This Woman Finds the Money for Chicago’s Green Energy Ideas

Clean Energy Trust cofounder Amy Francetic is pushing to make Chicago a hub of clean energy innovation.

By Cassie Walker Burke

Reposted by Greenest Engineering in Chicago

Photograph: Brian Kelly; Hair and Makeup: Jenna Baltes/Artists By Timothy Priano

The venture capitalist in front of a rendering of the Lakeside project

The Green Innovator

Name: Amy Francetic
Age: 46
Cofounder: Clean Energy Trust

From her 16th-floor office in the heart of the Loop, this eco-minded venture capitalist can survey the green roof atop City Hall, the soaring headquarters of United Continental, and myriad banks and financial firms. The view is a reminder of her role as a catalyst—an “accelerator,” as she puts it—in the race to make the Midwest a hub of clean energy innovation.

In 2010, she cofounded the nonprofit Clean Energy Trust to do just that. Backed by the investment might of Michael Polsky, the CEO of the Chicago-based wind-generation company Invenergy, and Nick Pritzker, a local billionaire and former Hyatt chief, Francetic connects area inventors who have revolutionary ideas with venture capitalists and manufacturers who can bring them to market. And she is an energy consultant on two potentially game-changing projects: the $120 million Argonne battery research center and the 500-acre Lakeside community planned for the former U.S. Steel site.

Francetic talks about fostering an ecosystem in the way that a biologist would—only instead of seeds, she’s helping early-stage companies build the relationships they need to innovate faster. “My goal is to unlock the capital that’s sitting on the sidelines,” says Francetic, who spent the first half of her career in Silicon Valley, where she worked for a time at a business incubator funded by Microsoft’s Paul Allen.

With her Lake Forest address and finance-jargon-laden pitch, Francetic is far from the stereotypical environmentalist. But she believes that the projects her small team has ushered along—among them a manufacturer of high-performance electric engines (HEVT) and a group of Northwestern University metals researchers looking to advance a more secure form of natural gas–storage (NuMat)—have the potential to make more efficient (and less toxic) products that decrease our country’s reliance on foreign oil. “Ultimately, it has to be about more than money,” she says. “It has to be about impact.”

Chicago-based LuminAID wins Clean Energy Challenge

By Julie WernauTribune reporter
  forwarded By Greenest Engineering in Chicago




Andrea Sreshta and her business partner were in Japan in2011 when an earthquake left millions of people without power. They realized that lightweight, inflatable, solar-powered LED lights could fill the lighting needs of a population in crisis.

Their Chicago-based company, LuminAID, won top honors Thursday at the third annual Clean Energy Challenge in Chicago, earning $100,000 in early stage capital in a competition that pitted 17 clean tech teams from across the Midwest against each other for more than $300,000 in cash prizes.

Food, water and medicine are shipped in by the truckload in a crisis, said Shreshta, but light is not. LuminAID's lamps can be shipped flat, printed with logos or instructions and are lightweight -- 100 weigh about 20 pounds.

"The light was on the 'Today Show' at the start of the year for 30 seconds," Sreshta said. "We sold $30,000 worth of lights in eight hours."

The company has been setting up partnerships with distributors around the world to assist everyone from the 1.3 million people who lacked light after an earthquake rocked Haiti to the 12 million refugees living in camps around the world.

On a stage worthy of a TED talk, innovators -- some with little more than an idea and others who had won similar competitions elsewhere -- faced a panel of about three dozen judges who, American Idol-like, could make or break their futures.

Among the judges were Pin Ni, president of Wanxiang Group, which now owns battery maker A123; a bevy of venture capital firms; representatives from Johnson Controls, Abbott Laboratories and United.

The contest brought together the nation's top researchers, entrepreneurs, investors and policy makers to uncover the most promising cleantech startups in the Midwest.

Bearing Analytics, a start-up out of Purdue University, won the $100,000 prize in the student category for its temperature and vibration sensing technology that can alert manufacturers to bearings creating enough friction that they could stop working or catch fire.

Andrew Kovacs, a co-founder, told judges that such problems do $50 billion a year in damage and lost time in everything from the auto to the wind industries.

If a bearing stop an auto assembly line, he said,it could cost $22,000 per minute until the problem is fixed. In another case, he said, a bearing in a 100-car coal train caught fire and it took so long for the conductor to walk back to the source the car and bridge below it were engulfed, cuasing $2 million in damage.

"This competition ... is often the first step toward moving new technology out of the lab and into the marketplace," said Amy Francetic, executive director of Clean Energy Trust, a nonprofit dedicated to accelerating the development of clean-energy businesses in the Midwest.

This year, eight early-stage firms and nine student-led start-ups competed. Three new awards, the $50,000 McCaffery Lakeside prize, the $20,000 Outstanding Female Cleantech Entrepreneur prize and the $10,000 Invenergy Renewable Idea prize were also awarded.

SkySpecs, a University of Michigan firm that uses unmanned aircraft to monitor sewers, wind turbines and bridges, won the Invenergy prize.

Amplified Wind Solutions, out of Washington University in St. Louis, won the Female Cleantech award. The woman-run firm has a system to amplify wind power and sees a market in the cell phone tower industry, for power cell towers in remote locations that are off-the-grid.

SmarterShade, a South Bend, Ind., company with a film that can turn windows opaque with the flip of a switch, was awarded the McCaffery Lakeside Prize.

At the last minute, the judges chipped in $10,000 of their own money to support Ornicept, an Ann Arbor, Mich., start-up that can track and analyze bird populations with cameras and cloud computing software. The company told judges that they believe their technology will support wind development, which is often required to send team of researchers into the field, at great expense, to study bird populations before setting up a wind farm.

Finalists from the previous two Challenges have raised more than $30 million in funding to date and have captured top honors at national competitions, including the National Clean Energy Business Competition, Cleantech Open and the Rice Business Plan Competition.

Last year, Chicago-based NuMat Technologies, a startup led by two Kellogg students, a Northwestern graduate student and a research professor, won $100,000 in the student division of Chicago's Clean Energy Challenge, followed by more than $1 million in other business-plan competition prizes.

The company, as part of a consortium that includes Des Plaines-based Gas Technology Institute, Northwestern University and a natural gas engine maker, also received $1.5 million in funding from the Department of Energy to be used to help commercialize the product.

NuMat invented a material that acts like a sponge for natural gas, reducing the amount of pressure needed to fill a tank of the gas by 80 percent.