Idealab founder Bill Gross started selling solar energy kits in 1973 at 15 years old. Now he’s leading solar tech company Heliogen
Idealab and Heliogen Founder Bill Gross speaks onstage during Vox Media’s 2022 Code Conference on September 08, 2022 in Beverly Hills, California.
Jerod Harris | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images
Bill Gross is best known for founding the technology incubator Idealab in 1996, after starting a handful of companies in software, education tech and online services spaces.
In the quarter-century since, Idealab has has started more than 150 companies and had more than 45 successful exits. Today, Gross devotes virtually all of his time to being the CEO of clean energy company Heliogen, which he launched out of Idealab in 2013, scoring Bill Gates as an early investor.
But Gross has always been a climate tech entrepreneur. He’s just had to wait for the world to catch up with him a bit.
He actually started a solar device company when he was in high school, long before he got into software, and the money he made helped him pay for college.
Gross grew up in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. When he was 15, in 1973, gas was rationed after OPEC imposed an oil embargo against the United States in order to punish the U.S. for providing support to Israel in the Arab-Israel war.
“You only could buy five dollars of gasoline per day. And I remember that my mother couldn’t buy enough gasoline to drive me to school,” Gross told CNBC in a video interview earlier in the fall.
So Gross had to ride his bike to high school. “As I’m riding both ways on the bicycle, I’m sitting here thinking, ‘It’s crazy that there’s somewhere else in the world that could decide to cut off your fuel supply, the thing that people need for their livelihood.’ I didn’t understand anything about climate change, or energy or anything. I just thought, ‘Someone else could do that?! That’s crazy.'”
This thought is still relevant now almost 50 years later, as Russia has cut off supplies of gas it is sending to Europe in response to the Ukraine war.
Gross went to the library after school to read about alternative renewable forms of energy such as solar energy and wind energy in the likes of Popular Science or Scientific American magazines. He got excited about the idea of renewable energy, had just taken trigonometry in school and used his newfound knowledge of both to make a couple of devices based on the idea of catching the sunlight and concentrating it.
Notes from when Bill Gross was a teenager developing the solar device that he went on to sell by mail in the 1970’s.
Photo courtesy Bill Gross
One device he made was a parabola-shaped solar concentrator that could be used to create a solar oven or solar cooker. The other was a Stirling engine, which converts heat energy into kinetic or mechanical energy.
“Because I was reading Popular Science magazine, I saw people used to take out little ads in the back,” Gross told CNBC. “And I had $400 of bar mitzvah money leftover, so I took out a small add in the back of Popular Science advertising ‘Kits and plans to make your own solar concentrator,’ and I started selling them!”
He would go on to sell 10,000 of these plans and kits starting at $4 apiece. Personal computers didn’t yet exist, so he typed the material on a typewriter and made the drawings himself by hand.
An advertisement that Bill Gross placed in the back of Popular Science magazine to advertise his solar devices company. The plans Gross sold were $4.00, but the ad says 25 cents to get a catalog, because he had a few different offerings.
Courtesy Bill Gross
He put what he made towards his college tuition. People from all over the country bought the kits and would send Gross a check or cash. It was his first foray into entrepreneurship, which was exciting, he said, and the experience served to change the trajectory of his life in other ways, too.
“I was really passionate about it back then. It really affected my life,” Gross told CNBC. “I wrote about that little business I started — it was called Solar Devices — on my application to college and it got me into CalTech. So it probably had a huge impact on my direction.”
For a long time, ‘nobody cared’
Gross studied mechanical engineering at CalTech while continuing to run the Solar Devices business during his first year, but then college got too demanding and he couldn’t keep up with running the business. Gross graduated from CalTech in 1981, right around the time IBM released its first mass-market personal computer.
Solar Devices order tracking from Bill Gross, circa 1970’s.
Photo courtesy Bill Gross
“I have these two seminal things that happen in my life: The Arab oil embargo and now the PC is invented basically on my day of graduation in 1981,” Gross told CNBC. “So I went down and bought an IBM PC. And I started learning how to program and I had a detour for 20 years doing software.”
Gross’ detour into software started in the early 1980’s when he wrote accounting software inside of Lotus 1-2-3 to help manage his business making and selling high-performance loudspeakers. He started selling that software for $695. Gross, his brother and two CalTech friends came up with a natural language interface to Lotus 1-2-3, which they showed off at a Las Vegas tech show in 1985. Lotus ended up acquiring the product (and the four of them) for $10 million.
