Source: cei.washington.edu, Dec 14
Two Northwest organizations representing the clean energy business community, the CleanTech Alliance and the Northwest Environmental Business Council (NEBC), have presented Michael Pomfret, managing director of the Washington Clean Energy Testbeds, with their 2018 Energy Leadership Achievement Award. The honor recognizes Pomfret’s work to accelerate the pace of cleantech commercialization in the region and beyond at the Testbeds. Pomfret oversaw the development of this open-access facility for prototyping, testing, and validating solar, battery, and system software/ hardware integration technologies, from construction, through opening in 2017, to tremendous first-year growth.
The award was announced at the Energy Leadership Summit, where 400 industry leaders and policymakers from across the Northwest convened to address current challenges and future opportunities for clean energy. The CleanTech Alliance and NEBC highlighted Pomfret’s accomplishments in not only establishing a state-of-the art facility to help users de-risk a cleantech concept, but also his work to create a supportive home for cleantech innovators to grow and attract investors to the region.
“This award from clean energy industry leaders is an acknowledgement that, in a very short time, we have created an important facility for cleantech innovation in the Northwest,” said Pomfret. “I’m honored to receive this award and to work on behalf of UW researchers and businesses accelerating a clean energy future. I’m also proud that the Testbeds have attracted companies globally to do work here, and both in-state and out-of-state companies have hired UW graduates to work at the facility to advance product development.”
“Mike has become an invaluable member of the Pacific Northwest cleantech community, and we can’t agree more that he deserves this recognition for his leadership at the Testbeds,” said Daniel Schwartz, director of the UW Clean Energy Institute (CEI), the organization that operates the Testbeds. “He has helped make the Testbeds into a dynamic realization of CEI’s goals, showing that partnerships between researchers and innovators in the private sector are a viable and fruitful pathway for cleantech.”
The Washington Clean Energy Testbeds serves a growing community of over 210 active users. This includes 29 cleantech startups, mid-size companies, and major corporations like Microsoft, as well as University of Washington (UW) scientists and engineers. Additionally, five of those 29 companies have operations based at the Testbeds where they use the facility’s instruments, trained experts, and networks to build their startups or develop new product lines. Testbeds users pay a per-use fee to use state-of-the-art instruments and access UW staff. External users retain all intellectual property developed at the Testbeds.