Free Electrons: The 15 finalist startups have been announced

Wednesday 09, June 2021

Innovation

The global startup acceleration program will award a cash prize of USD 200,000 to the winner. The candidates come from 11 countries.

The 15 startups that will go through to the next stage of the 2021 edition of Free Electrons - the first global program connecting the most promising startups with energy industry giants - have already been selected.

After receiving hundreds of applications from 76 countries, the program jury selected 35 startups to participate in the bootcamp held by DEWA (Dubai Electricity and Water Authority - United Arab Emirates), which took place remotely from May 24 to May 27. The bootcamp brought together more than 150 utilities and startups from 18 countries, which connected through more than 215 virtual meetings across six time zones.

The selected startups come from 11 countries and will now be able to pitch their projects and solutions to energy industry giants. The projects cover the following fields: clean energy, energy efficiency and management, customer solutions, smart grids, and energy communities.

From June 21 to November, the 15 finalist startups will have the opportunity to develop pilot projects, test solutions, get feedback, work with the utilities, and raise investment. At this stage, which will kick off soon, startups will participate in three modules: the June module will be held by AusNet Services (Melbourne, Australia), the July module will be hosted by EDP, and the September module will be held by CLP (Hong Kong, China).

The competition final will be held in November, right after the last module - hosted by ESB (Dublin). The winning startup, which will be awarded a USD 200,000 cash prize, will be announced after the final.

EDP is currently working with seven startups that were involved in the previous edition of the Free Electrons competition. In addition to Vyntelligence, which has won last year's edition, NET2GRID, Chargetrip, EnergyX, FlexiDAO, Soraytec and Tesselo have also captured the interest of several companies within the Group, and are now developing pilot projects with these companies. Through EDP Ventures, EDP has also invested in three of these startups: Tesselo, Vyntelligence, and Net2Grid.

The Free Electrons competition is held by a consortium of utilities comprising the following companies: American Electric Power (USA), AusNet Services (Australia), CLP (Hong Kong, China), DEWA - Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (Dubai), EDP - Energias de Portugal (Portugal), E.ON (Germany), ESB - Electricity Supply Board (Ireland), Origin Energy (Australia) and SP Group (Singapore). Free Electrons is supported by Portuguese company Beta-i.

The 15 selected startups are:

Camus Energy (USA)

DABBEL - Automation Intelligence (Germany)

Duckt (Estonia)

Electron (UK)

eSmart Systems (Norway)

FiberSense (Australia)

FSIGHT - Energy Flows (Israel)

Gilytics (Switzerland)

Gridcognition (Australia)

gridX (Germany)

KelTech IoT (Ireland)