Gross later founded an educational software company and sold it to Vivendi for $90 million, then started tech incubator Idealab at the dawn of the dot-com boom. In the early 2000s, he decided to begin to pivot back to climate tech, this time with some money in the bank.
Bill Gross graduating from college.
Photo courtesy Bill Gross.
He started doing research and development in the space, but there wasn’t enough demand for solar energy tech. “I was way too early. No one cared,” Gross told CNBC.
“I remember I was working on this when Al Gore came out with ‘Inconvenient Truth.’ Still, nobody cared. I remember working on this in 2008 during the recession, nobody cared. I remember in the early 2010, 2012, people started talking about it, but there was no Greta yet,” Gross said, referring to the climate activist Greta Thunberg, who started protesting a lack of climate change action in 2018. “There was no movement. And certainly there was no inflation Reduction Act, which is a game changer,” Gross said.
In 2010, Gross heard Bill Gates speak at a TED conference about needing to make energy and energy storage cheaper. After that talk, Gross approached Gates and shared his idea of using computational power to improve the efficiency of solar power. Gates ended up investing in Gross’s idea, seeing the potential to replace many industrial processes that require high heat and burn fossil fuels to get there.
In 2013, Gross launched Heliogen, which uses artificial intelligence to position a collection of mirrors located in a circle around a central tower to reflect the sunlight back with maximum impact.
One critical component of Heliogen’s approach is built-in energy storage. One limiting factor for solar energy is its intermittency, which means it only delivers power when the sun is shining. But Heliogen stores energy as heat in a thermos of rocks — something traditional solar panels cannot do without batteries, as they turn the sun’s rays immediately into electricity.
“We’re gathering the energy when the sun is out. But we’re delivering the energy continuously because the energy is coming out of the rock bed,” Gross told CNBC. “And basically we are recharging the rock bed, like you would recharge your battery. The difference is a battery expensive, and rock bed is cheap.”
In 2019, Heliogen announced it had successfully concentrated solar energy to temperatures over 1,832 degrees Fahrenheit.
A bird’s eye view of the concentrated solar technology Heliogen is working to build and commercialize. This is the demonstration project in Lancaster, Calif.
Photo courtesy Heliogen
“Heliogen is the culmination of my life’s work,” Gross told CNBC, because it uses both software and renewable energy expertise.
The company had its first prototype in 2015, “but then, still, nobody cared. Couldn’t get any customers,” Gross said. He did get a couple of customers, but, it was still “struggling, struggling, struggling.” By 2019, Heliogen had the first large-scale system built and this time, “the world went crazy,” Gross said. “We got so much press and publicity, and customers started calling us all over who wanted to replace fossil fuels with concentrated sunlight, and then Covid hit,” Gross said.
After a bit of a Covid slowdown, interest started picking up again as the urgency around decarbonizing mounted and as energy price volatility made companies rethink their energy supply strategies, Gross said. The company went public via SPAC in a deal that landed $188 million of gross cash proceeds to Heliogen and on Dec. 31, 2021, Heliogen started trading.
The company is not yet profitable, losing $108 million in the first nine months of the year, but that’s expected as the company scales, according to Gross.
“We projected we would run at a loss for the few years of operation as we drive down the cost with volume production and the renewable energy production learning curve,” Gross told CNBC.
Heliogen’s first commercial grade project is in the final stages of permitting and aims to break ground next year in Mojave, California. The concentrated solar field is funded with $50 million from Woodside Energy, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Australian energy producer Woodside Petroleum, and $39 million from the U.S. Department of Energy.
This is the demonstration project in Lancaster, Calif. of the the concentrated solar technology Heliogen is working to build and commercialize.
Photo courtesy Heliogen
While Gross has been ahead of the curve for most of his climate career, he’s confident the industry is catching up with him now. As the urgency surrounding climate change has become more widely understood, corporate executives face pressure from stakeholders to clean up their corporate emissions.
“But then the final straw was price of fossil fuels went up like crazy. The price of fossil fuels after Russia invaded Ukraine is a game changer,” Gross told CNBC. “Now, it’s not just for CO2 emissions, now you can save money. Now, this is the ultimate thing, which is make the energy transition be about reducing your cost, not about increasing your cost.”
There’s no time to waste.
“When I was a teenager, there was 320 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere,” said Gross, who is now 64 years old. “And today, there are 420.”
