Bugs, batteries and blades: For Western New York startups, climate and clean tech is hot

Turning food waste into animal feed using bugs. 

Developing windmill blades that adapt to real-time wind conditions.  

Making electric vehicle charging more accessible. 

Radu Popa pours dried larvae onto an industrial separator for a demonstration at River Road Research. When in use, the separator is used to separate live larvae.

These are just a sampling of the things climate tech and clean tech companies growing right here in Western New York are doing. 

And these kinds of companies have so far been successful in the region, Launch NY President and CEO Marnie LaVigne said. 

Launch NY – a Buffalo-based startup incubator that supports early-stage companies across 27 Upstate New York counties – started its Emerging Cleantech Opportunity Incubator in 2018. 

Since then, the number of cleantech companies grew from less than 10% of Launch NY’s overall portfolio to around 20%. Currently, there are 35 companies in the incubator that employ 281 people and have raised $206 million from investors. Companies in the ECO Incubator have created double the jobs of the typical Launch NY company and raised many times more capital investments, LaVigne said. 

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These companies will be on the forefront of helping New York reach its aggressive climate goals, such as reaching 70% renewable electricity generation by 2030 and a 100% zero-emission electricity sector by 2040.

Dennis Elsenbeck, a sustainability and energy consultant for the law firm Phillips Lytle, thinks Western New York is the perfect region to lead this cleantech revolution. 

Energy was born here, Elsenbeck said. It’s part of the community’s DNA, dating back to the late 1800s when power companies in Niagara Falls were among the first to transmit electricity. 

Buffalo has room to grow as well, Elsenbeck said. Companies can bring jobs back to communities that need them by setting up shop in blighted neighborhoods. 

“You can revive our Rust Belt neighborhoods by thinking about a new green economy,” he said. 

And finally, Western New York has the technical and scientific knowledge base needed to innovate these ideas through its robust network of colleges and universities. 

“There’s a lot of money really piling into this category now because the challenges are hard and they’re going to take a lot of money to really solve them and bring them to market,” said Danielle Blount, manager of Launch NY’s ECO Incubator. 

These local startups are looking to carve a niche in the fast-growing market. 

Claudia Maldonado, founder and CEO of Atrevida Science, in front of the wind tunnel in the Structural Engineering Earthquake Simulation Laboratory at UB where her team developed and tested an innovative wind turbine technology the company is now scaling to market, Wednesday, Dec. 14, 2022. 

Atrevida Science

Born out of the research conducted by University at Buffalo professor John Hall, Atrevida Science is developing morphing windmill blades that can adapt to changes in wind.

The typical windmill blade is fixed, Atrevida Science CEO Claudia Maldonado said. And the size of windmill blades continues to grow to increase the amount of electricity produced. 

But as wind turbines get bigger, they begin to encounter more problems, Hall said. 

The largest windmill blades can be as long as a football field. They are expensive to produce and costly to fix if the wind turbine breaks down. 

“If the wind changes – there’s a gust, there’s a shear, there’s heavy loading occurring on the blade – there’s little (windmill operators) can do to adjust it,” Maldonado said. “So what they do is pull back production so they don’t damage components, they don’t create damaging stresses. What that relates to is less production, less energy produced. And that’s not good if we want those turbines to be out there producing the maximum amount of clean energy.”

Atrevida Science’s blades are 6% to 14% more efficient than traditional blades, based on simulations and experiments the team has done in UB’s wind tunnel, Hall said.

Atrevida’s morphing blades can reduce the load, or the force, exerted on a wind turbine, by up to 72%, Hall said. Reduced load leads to less wear and tear on the turbines. They won’t break down as frequently, so they can run more consistently and produce more electricity, Hall said. A typical wind turbine produces between 25% to 50% of its nameplate capacity.

Hall’s research has been going on since 2015. Maldonado came on board in 2018 to lead the research to commercialization.

The company is in the process of developing a digital twin, or a virtual model designed to accurately reflect a physical object, of their blades. The digital twin is complex and will mimic real-life conditions as accurately as possible, Hall said. 

Once that is complete, Atrevida will be able to take their research to windmill blade manufacturers to show them how their systems can be improved, Maldonado said. 

Atrevida will not be manufacturing blades. It’s very expensive, and there’s only a handful of manufacturers that produce windmill blades. 

What the company plans to do is sell its blade designs to manufacturers. 

Claudia Maldonado, founder and CEO of Atrevida Science, left, with her team, from left, Hailie Suk, principal investigator; James Roetzer, graduate student intern with NYSERDA; chief strategist Edward Tierney; and John Hall, assistant professor, department of mechanical and aerospace engineering, inside the wind tunnel in the Structural Engineering Earthquake Simulation Laboratory at UB where the team developed and tested an innovative wind turbine technology the company is now scaling to market, Wednesday, Dec. 14, 2022. 

“We have to first use modeling simulation tools to figure out the best design and then be able to deliver a design to the industry that makes it more efficient and reduces loading,” Hall said. 

