Sydney Lienemann is trying to turn a side gig into a business opportunity.
Lienemann, a climate advisor for the city of Albuquerque, plans to create a way to harness clean energy in reused electric car batteries through a company she created called UpCycle Power. While she hasn’t completed the project just yet, Lienemann is well on her way to making that a possibility.
Having come up with the idea late last year, she recently partnered with the Arrowhead Center at New Mexico State University, which helps people — or small businesses — grow their idea through their resources, connections and expertise.
Lienemann’s partnership with Arrowhead has so far helped her connect to Arrowhead's EnergySprint, which helped accelerate her idea.
"I was lucky that [Arrowhead] was doing EnergySprint, specifically focused on energy technology,” said Lienamann, who holds a Ph.D in physics from the University of Colorado and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
"It’s great to be in a program with people who are really focused on this particular industry,” she said.
Electric car batteries, in particular, caught Lienemann’s attention because they usually harness about 80% of their power after being used. While it isn’t enough to run an electric car, she said it is enough battery power to harness clean energy.
Lienemann’s goal, once her research is completed, is to sell the revamped car batteries to small businesses and homeowners in rural communities that use solar energy. She said it is a good way to store energy so that it can be used if a storm hits and knocks out power, or to use at night when the sun isn’t out.
“I'm really focused on small businesses that can benefit from this [and] how this could save them money in the long term,” Lienemann said, “But there's also I think a real value for rural communities.”
Lienemann has been operating off a stipend of $1,500 from the Arrowhead Center and another $5,000 she won in the Arrowhead Innovation Fund Pitch competition. Sandia National Labs has aided Lienemann’s project as well. Its New Mexico Small Business Assistance program helped to connect her to a battery researcher, she said.
Lienemann has applied for small-business grants with the National Science Foundation to help her conduct further research on how lithium-ion car batteries age and when they should be retired. She received help applying for those grants through NM FAST, a program within the Arrowhead Center that helps small businesses in New Mexico through the grant process.
“Working with Sydney over the past few months as she decided which agency best fit her direction and needs, and then supporting her on creating her STTR proposal, was a great pleasure," said Del Mackey, an Arrowhead Center senior economic development officer, in a statement.
When the funding is adequate, Lienemann said she will partner up with two optical engineering professors at NMSU, Olga Lavrova and Satishkuma Ranade, to take the project a step further.
Lienemann’s driving factor for the project is to produce less e-waste, she said, and the fact that hundreds of billions of dollars will need to be spent countrywide for clean energy storage in the next decade. With her project, she estimates that the batteries she creates for clean energy storage will come at 30% less cost and will produce 50% less carbon emissions.
“That means that these systems will be available to a lot wider audience of people than can currently afford battery storage,” Lienemann said.