Environment
‘Repowering’ era for America’s aging wind energy industry begins, despite Trump’s effort to kill it
Jeffrey Sanders / 500px | 500px | Getty Images
On Inauguration Day, President Donald Trump issued an executive order indefinitely halting permits for new onshore wind energy projects on federal land, as well as new leases for offshore wind farms in U.S. coastal waters. The action not only fulfilled Trump’s “no new windmills” campaign pledge, but struck yet another blow to the wind industry, which has been hit hard over the past few years by supply chain snags, price increases upending project economics, public opposition and political backlash against federal tax credits, especially those spurring the fledgling offshore wind sector.
Nonetheless, the nation’s well-established onshore wind industry, built out over several decades, is generating nearly 11% of America’s electricity, making it the largest source of renewable energy and at times last year exceeding coal-fired generation. On April 8, the fossil-fuels-friendly Trump administration took measures to bolster coal mining and power plants, but as the infrastructure driving wind energy ages, efforts to “repower” it are creating new business opportunities for the industry’s key players.
This repowering activity has emerged as a bright spot for the wind industry, giving a much-needed boost to market leaders GE Vernova, Vestas and Siemens Gamesa, a subsidiary of Munich-based Siemens Energy. Following several challenging years of lackluster performance — due in particular to setbacks in both onshore and offshore projects — all three companies reported revenue increases in 2024, and both GE Vernova and Siemens stock have moved higher.
GE Vernova, spun off from General Electric a year ago, led overall onshore wind installations in 2024, with 56% of the U.S. market, followed by Denmark’s Vestas (40%) and Siemens Gamesa (4%).
GE Vernova stock performance over the past one-year period.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, installed wind power generating capacity grew from 2.4 gigawatts (GW) in 2000 to 150.1 GW as of April 2024. Although the growth rate for launching new greenfield onshore wind farms has slowed over the last 10 years, the U.S. is still poised to surpass 160 GW of wind capacity in 2025, according to a new report from energy research firm Wood Mackenzie.
There currently are about 1,500 onshore wind farms — on which more than 75,600 turbines are spinning — across 45 states, led by Texas, Iowa, Oklahoma, Illinois and Kansas. Virtually all of the wind farms are located on private land, and many of the largest ones are owned and operated by major energy companies, including NextEra Energy, RWE Clean Energy, Pattern Energy, Clearway Energy, Xcel Energy and Berkshire Hathaway‘s MidAmerican Energy, which generates 59% of it renewable energy from wind, including 3,500 turbines operating across 38 wind projects in Iowa.
A growing number of the turbines are 20-plus years old and nearing the end of their lifecycle. So increasingly, operators have to decide whether to upgrade or replace aging turbines’ key components, such as blades, rotors and electronics, or dismantle them altogether and erect new, technologically advanced and far more efficient models that can increase electricity output by up to 50%.
“What’s becoming clear is that more and more of the U.S. installed base [of onshore turbines] has exceeded its operational design life,” said Charles Coppins, research analyst for global wind at Wood Mackenzie, “and now operators are looking to replace those aging turbines with the latest [ones].”
To date, approximately 70 GW of onshore wind capacity has been fully repowered in the U.S., according to Wood Mackenzie, while an additional 12 GW has been partially repowered. The firm estimates that around 10,000 turbines have been decommissioned and that another 6,000 will be retired in the next 10 years, Coppins said.
Damaged wind turbine that was first hit by a tornado then lightning.
Ryan Baker | Istock | Getty Images
Beyond the fact that aged-out turbines need to be upgraded or replaced, repowering an existing wind farm versus building a new site presents economic benefits to operators and OEMs. To begin with, there’s no need to acquire property. In fact, in certain situations, because today’s turbines are larger and more efficient, fewer turbines are needed. And they’ll generate additional electricity and have longer lifecycles, ultimately delivering higher output at a lower cost.
Even so, “there are some limitations on how much capacity you could increase a project by without having to go through new permitting processes or interconnection queues” to the power grid, said Stephen Maldonado, Wood Mackenzie’s U.S. onshore analyst. As long as the operator is not surpassing the allowed interconnection volume agreed to with the local utility, they can add electricity to the project and still send it to the grid.
Public opposition, Maldonado said, may be another hurdle to get over. Whether it’s a new or repower wind project, residents have expressed concerns about environmental hazards, decreased property values, aesthetics and general anti-renewables sentiment.
