by Brianna Crandall — October 24, 2016 — The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) announced on Wednesday the grand prize winner in the crowdsourcing JUMP Smart Phone Call for Innovation. Industry partner CLEAResult, designer and manager of energy optimization services, provided a $3,000 prize and recognized the winner, selected by a panel of judges at the JUMP finals, during their Energy Forum in Austin, Texas.
Charles Xie, with the Concord Consortium in Concord, Massachusetts, won with the submission titled “Application to Create Infrared Street View.”
“Xie’s innovation combines existing infrared camera attachments for smartphones and crowdsourcing through school programs to create thermal maps of neighborhoods,” NREL Senior Engineer Lieko Earle explained. “This application will identify anomalies such as urban heat islands and targets for energy-efficiency upgrades.”
Xie will be awarded the cash prize as well as technical assistance in commercializing his smartphone application.
This innovation challenge was focused on ideas and topics related to residential buildings, although the solutions could be expanded in their application, and the JUMP program has calls for innovation out in other areas. Participants submitted original ideas to the JUMP crowdsourcing Web site, and five finalists were selected by the judges to present their concepts at the CLEAResult Energy Forum in front of the utility executives. The other finalists were:
- “unVolt — The Energy Saving Application” by Shariq Ali
- “Smartphones as Residential Energy Management Systems” by Justin Doh
- “EnergyABC Monster Game — Awareness Behavior Commitment” by Yang Gao
- “Consumer Alerts From Local Water Utilities to Impact Energy Use” by Carter Wall
“We were impressed by the diversity and thoughtfulness of the solutions put forth from all of the finalists,” said CLEAResult’s Emily Kemper, a judge on the panel. “Ultimately, the judges felt that Xie’s idea to use existing infrared technology would engage new participants in energy-efficiency programs in an immediate and impactful way.”
JUMP, launched by DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) last year, is an online crowdsourcing community that is co-hosted by NREL, ORNL and three other DOE national laboratories, as well as top companies and organizations in the buildings industry. JUMP stands for Join in the discussion, Unveil innovation, Motivate transformation and Promote technology-to-market. This platform provides an opportunity for innovators, particularly small entrepreneurs, to present ideas for new energy-efficient buildings technologies to private- and public-sector leaders in research and development.
