Pittsburgh-based CorePower Magnetics Inc. has won a $5 million grant from the Department of Energy under a clean-energy initiative that will help it vastly scale up the domestic production of efficient and smaller and lighter components for electric vehicles.
CorePower, a spinout of technology developed at Carnegie Mellon University and the National Energy Technology Laboratory, designs and uses advanced manufacturing to produce inductors, transformers, motors and generators that are much more efficient, powerful and lighter in weight and size than traditional equipment. CorePower's soft magnetic technologies does not use rare earth minerals, a key selling point, and are found in not only electric vehicles but other products that will be big in the energy transition.
Tuesday's funding announcement was one of eight firms that shared in $100 million from the Biden administration's Seeding Critical Advances for Leading Energy Technologies with Untapped Potential (SCALEUP) and the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) in the U.S. Department of Energy. It was one of the handful of successful firms to win the SCALEUP funding among 160 concept papers in this funding round that were reduced by DOE to the eight. Other winners, none from Pennsylvania, also involved other magnetic technologies, energy storage, the cleaning up of the pulp/paper industry, and lighter and more efficient floating wind turbines.
"This group is truly elite. We picked them because we truly believe their projects are going to be transformational," said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm during a virtual meeting introducing CorePower and the other winners Tuesday morning.
The funding will give a big boost to CorePower's manufacturing and marketing efforts, adding to the $2.5 million in preseed funding that was announced in September. CorePower, which has revenue between $1 million and $5 million, will be using the grant to establish a manufacturing line for its magnetic components.
CEO Sam Kernion said during the meeting that CorePower was commercializing its magnetic technology that includes design advances, a compact size and specialized alloys.
"The ARPA-E SCALEUP program will enable us to install and commission the first domestic manufacturing line that goes from melting nanocrystalline metal all the way to manufacturing finished components, so we can start offering these solutions to the EV and power grid markets," Kernion said.
A previous version of this story incorrectly identified the source of CorePower's materials. They do not use rare earth minerals.
