West Gate’s Third Cohort Most Diverse Set of Technologies Yet
West Gate Cohort 3 (left to right) Simon Julien, Latimer Controls; Julia Curley, EsterCycle; Spencer Whitman, Aquarry; Michael Solomentsev, Palanquin Power; Reamonn Soto, Sensatek Propulsion Technology; Heather Platt, Mana Battery. Photo by Gregory Cooper, NREL
The third cohort of West Gate, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL’s) Lab-Embedded Entrepreneurship Program (LEEP), is the most technologically diverse yet, with innovations ranging from pumping carbon dioxide (CO2) into pit lakes to helping solar arrays adapt to a passing cloud, and funding coming from six different offices within the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).
“The solution to the climate crisis is not just one technology,” said West Gate Program Director Shelly Curtiss. “We need to cast a wide net to bring solutions to every corner, and this new cohort represents that effort.”
West Gate is one of four LEEP nodes within DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy with core support from the Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office. As a LEEP node, West Gate embeds innovators at NREL and pairs them with national laboratory scientists and capabilities over a period of two years. During this time, innovators have prime access to world-class facilities and expertise to significantly advance the development of their clean energy technologies.
The first West Gate cohort graduated this fall and saw a great deal of success during its two-year program, with strong presence in the market and rising investments.
“We could not be prouder of the inaugural cohort,” Curtiss said. “It sets a high standard for all future participants in the program.”
Cohort 3’s participants are:
- Julia Curley, founder and CEO of EsterCycle
- Simon Julien, founder and CEO of Latimer Controls
- Heather Platt, director of Materials Engineering for Mana Battery
- Michael Solomentsev, founder and CEO of Palanquin Power
- Reamonn Soto, founder and CEO of Sensatek Propulsion Technology
- Spencer Whitman, cofounder and chief technology officer of Aquarry.
Curley, a former NREL researcher, founded EsterCycle based on one of her research projects at the laboratory. Her chemical recycling technology works by targeting ester bonds found in plastic bottles or food containers to break them down into their original building blocks, enabling circularity for bioplastics.
“NREL has the best resources, and I’m glad EsterCycle is going to continue here,” Curley said. “We’ve done a lot of great foundational work in the lab, and West Gate gives us the breathing room to fine tune the process and move the company forward. It’s a weird juxtaposition of wanting to take my time but also scale as fast as possible.”
Many plastics go unrecycled because there are many different kinds, and a process that may work for one may not work for another. But Curley’s innovation can break down mixtures of polymers, transforming complex and impure post-consumer waste to recycled plastics with excellent material properties.
Julien’s technology focuses on enhancing the operational flexibility and control of solar energy, enabling it to become a primary source of power for utilities rather than an alternative.
“Right now, solar is regarded as an unstable resource,” Julien said. “It’s a resource grid operators react to versus using as an asset, and that’s partially because of shading.”
Dynamic cloud shading causes power out of solar plants to be extremely intermittent and causes many grid operators to curtail or turn off these solar plants, prioritizing reliable fossil-fueled generators. Thus, a clear threshold of how much solar grid operators are willing to tolerate is emerging and restricting new solar installations. Julien’s software-only solution reduces curtailment by optimizing set points across the solar plant to evade shaded regions and allowing the operator to precisely dispatch the curtailed solar by understanding exactly how much potential is at the site at any moment.
“West Gate is a great opportunity for us to continue to bridge the gap between research-level developments and commercialization,” Julien said. “Latimer already has our first customer in Kauai, Hawaii, but there are new features and renovations we’d like to add in during the West Gate work to progress toward a better final product.”
Platt’s technology aims to make sodium-ion batteries a more viable solution than lithium iron phosphate (LFP) lithium-ion batteries. LFP batteries need large quantities of lithium, which makes large-scale grid storage difficult because there simply is not enough raw material being mined in the United States today. An additional benefit of sodium-based batteries is that they are safer than LFP batteries, so they do not come with the same risks inherent in LFP-based batteries.
“Sodium can be a fantastic solution for the grid in particular, because it costs much less and the raw materials are more plentiful domestically,” Platt said.
Mana Battery wants to start by selling the salt-based electrolytes to battery cell and pack creators, before eventually graduating to making the batteries as well.
“West Gate is a fantastic opportunity because NREL can help with lifetime modeling,” Platt said. “Mana Battery wants to promise a 20-year lifetime for our batteries, and we don’t have 20 years to collect data. By the end of the two-year program, we want to be piloting the electrolyte solution and selling small quantities to customers.”
The number of data centers around the world continues to grow, increasing the strain on electrical grids trying to keep up with their energy demands. Solomentsev’s technology aims to make data centers more energy efficient by rethinking the way power is converted and distributed within these massive infrastructures.
“The mental model that I give to people is a laptop charger,” he said. “It heats up when in use because there are losses inside. If you’re a data center, you have similar losses but at a much larger scale. Palanquin has an architecture that interconnects the power converters and loads in a way that the power converters have to do as little work—and incur the smallest losses—as possible.”
Solomentsev wants to change how the industry builds power conversion infrastructure. His innovative approach promises not only to improve efficiency but also to significantly cut operational costs for data centers globally.
“West Gate is exactly where I need to be,” he said. “This program offers unparalleled opportunities to refine my technology and scale my business in ways that simply wouldn’t be possible elsewhere.”
While Solomentsev focuses on data centers, Soto aims to make operating wind farms more efficient. His technology allows him to track the structural integrity of blades more rapidly, requiring less human power. It also shows if the blade’s pitch is misaligned, which can impact aerodynamics and power generation.
“For an average of 80 wind turbines, Sensatek can bring back 20,000 megawatts of power that was otherwise lost due to blade failure,” Soto said. “West Gate is a real opportunity to help us learn. We get a chance to build on the credibility that NREL provides from the researchers and then leverage those learnings so it has an impact.”
Soto will work with the wind turbines at NREL’s Flatirons Campus near Boulder, Colorado, where it already has one sensor in place, equivalent to deploying a million virtual accelerometers.
“We’ve hit the ground running,” he said. “We’re revolutionizing how the wind industry thinks about blades, and two years is going to go by fast. It takes a village to raise a kid, and it takes one to build a company.”
Whitman’s technology offers an innovative solution that combines carbon capture with the restoration of contaminated bodies of water, such as pit lakes created by mining operations.
“Aquarry is removing CO2 from the atmosphere and storing it in the lakes,” Whitman said. “By adding alkaline materials to the water, it creates a deficiency of CO2, turning the water into a sort of vacuum that pulls in atmospheric carbon. It’s going to improve the water quality and turn these pit lakes into revenue generators for mining companies while helping to address climate change.”
Whitman hopes his time with West Gate leads to a pilot program with a mining company, demonstrating how these abandoned lakes can be turned into assets that contribute to both environmental restoration and carbon management. With NREL’s resources and network, Whitman is optimistic about the impact his technology could have on the mining industry and beyond.
Cohort 3 innovators are harnessing West Gate’s unique position within NREL and the broader DOE ecosystem to refine their technologies and accelerate their path to market. As they reach new milestones, these advancements could reshape industries, drive substantial environmental benefits, and reinforce the U.S. leadership in the global clean energy transition.