DTE Energy and the University of Michigan are sponsoring an annual entrepreneurship competition. The DTE Clean Energy Prize is meant to encourage teams form Michigan colleges and universities to develop the best way for offering new clean-energy technologies commercially.
“Our goal is to drive promising clean energy ideas and technologies from the research lab to commercialization,” Earley said. “To do that, we are making a 5-year, $450,000 commitment to fund the DTE Clean Energy Prize, a new competition open to the best and brightest students and faculty at Michigan’s colleges and universities.”
The prize pool for the 2009 competition will be $100,000, which will be divided among the winning teams. For subsequent years, it is expected that the prize pool will be $200,000.
The prize competition will be hosted by the University of Michigan, but will be open to students and faculty from all Michigan colleges and universities. For the first year, each team must have at least one University of Michigan student or faculty member.
Competing teams will be required to develop business ideas that support renewable energy, energy efficiency and demand response, greenhouse gas and environmental control technologies and energy storage. The first competition will be held this fall. Prizes will be awarded next spring.