GE awards $100,000 for grid innovation: wind turbines, water meters and more

General Electric on Tuesday announced five winners of an innovation challenge to power the grid of the future.

The spoils of the challenge, part of its Ecomagination campaign, are five checks for $100,000 each to develop technologies for applications as diverse as wind turbines, water meters and cyber-security.

The winning companies had to submit entrepreneurial ideas that they thought could help build a "smarter, cleaner, more efficient electric grid."

The winning ideas? As follows:

• A lightweight, inflatable wind turbine. (WinFlex of Kiryat Yam, Israel)
• A technology that instantly de-ices wind turbine blades so they never slow or shut down. (IceCode of West Lebanon, N.H.)
• An intelligent water meter that can generate its own power. (Capstone Engineering of Carrollton, Texas)
• A secure network infrastructure that allows two-way communications grid monitoring and substation automation from wind and solar farms. (ElectricRoute of Salem and Hollis, N.H.)
• A technology that solves short-circuiting and outages from overloaded electric grids by enabling precise control over their flow and power. (GridON Systems of Givatayim, Israel)

The five winners were selected from almost 4,000 proposals.

There are two more categories of the challenge: renewables and green buildings.

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com