On a recent Wednesday night, dozens of entrepreneurs, engineers and government officials gathered at the Roux Institute in Portland for the launch of a program promising to bring green jobs and breakthrough technologies to Maine.
The aptly named ‘ClimateTech Incubator’ is seeded by a $975,000 grant from the Governor’s Energy Office and supports founders of a dozen startups as they develop their companies under the auspices of Northeastern University and tech industry leaders.
The excitement at the event was palpable. Attendees sipped from glasses of champagne and picked at hors d’oeuvres as they mingled with the startup founders. A roar of energetic voices spread across the swanky open-concept office space where the startups have been working for the past two months.
“The energy level is just off the charts,” said Jon Wallace, a part-time lecturer in engineering at Northeastern and one of the incubator’s “entrepreneurs in residence,” who coaches other members.
Wallace is developing his own company in the incubator, with a product that calculates how pilots of smaller planes can reduce their emissions during flights.
He said that the incubator’s community of founders, its location in Portland, a friendly state government and pipeline of Northeastern students make it one-of-a-kind; a venture full of promise.
“It’s hard to find a place with more leading climate scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs and investors,“ Wallace said. “I’m confident … that we’re going to really be able to make a difference on … climate change.”
Outside of the Roux Institute’s office space on Fore Street, hints of climate change’s pervasive sources and immense scale appeared in various ways.
Just a few blocks away, a 3,000-passenger cruise ship idled at a pier in Portland Harbor, plumes of exhaust rising from its smoke stacks. Petroleum tanks across the Fore River in South Portland were visible from the office’s windows.
Days later, a king tide caused minor flooding by Portland Pier — a recurring threat that Northeastern intends to address at the institute’s future campus on the former B&M Baked Beans factory site off Portland’s Back Cove, where construction started earlier this month.
These are the issues that the incubator’s startups hope to mitigate with technology. One of those startups is bluesonde technologies, which is developing buoys equipped with water quality sensors for outside researchers or companies to use in pursuit of removing carbon.
Ocean researcher John Williams co-founded the company with CEO Andrew Thompson, two former employees of the carbon removal company Running Tide. Their Portland-based former employer shut down this June due to financial constraints, coinciding with growing skepticism of the company’s underlying methods for removing large amounts of carbon from earth’s atmosphere by sinking wood chips into the ocean.
Williams told The Maine Monitor whereas Running Tide specifically sought carbon removal, bluesonde is on the research side of things, designing its buoys to also scout locations for offshore wind sites and aquaculture.
A large portion of the other incubator startups rely on AI to provide a range of services, from AI-enabled bike technology that alerts riders when they are on a collision course with a car to an AI system for improving building energy efficiency based on variables like occupancy and temperature.
Enodia co-founders Jack Watson and Rohit Bokade are using AI to develop technology that models climate change fueled-disasters like floods to pinpoint the weak links in a power grid, revealing where infrastructure upgrades would be most effective.
Founders repeatedly praised the benefits that the incubator has provided so far. They can bounce ideas off of other members and receive business advice from companies that have already scaled upward, such as Elipsa, the building efficiency company. The Roux’s office space also has a lab area where companies can design their prototypes, which bluesonde has used for its buoys.
Dan Burgess, director of the Governor’s Energy Office, spoke of the green technologies already bound for the state and the opportunity for the incubator to add more. Burgess touted the massive energy storage project planned in Lincoln supported by a $147 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy and the state’s offshore wind development, among other projects.
“I believe that the challenges presented by climate change are great, but they’re exceeded by the opportunity that we have to build an economy here in Maine, and to move Maine forward,” Burgess told the audience ahead of the incubator’s ceremonial ribbon-cutting.
Two other organizations received a chunk of the 2023 Clean Energy Partnership award that seeded the Roux’s incubator, a Brunswick company advising contractors on how to scale their weatherization and energy efficiency services and a Waterville clean energy technology training program, but the Roux took the lion’s share of the funds.
The partnership’s roughly $6 million in awards that have been distributed over the past few years contribute to Gov. Janet Mills’ ultimate goal of creating 30,000 clean energy jobs in Maine by 2030, with more than half of those created thus far, her administration reported in May.
That goal is backed by roughly $1 billion in American Rescue Plan Act funding that is allocated through the state’s Jobs and Recovery Plan, which went into effect in October 2021.
It will require a whole lot more funding for the Roux’s incubator to meaningfully contribute to that goal, outside of what Maine has provided, according to Warren Adams, the incubator’s director.
Though it’s kicking off with just 12 startups, Adams intends for more companies to join the incubator over time, with applicants accepted on a rolling basis.
“The funding that we’ve received from the Governor’s Energy Office is just really a drop in the bucket of what we hope to raise to support the companies over time,” Adams said.
“We’re not the first organization to be in the climate tech space here, there’s a lot of great organizations, but collaborating is key … and we hope to grow this group very quickly.”