RWE, a subsidiary of Germany’s RWE Group, is the third largest renewable energy company in the U.S., owning and operating 41 utility-scale wind farms, according to its CEO Andrew Flanagan, making up 48% of its total installed operating portfolio and generating capacity, which also includes solar and battery storage.
One of RWE’s two repower projects underway (both are in Texas), is its Forest Creek wind farm, originally commissioned in 2006 and featuring 54 Siemens Gamesa turbines. The project will replace them with 45 new GE Vernova turbines that will extend the wind farm’s life by another 30 years once it goes back online later this year. Simultaneously, RWE and GE Vernova are partnering on a new wind farm, immediately adjacent to Forest Creek, adding another 64 turbines to the complex. When complete, RWE will deliver a total of 308 MW of wind energy to the region’s homes and businesses.
Flanagan noted that the combined projects are related to increased electricity demands from the area’s oil and gas production. “It’s great to see our wind generation drive the all-of-the-above energy approach,” he said. What’s more, at its peak, the repower project alone will employ 250 construction workers and over its operating period bring in $30 million in local tax revenue, he added.
In turn, the twin projects will support advanced manufacturing jobs at GE Vernova’s Pensacola, Florida, facility, as well as advancing the OEM’s repower business. In January, the company announced that in 2024 it received orders to repower more than 1 GW of wind turbines in the U.S.
Koiguo | Moment | Getty Images
Siemens Gamesa has executed several large U.S. repowering projects, notably MidAmerican’s expansive Rolling Hills wind farm in Iowa, which went online in 2011. In 2019, the company replaced 193 older turbines with 163 higher-capacity models produced at its manufacturing plants in Iowa and Kansas.
Last year, Siemens Gamesa began repowering RWE’s 17-year-old Champion Wind, a 127-MW wind farm in West Texas. The company is upgrading 41 of its turbines with new blades and nacelles (the housing at the top of the tower containing critical electrical components) and adding six new turbines.
In early April, Clearway announced an agreement with Vestas to repower its Mount Storm Wind farm in Grant County, West Virginia. The project will include removing the site’s 132 existing turbines and replacing them with 78 new models. The repower will result in an 85% increase in Mount Storm’s overall electricity generation while using 40% fewer turbines.
Preparing for ‘megatons’ of turbine recycling and tariffs
Another benefit of repowering is invigorating the nascent industry that’s recycling megatons of components from decommissioned turbines, including blades, steel, copper and aluminum. Most of today’s operational turbines are 85% to 95% recyclable, and OEMs are designing 100% recyclable models.
While the majority of mothballed blades, made from fiberglass and carbon fiber, have historically ended up in landfills, several startups have developed technologies recycle them. Carbon Rivers, for example, contracts with the turbine OEMs and wind farm operators to recover glass fiber, carbon fiber and resin systems from decommissioned blades to produce new composites and resins used for next-generation turbine blades, marine vessels, composite concrete and auto parts.
Veolia North America, a subsidiary of the French company Veolia Group, reconstitutes shredded blades and other composite materials into a fuel it then sells to cement manufacturers as a replacement for coal, sand and clay. Veolia has processed approximately 6,500 wind blades at a facility in Missouri, and expanded its processing capabilities to meet demand, according to David Araujo, Veolia’s general manager of engineered fuels.
Trump’s new-project moratorium isn’t his only impediment to the wind industry. The president’s seesaw of import tariffs, especially the 25% levy on steel and aluminum, is impacting U.S. manufacturers across most sectors.
The onshore wind industry, however, “has done a really good job of reducing geopolitical risks,” said John Hensley, senior vice president for markets and policy analysis at the American Clean Power Association, a trade group representing the clean energy industry. He cited a manufacturing base in the U.S. that includes hundreds of plants producing parts and components for turbines. Although some materials are imported, the investment in domestic manufacturing “provides some risk mitigation to these tariffs,” he said.
Amidst the headwinds, the onshore wind industry is trying to stay focused on the role that repowering can play in meeting the nation’s exponentially growing demand for electricity. “We’re expecting a 35% to 50% increase between now and 2040, which is just incredible,” Hensley said. “It’s like adding a new Louisiana to the grid every year for 15 years.”
GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik recently told CNBC’s Jim Cramer that the growth of the U.S.’s electric load is the largest since the industrial boom that followed the end of the second world war. “You’ve got to go back to 1945 and the end of World War II, that’s the infrastructure buildout that we’re going to have,” he said.
