Solar Prize Round 4 Winner Journey (Text Version)

This is the text version of the video Solar Prize Round 4 Winner Journey.

Amy Atchley: I'm Amy Atchley, and my background is actually in teaching. But when COVID started, we decided to do our own thing, and so I gave my notice and finished out the school year and then jumped in full time or full time and a half to the r&d lab.

Narrator: Meet Amy Atchley, former teacher turned solar energy innovator and a proud member of the r&d lab. The r&d lab, along with AeroShield Materials, was recently named as a winning team in Round 4 of the American-Made Solar Prize.

Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and administered by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the American-Made Solar Prize offers everyone—from seasoned professionals to budding entrepreneurs—the opportunity to earn funding and support for their technologies.

the r&d lab’s winning idea was a metal residential roofing product, designed to make solar roofs longer-lasting, more aesthetically pleasing, and faster to install.

AeroShield Materials, the other Solar Prize Round 4 winner, is developing a flat-plate solar-thermal energy collector system with efficiencies greater than 45%.

By competing in this multi-phased competition, both teams earned themselves a total of $650,000 in cash prizes, plus $150,000 in technical vouchers to be used at national laboratories and other facilities. This funding can be used to further develop their technologies and gain more traction with industry.

But their ideas were still developing when the competition began.

Brian Atchley: At the Ready stage, we had had an idea but had no focus. We had the aesthetic bit built out, but we didn't have the mounting hardware solution figured out. And so that is the stuff that we kind of evolved through the prize.

Aaron Baskerville-Bridges: So, for us, this competition just absolutely accelerated the way that we went about our scale-up and our manufacturing and prototyping especially. I don’t think we would have made a prototype as early in our development if it wasn’t for the prize. And to ask from the judges to see something in the real world that worked and that had performance values that you could measure.

Narrator: Overall, both teams agree that their participation in the competition put them on a faster track to market.

Kyle Wilke: I do think that the Solar Prize really enabled us to move forward in a very different way than we would have otherwise. So, if we look at like an early-stage startup like Aero Shield, there’s other forms of funding like grants, SBIR maybe, like venture funding that all kind of come with different advantages and disadvantages. And something I think really unique about the Solar Prize in this is that it really let us focus on trying to get to a product.

Amy Atchley: It was definitely accelerated because of the Solar Prize. We couldn’t have moved as fast, partly because of the funding and then partly because of the support that we were receiving. You know, each round, it was nice to get the recognition, you know, that somebody saw something in what we were doing. And then of course to get that financial boost was super valuable, and the voucher is allowing us to be certified earlier than we could have otherwise.

Carlos Fernandez-Abali: It was a true accelerator. I mean, you cannot go to a group of angel investors out there in the market and put a high-risk endeavor like this together and get it funded. I mean, only something like this allows for, you know, ideas that are, that are good ideas but haven’t been tested to be put together and driven to the point where you can say, "OK, I am pretty confident we have a good solution here, something of true value."

Elise Strobach: It was, it’s huge. It’s game changing for us.

Narrator: Congratulations to AeroShield Materials and the r&d lab for winning the American-Made Solar Prize Round 4! Learn more about the competition, including upcoming opportunities to participate at americanmadechallenges.org/solarprize.