Sometimes, "shade happens." Just ask Unified Solar, the startup that walked away the $125,000, first-place winner of the MIT Clean Energy Prize Monday night.
Unified Solar is focused on helping the solar industry create cost-effective solar panels whose output is not affected when partially shaded. The team's patent-pending integrated chip roughly doubles the average energy capture improvement of similar technologies.
The MIT Clean Energy Prize is a seven-year-old national business plan competition, and was jointly founded by MIT, NSTAR and the U.S. Department of Energy to bolster clean energy entrepreneurship. This year's semi-finalists hailed from a wide variety of schools, including Rutgers, Northwestern and the University of Maryland.
Unified Solar is an MIT spin-out, and now a finalist in the energy category of the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, whose winner will be announced on May 14. Prior to pocketing $125,000 from NSTAR, the team also won another $100,000 from the Department of Energy.
“Unified Solar’s unique solution to create solar panels that are not affected when partially shaded is a potentially game-changing breakthrough for solar energy,” said NSTAR President Craig Hallstrom in a statement. “Solar panels are becoming more popular with our customers and improving their efficiency will make them a more affordable and attractive option.”
Unified Solar Co-founder and CEO Arthur Chang, an MIT Ph.D. candidate, shared enthusiasm of his own. "We truly believe in our product's ability to accelerate the adoption of clean and renewable energy," he said. "We are fired-up to prepare the solar market for all those moments when ‘shade happens.'"
Image via NSTAR
