2010 Winners
2008 Winners
1st Place: ($25,000)
MicroEnergy Credit Corporation
Columbia Business School
Roughly 2.5 billion people worldwide suffer from “energy poverty”; a lack of access to affordable, healthy, and environmentally friendly ways to heat, light, and provide income for their families. MicroEnergy Credits Corporation makes use of the carbon emissions cap-and-trade markets to help Microfinance institutions offer clean, efficient energy products to their customer base of over 250 million microentrepreneurs. This makes energy-efficient products like solar electric lighting, efficient cookstoves, and local biogas cooking fuel, accessible and affordable to poor households. MECC bridges the gap between the $30 Billion carbon markets and billions of people making clean energy choices.
2nd Place: ($10,000)
Bio Power Technology
Prasetiya Mulya Business School, Indonesia
Bio Power Technology (BPT) was initiated in response to electricity shortage in Indonesia. BPT involves local farmers and communities and uses agricultural waste to create electricity, thus creating business sustainability as well as social and financial return on investment. Supported by a powerful management team and an experienced board of advisors, BPT aspires to increase overall quality of life for Indonesian people.
3rd Place: ($5,000)
BioVolt
MIT Sloan School of Management
BioVolt’s mission is to bring low-cost, clean, renewable energy generation to off-grid rural, remote customers worldwide. The company has developed a microbial fuel cell (MFC) with innovative and patent-pending catalyst and membrane technology that directly converts cellulose into electricity. Our customers are renewable energy distributors and installers in developing countries that have access to novel credit/financing instruments and serve low-income communities that have difficulty accessing the electricity grid. Throughout this effort, BioVolt will develop the technology for higher efficiency and larger scale applications to fulfill its long term vision of becoming the industry leader in microbial fuel cell products.
Social Impact Assessment (SIA) Winner
SMART - Sustainable Marine Adventures and Responsible Tourism ($5,000)
Thammasat University, Thailand
SMART (Sustainable Marine Adventures and Responsible Tourism) is being launched to commercialize the successful environmental and social initiatives that have been generated by the Ecotourism Training Center (ETC) for the last three years. Founded originally as a grassroots relief effort to help affected people in areas devastated by the Asian Tsunami of 2004, ETC has proved that it can train low-income local inhabitants with high-level driving and reef conservation skills. SMART is the commercial arm of the ETS and provides dive tours in the lucrative market in Southeast Asia. The company will be launched in Thailand, which receives over 500,000 tourists who come to the country to specifically dive. SMART will build additional dive operations in neighboring Southeast Asia countries which have large or growing dive industries, have a need to develop sustainable environmental management practices in order to preserve its natural and tourism resources, and large discrepancies between incomes of local inhabitants and the large number of international visitors.