Maldonado believes the industry will “pay dearly” for Atrevida’s technology. 

Atrevida Science has received almost $500,000 in grants from the National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Defense and UB, Maldonado said. 

During the first several months of 2023, Atrevida Science plans to start looking for investors. The company needs additional funds to hire the programmers and coders to do the digital modeling and simulations. 

Separated into containers, black soldier fly larvae busily consume food waste.

River Road Research

Radu Popa dug his hand into a pile of dirt and exposed hundreds of small, squirmy white larvae hiding under the surface. 

Those larvae would soon become an alternative protein source for animal feed through a process developed by River Road Research to turn food waste into a sustainable protein for livestock, fish and even pets.  

River Road Research, an offshoot of local energy company Noco, spent years researching how to dispose of food waste in an economically and ecologically positive way.

They came up with a patented process that relies on the lifecycle of the black soldier fly.

Radu Popa, head of science at River Road Research, holds a black soldier fly on his finger.

River Road Research grows black soldier flies to adulthood for their eggs. Once the eggs hatch, River Road feeds the larvae human-grade food waste, Popa, the company’s research director, explained.

Food waste can be anything from the residue produced from brewing beer or the tops of pineapples from facilities that core and can them, said Bobbie Thoman, director of sustainability and innovation at Noco. 

The larvae grow 2,000 times in size in less than three weeks, Popa said. Once they are grown, they are frozen and dried to be ground into protein meal, which has a consistency similar to cocoa powder. 

Some of the larvae will continue to the pupae stage and become adult soldier flies to keep the lifecycle going, Popa said. 

Black soldier flies are the best insects for this because their larvae eat pretty much anything, they grow fast and they are high in protein, Popa said. 

“We can create a much more sustainable and much healthier animal feed than currently on the market,” Thoman said. “The energy and space and water savings are astronomical compared to other protein production processes.”

River Road is now in the process of commercializing its technology. 

“We’ve proven that we can do it,” said Jim Newman, Noco Energy Corp. president. “Now we’re working on how to scale it up.”

Thoman said River Road is about 10 months out from commercialization. 

Once commercialization is up and running, River Road Research will start hiring people from the community to work in production, Newman said. The company, which is structured as a startup separate from Noco, has four full-time employees.  

River Road’s headquarters is in an old building on Leslie Street in East Buffalo that used to be home to a roller skate manufacturer, among other businesses. The building has since been revived and River Road is one of several tenants.

Joshua Aviv, CEO of SparkCharge, which won the 2018 edition of 43North. 

SparkCharge 

SparkCharge is revolutionizing the way electric vehicle owners charge their cars, partially from Buffalo. 

SparkCharge, which won $1 million from the 43North startup competition, manufactures its portable electric vehicle chargers at the Northland Central building in East Buffalo. 

The company makes two versions of its Roadie portable chargers: a 20-kilowatt version and a 125-kilowatt version. 

The Roadie chargers are not sold to individual electric vehicle owners. Rather, they are sold to businesses that can make the chargers available to electric vehicle owners, like in parking lots at grocery stores, malls and office buildings. 

SparkCharge also has an app called Currently. It’s like Uber or Doordash for electric vehicle owners, CEO Joshua Aviv said.

The 2018 winner of the 43North business plan competition appeared on the season premiere of the ABC-TV show “Shark Tank” on Friday. 

“The owner can select how much range they want, when they want it, where they want it,” Aviv said. “And with the push of a button, have it delivered. And that allows them to not have to worry about finding, sitting or waiting at an EV charging station.”

SparkCharge, which was founded in Syracuse and now is headquartered in Massachusetts, raised $23 million this year. In total, the company has raised $30 million, including a $1 million investment from the TV show “Shark Tank.” 

During the company’s time in Buffalo, Aviv realized Buffalo was the best place to manufacture its Roadie chargers due to the caliber of talent the company has been able to hire here. 

“The talent in Buffalo and the dedication of the people in Buffalo was something that we knew made Buffalo the right spot for us,” Aviv said. “A lot of the manufacturing and assembly and technician talent in Buffalo is third-, fourth-generation talent that have seen their parents or grandparents work in factories, building amazing products that have kept America moving forward. And it was an honor for us to continue that tradition.”

SparkCharge has a dozen employees in Buffalo and plans to expand to a larger manufacturing space to keep up with demand, Aviv said. 

“Demand for our current product is increasing like crazy,” he said. “We’ve had an absolute huge spike in demand not only for the product, but also for the charging service.”

Roadie sales have increased over 1,000% in the last year, Aviv said. The company also plans to expand its Currently app, which is available primarily in California and Texas, to five to 10 new markets in the next couple of months. 

SparkCharge’s Currently service is not yet available in Buffalo, but the company is working on it, Aviv said.

Must-read local business coverage that exposes the trends, connects the dots and contextualizes the impact to Buffalo’s economy.

I cover technology and startups for The Buffalo News. A North Tonawanda native, I returned to Buffalo in January 2022 after five years of reporting in Central New York and Wisconsin.

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