Carnegie Mellon University
May 01, 2014

Whitacre receives "Resonate" award

Professor Jay Whitacre received one of the 2014 "Resonate" awards from the Resnick Sustainability Institute at Caltech. The award recognizes his achievements as founder of Aquion Energy, spun out of Carnegie Mellon University in late 2009. Since then this organization has raised over $100 Million, has over 130 employees, and is currently shipping products.

As the primary technical lead and CTO, Whitacre has been deeply involved with decisions ranging from basic materials selection, to the implementation of manufacturing equipment, to negotiating product placement with customers around the world. The potential for impact of this technology is extremely high, as it represents a legitimate pathway to being inexpensive enough (under $100/kWh) to enable the displacement of some traditional baseload fossil fuel sources by solar and wind.