What started off as a rainy and blustery San Francisco day soon turned into brilliant sunshine as hundreds of cleantech supporters congregated to hear from illuminating keynote speakers, meet the finalists and alumni companies in the Expo, and see demos by exceptional cleantech startups from around the world. This was also the day where we would find out which of the finalist teams from the USA and numerous other countries would be selected as overall winners in the world’s largest cleantech competition.

Shortlisted in the National Accelerator program were the five winners of each category.
• Energy Efficiency: 75F (Mankato, MN)
• Information & Communications Technologies BitGrid (Washington, DC)
• Agriculture-Water-Waste: Drinkwell (Boston, MA)
• Transportation: NG1 Technologies (Olive Branch, MS)
• Energy Generation: Maxout Renewables (Livermore, CA)
(I'm delighted to say I'll be providing PR services to Maxout as part of my sponsorship of the Cleantech Open.)

Shortlisted in the Global Ideas program: AutoAgronom (Israel), Gasliner (Latvia), RayGen (Australia), Waynergy (Portugal), and Ynsect (France).

The evening awards ceremony was emceed with insightful wit and good-natured ribbing by Hal Sparks who, it turns out, is a physics nerd and built his own 3D printer before they went mainstream. Hal, together with representatives from Cleantech Open sponsors Arrow Technologies, University of Phoenix, and Wells Fargo, introduced the other category winners.

National Accelerator People’s Choice: 75F
Global Ideas People’s Choice: Ynsect
VC Choice Award: Axiom Exergy
Alumnus Award: Dragonfly Systems (recently acquired by SunPower)
National Sustainability Award: Drinkwell

Grand Prize Winners

National Accelerator (USA)
First place: NG1 Technologies
Second place: Drinkwell
Third place: 75F

Global Ideas overall winner: AutoAgronom

The official news release is here.

I'm looking forward to working with some of these startups. It's been encouraging to see the overall quality of the participants in the Cleantech Open Accelerator increase every year since its founding in 2005..