An alternative energy company from Maine, DownEast Power Company, is taking a page out of cleantech innovation award programs such as X-Prize to launch its own hunt for new technologies and opportunities related to biomass. The company plans to give out up to $5 million to proposals that could help revitalize its own biomass generation facility. It has teamed up with Hypios, which offers a social network for crowdsourcing, to help orchestrate the competition.
The DownEast 2010 Biomass Engineering Prize Competition is basically an effort on the company’s part to transform what the company itself calls an “underperforming” facility in Deblois, Maine. The company seeks an engineering plan to help get its 25.8-megawatt biomass power plan (which uses clean wood fuel) back on the grid. The application for the contest reads: “This challenge has two simple goals: return the facility to profitability and utilize new and disruptive biomass-fueled electricity generation technologies that do not require massive capital investments and that can achieve sustained profitable operations.”
There are two proposed rounds of applications. The deadlines are Nov. 1, 2010, and March 31, 2011.
