and Director of OTT Vanessa Chan says in a news release. “The startup pitch winners have honed their entrepreneurial skills and demonstrated a critical understanding of their technological impacts, targeted markets, and scalable strategies.”

Focused on environmentally responsible steel, Hertha Metals won the $100,000 prize. The company's steelmaking process reduces emissions by 95 percent, per the news release, while remaining financially accessible. Hertha Metals was nominated by Greentown Labs, which won $25,000 for its nomination.

The program's other 2024 winners included:

Daytona Beach, Florida-based Sensatek Propulsion Technology Inc., which won second place and $40,000 and was nominated by mHUB Innovation Center
Arlington, Virginia-based Torev Motors, which won third place and $20,000 and was nominated by Dominion Energy Innovation Center
Fort Collins, Colorado-based NitroCat Energies, which won the a $5,000 Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) Prize and was nominated by Colorado State University

Hertha Metals was founded by Laureen Meroueh, a mechanical engineer and materials scientist, in 2022. A Greentown Houston member, the company is also currently in the inaugural cohort of the Breakthrough Energy Innovator Fellows.

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Solar tracking manufacturer opens second Houston facility

now open

PV Hardware USA, a provider of solar tracking and foundation solutions, has announced the opening of its second U.S. manufacturing facility in Houston, which is expected to create more than 100 jobs locally and strengthen domestic production capacity for solar energy facilities.

“Opening our second U.S. manufacturing facility represents an exciting step forward in our growth journey and demonstrates our commitment to the U.S. market,” Rodolfo Bitar, VP of Business Development for PVH USA, said in a news release.

The 95,000-square-foot facility began operations in July and aims to increase production while reducing lead times for customers. The new state-of-the-art building joins the company’s first $30 million U.S. manufacturing facility, which opened in Houston in May 2024 as one of America’s largest solar tracker manufacturing facilities.

Established in 2008 in San Francisco, PVH USA has launched a series of innovative advancements that help solar facilities withstand extreme weather events, generate more energy during overcast weather and expand the types of terrain suitable for solar installations. Its proprietary pre-assembly process can reduce installation times by 40 percent, which helps expand solar power capacity to meet increasing demand for electricity, according to the company. Currently, PVH USA has over 32 gigawatts of solar trackers supplied worldwide, and it operates from advanced manufacturing facilities in Spain, Saudi Arabia and the United States.

Its existing Houston facility manufactures solar structures and custom-built solar tracking systems for new solar generation projects.

“By expanding our presence in Houston, we are not only investing in local economic development but also ensuring we can better serve our customers with faster turnaround times and the highest quality products that are 100% domestically made,” Bitar added in the release.

Rice University team finds economical way to recycle data center heat into power

waste not

As data centers expand, their energy demands rise as well. Researchers at Rice University have discovered a way to capture low-temperature waste heat from data centers and convert it back into usable power.

The team has introduced a novel solar thermal-boosted organic Rankine cycle (ORC)—a power system that uses a safe working fluid to make electricity from heat. The design incorporates low-cost rooftop flat-plate solar collectors, which warm the data center’s coolant stream before it enters the ORC. The findings, published in Solar Energy, show that the additional “solar bump” helps surpass the technical roadblocks with data center waste, which has typically been too cool to generate power on its own.

The research was supported by the Alliance for Sustainable Energy LLC, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the U.S. Department of Energy.

“There’s an invisible river of warm air flowing out of data centers,” Laura Schaefer, the Burton J. and Ann M. McMurtry Chair of Mechanical Engineering at Rice and co-author of the paper, said in a news release. “Our question was: Can we nudge that heat to a slightly higher temperature with sunlight and convert a lot more of it into electricity? The answer is yes, and it’s economically compelling.”

Traditionally, electric heat pumps have been used to raise temperatures before recovery, but the benefits were limited because the pumps consumed significant extra power.

Kashif Liaqat, a graduate student in mechanical engineering at Rice, and Schaefer achieved a "temperature lift” by using solar energy to create thermoeconomic models. They modeled affordable, low-profile rooftop solar collectors that fed into an ORC and tied into a liquid-cooling loop. The collectors were validated against industry tools and tested at some of America’s largest data center hubs in Ashburn, Virginia, and Los Angeles, which provided varying climate challenges.

The system recovered 60 percent to 80 percent more electricity annually from the same waste heat, with a 60 percent boost in Ashburn and an 80 percent boost in Los Angeles, according to Rice. It also achieved over 8 percent higher ORC efficiency during peak hours, and an increase in annual average efficiency. The approach also lowered the cost of electricity from the recovered power by 5.5 percent in Ashburn and by 16.5 percent in Los Angeles.

“What the industry considers a weakness becomes a strength once you add solar,” Liaqat said in a news release. “That’s great news for modern data centers.”

Next up, the team will look to pilot its hybrid system in operational sites and explore thermal storage, which the researchers hope could bank solar heat during the day to assist with energy recovery efforts at night.

Greentown and EnergyTech Nexus announce ecosystem partnership

green team

Two of Houston’s leading energy transition organizations are joining forces.

Climatetech incubator Greentown Labs and founder community Energy Tech Nexus announced a "strategic ecosystem partnership," aimed at accelerating growth for clean energy startups. EnergyTech Nexus will move into Greentown Labs and plans to open an investor lounge on-site.

“Greentown Labs is the nexus for the energy transition, where startups can gather, collaborate and grow. Positioning our own extended community within the hallowed walls of Greentown will further foster the creation of authentic connections between founders and reduce friction to critical resources, bringing the village together will only accelerate the flywheel on innovation here in Houston, Texas,” Jason Ethier, EnergyTech Nexus founding partner, said in a news release.

Additionally, EnergyTech Nexus will launch Cephyron IRM, an AI-driven investor platform that will help founders of early-stage technologies connect with sources of capital. Greentown members will be granted early access to the platform.

According to the organizations, the ecosystem partnership represents years of collaboration. Ethier, whose startup Dynamo Micropower was one of the first to join Greentown's Cambridge, Massachusetts, incubator, previously served on Greentown's board of directors and in other leadership positions. He and Juliana Garaizar, a fellow founding partner of EnergyTech Nexus, were also instrumental in bringing Greentown Labs to Houston. Garaizar has also held numerous leadership roles at Greentown Houston.

“This partnership has been a long time coming—our organizations are kindred spirits that need to be working together to enhance the entrepreneurial support systems available to climate innovators in Houston,” Lawson Gow, Greentown’s Head of Houston, added in the release. “Capital is a top priority for climate and energy founders, and this team-up will directly address this challenge.”

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