As OEMs and wind farm developers continue to face rising capital costs for new projects, as well as a Trump administration averse to clean energy industries, “repowering offers a pathway for delivering more electrons to the grid in a way that sidesteps or at least minimizes some of the challenges associated with all these issues,” Hensley said.
Capable of delivering up to 1,200 kW of power to get electric commercial trucks back on the road in minutes, the new ABB MCS1200 Megawatt Charging System is part of an ecosystem of electric vehicle supply equipment (EVSE) that ABB’s bringing to this year’s ACT Expo.
ABB E-mobility is using the annual clean trucking conference to showcase the expansion of its EVSE portfolio with three all-new charger families: the field-upgradable A200/300 All-in-One chargers, the MCS1200 Megawatt Charging System for heavy-duty vehicles shown (above), and the ChargeDock Dispenser for flexible depot charging.
The company said its new product platform was built by applying a computer system-style domain separation to charger design, fundamentally improving subsystem development and creating a clear path forward for site and system expansion. In other words, ABB is selling a system with both future-proofing and enhanced dependability baked in.
“We have built a system by logically separating a charger into four distinct subsystems … each functioning as an independent subsystem,” explains Michael Halbherr, CEO of ABB E-mobility. “Unlike conventional chargers, where a user interface failure can disable the entire system, our architecture ensures charging continues even if the screen or payment system encounters issues. Moreover, we can improve each subsystem at its own pace without having to change the entire system.”
The parts of ABB’s new EVSE portfolio that have been made public so far have already been recognized for design excellence, with the A400 winning the iF Gold Award and both the A400 and C50 receiving Red Dot Design Awards.
New ABB chargers seem pretty, good
ABB says the systemic separation of its EVSE enhances both reliability and quality, while making deployed chargers easier to diagnose and repair, in less time. Each of the chargers’ subsystems can be tested, diagnosed, and replaced independently, allowing for quick on-site repairs and update cycles tailored to the speed of each systems’ innovation. The result is 99% uptime and a more future-proof product.
“The EV charging landscape is evolving beyond point products for specific use cases,” continued Halbherr. “By implementing this modular approach with the majority of our R&D focused on modular platforms rather than one-off products … it reduces supply chain risks, while accelerating development cycles and enabling deeper collaboration with critical suppliers.”
Key markets ABB is chasing
- PUBLIC CHARGING – with the award winning A400 being the optimal fit for high power charging from highway corridors to urban locations, the latest additions to the A-Series All-in-One chargers offer a field-upgradable architecture allowing operators to start with the A200 (200kW) with the option to upgrade to 300kW or 400kW as demand grows. This approach offers scalability and protects customer investment, leading to Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) savings over 10 years.
- PUBLIC TRANSIT AND FLEET – the new Charge Dock Dispenser – in combination with the already in market available HVC 360 – simplifies depot charging with a versatile solution that supports pantograph-, roof-, and pedestal charging options with up to 360kW of shared power and 150m/490 ft installation flexibility between cabinet and dispensers. The dispenser maintains up to 500A output.
- HEAVY TRUCKS – building the matching charging infrastructure for commercial vehicles and fleets represents a critical innovation frontier on our journey to electrify transportation. Following extensive collaboration with industry-leading truck OEMs, the MCS1200 Megawatt Charging System delivers up to 1,200kW of continuous power — 20% more energy transfer than 1MW systems — providing heavy-duty vehicles with purpose-built single-outlet design for the energy they need during mandatory driver breaks. To support other use cases, such as CCS truck charging, a dual CCS and MCS option will also be available.
- RETAIL – the award winning C50 Compact Charger complements the family as the slimmest charger in its category at just 9.3 inches depth, optimized for convenient charging during typical one-hour retail experiences. With its large touch display, the C50 takes the award-winning A400 experience even further — setting a new standard for consumer experience and very neatly echoing our own take on that “Goldilocks” timing zone for commercial charging.
ABB says that the result of its new approach are chargers that offer 99% plus uptime — a crucial statistic for commercial charging operations and a key factor to ensuring customer satisfaction. The new ABB E-mobility EVSE product family will be on display for the first time at the Advanced Clean Transportation Expo (ACT Expo) in Anaheim, California next week, then again at Power2Drive in Munich, Germany, from May 7-9.
Electrek’s Take
The ACT Expo is one of – if not the most important sustainable trucking event in North America, featuring all the big names in heavy trucks, construction equipment, material handling, infrastructure – even Tier 1 suppliers. Mostly, though, it’s many fleet buyers’ only chance to test drive these zero emission trucks before writing a big PO (which just makes it even more important).
