alphabet energy

Our co-founder Matt will be speaking this Friday, November 20th in a special seminar at the UC Berkeley Materials Science department. An outline of his talk is below. Feel free to join!

Over two-thirds of the energy we produced is wasted as heat. Waste heat is everywhere: factories, power plants, cars, buildings. More waste heat is produced worldwide–$4 trillion worth–than actual useful energy, but limitations in technology have prevented others from tapping into this enormous opportunity.

Of several technologies available to recover waste heat as electricity, thermoelectric materials are perhaps the most promising. As solid-state heat engines they can convert any temperature gradient into electricity directly, with no moving parts. However, to date have been prohibitively expensive. In 2009, Alphabet Energy, Inc. was founded by recent Berkeley Materials Science Ph.D. graduate Matt Scullin with professor Peidong Yang to commercialize a new thermoelectric material from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that will be 50x cheaper than existing ones. With it, profitably recovering wasted energy where it could otherwise never be used will become reality.

Join Matt as he discusses waste heat, recent trends in thermoelectric materials research, the “chasm” between laboratory R&D and marketable, manufacturable technology, and taking university IP to a startup that recently won two categories of the Clean Tech Open.

Location is room 348 in the Hearst Memorial Mining Building at 9:00am.