Electrek will be there again this year, and we’ll be bringing you all the latest news from press events and product reveals as it happens.
SOURCE | IMAGES: ABB E-mobility.
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Along with Tennessee Tech, Tennessee-based ultralight aircraft company Whisper Aero has secured a $500,000 grant to help advance the company’s innovative electric jet motor concept off the drawing board and onto the testing phase.
Earlier this month, the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development (TNECD) announced plans to award $500,000 to Tennessee Tech and Whisper Aero through the Transportation Network Growth Opportunity (TNGO) initiative.
“We look forward to using these award dollars to place students in internships working directly with Whisper Aero leaders,” said Tennessee Tech President Phil Oldham. “By learning from an electric propulsion innovator like Whisper Aero, our students will gain invaluable perspective and can take what they have learned in the classroom and apply it right here in Tennessee.”
The grant will see a Whisper Aero glider fitted with a pair of the company’s eQ250 electric-powered jet “propulsors” for UltraQuiet flight. Tennessee Tech faculty and students will carry out copper-bird ground testing to ensure the safe integration of engines, batteries, and controllers, and kickstart Tennessee Tech’s new Crossville Mobility Incubator.
Those propulsors, by the way, are super cool.
Whisper Aero’s main claim to fame is its innovative UltraQuiet WhisperDrive (above). It’s effectively an electrically spun ducted fan jet engine that uses a large number of stiff composite fan blades inside a lightweight, acoustically treated duct. With so many blades, the Whisper Aero propulsor can push more air than a conventional prop while spinning much more slowly. As such, the “blade passage frequency” moves up to more than 16,000 Hz – outside the range of most human hearing but not, supposedly, high enough to freak out the beagles.
The Whisper Aero ultralight is effectively an Aériane Swift3 glider fitted with a pair of Whisper’s eQ250 propulsors, each capable of up to 80 lbs. of thrust. The Ultralight has a wingspan of over 40 ft with a maximum L/D of 35:1 and can be stressed to a design loading of +6/-4g, making it capable of some pretty impressive acrobatic feats.
The Swift3 glider is designed for a low speed, low power cruising speed of 45–55 knots with “just” 6.5 hp. Power-off glides from a few hundred feet showed a low sink rate, and a climb rate of 1,250 ft/min with full self-launching power (in other words: the Whisper glider doesn’t have to be towed by a launch vehicle, like a conventional ultralight glider).
Quiet cool
Range under full power is about 109 miles with current battery tech, but it’s expected that range under the latest EPiC 2.0 energy batteries would rise to nearly 170 miles.
Nathan Millecam, CEO of Electric Power System, said, “EPiC 2.0’s leap in energy density and thermal performance has enabled a significant increase in range, a clear validation of our next-gen cell technology. We are impressed by what the Whisper team continues to achieve in advancing electric aviation.”
The press release concludes explaining that flight tests are expected to show that the Whisper Aero glider can be flown, “a few hundred feet away from neighborhoods without any disturbances, while carrying a 220 lbs. payload with full range,” which is all kind of ominous in today’s political climate, but still pretty neat from a purely tech perspective.
The TNGO grant follows a separate grant from NASA awarded last year, though that grant aims to develop the eQ250s – not as a propulsion system, but as a key component in future spacecraft ventilation systems.
Tennessee Tech announces TNGO grant
With support from TNECD’s Transportation Network Growth Opportunity (TNGO) initiative, Tennessee Tech University and Whisper Aero are partnering to advance next-generation propulsion technology in the aerospace industry. This collaboration will enhance aerospace research and workforce development, ensuring Tennessee remains a leader in cutting-edge mobility solutions.
SOURCE | IMAGES: TNECD; via eVTOL Insights, New Atlas.
If you’re considering going solar, it’s always a good idea to get quotes from a few installers. To make sure you find a trusted, reliable solar installer near you that offers competitive pricing, check out EnergySage, a free service that makes it easy for you to go solar. It has hundreds of pre-vetted solar installers competing for your business, ensuring you get high-quality solutions and save 20-30% compared to going it alone. Plus, it’s free to use, and you won’t get sales calls until you select an installer and share your phone number with them.
Your personalized solar quotes are easy to compare online and you’ll get access to unbiased Energy Advisors to help you every step of the way. Get started here.
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