From technologies for extracting rare earth elements from plants to advanced membranes for water filtration, and from vertical-axis wind turbines to next-generation, long-lived flywheel energy storage, innovators bring exciting ideas to the fourth cohort of West Gate—NREL’s Lab-Embedded Entrepreneurship Program.
“We are supporting the vast landscape of energy technologies that enable resilient, secure, and affordable energy for the country,” West Gate Program Director Shelly Curtiss said. “Innovation across that landscape opens more avenues to more advanced energy systems.”
West Gate is one of four Lab-Embedded Entrepreneurship Program node and receives key support from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office. Innovators embed at NREL for two years and receive access to researchers and resources to help de-risk their technologies while undergoing specialized entrepreneurial training.
The fourth cohort includes:
- James Clegern, president and founder of KineticCore Solutions
- Kian Lopez, cofounder and CEO of OsmoPure Technologies
- Ying Sun, cofounder of Rare Flora
- Ian Brownstein, cofounder and CEO of XFlow Energy.
KineticCore Solutions’ James Clegern
Flywheel technology has been around for over 4,000 years—think a potter’s wheel. Modern flywheels are the power smoothing part of every internal combustion engine for nonelectric vehicles.
“The only technology that’s maybe older than ours is thermal energy storage with rocks being warmed by a fire,” Clegern said.
Clegern said that if you want to add energy storage capacity to flywheels, you must make them spin faster or you have to add mass. The flywheel’s traditional cylindrical shape limits how fast you can spin it, so modern flywheels must add mass to make them viable “kinetic batteries,” increasing costs.
Clegern wanted to bring down those costs and make flywheels competitive with chemical batteries, so he focused on optimizing a new flywheel structural design made with carbon composite that resembles a flying saucer (an ovoid shape). This new three-dimensional shape distributes stress better so that it can spin 450% faster than a traditional steel flywheel, increasing the energy stored while requiring up to 95% less mass. Less mass and an overall simpler design significantly reduce costs, making KineticCore kinetic batteries cost-effective for a wide variety of applications needing high power, long life and multiple battery cycles per day in a non-chemical package with greatly reduced fire, freezing, and explosive risks.
West Gate presents a great opportunity for testing KineticCore’s product prototype.
“NREL has great testing facilities and outstanding ‘third-party’ testing support,” Clegern said. “As a small business, that’s sometimes millions of dollars of equipment that a startup just cannot afford. Plus, NREL has a great reputation for supporting energy technologies and transportation, too.”
Clegern’s vision for the technology is integration into transportation and commercial/industrial facilities, where behind-the-meter peak power reductions can actively be engaged.
“We’re looking at applications across EV charging and advanced facility electrification where the needed grid high-power draw is expensive to implement and a higher cost to continuously use over a project’s lifetime. By allowing commercial and industrial customers to minimize their peak power demand, their electrical costs go down and local utility grids improve stability by having reduced power spikes,” he said.
OsmoPure Technologies’ Kian Lopez
Lopez’s technology takes inspiration from natural evaporation and condensation processes but departs from traditional thermal methods, which are rarely used in modern water treatment due to their high energy demands.
Taking advantage of evaporation and condensation to purify water, the OsmoPure technology applies pressure to drive water vapor across a membrane, offering a far more energy-efficient way to remove impurities. This approach is particularly promising for the semiconductor industry where ultrapure water is essential for maintaining product quality and system integrity.
The technology works by applying pressure across an air gap in the membrane, driving water vapor from the contaminated side to the clean side, where it condenses as purified water. Using pressure instead of heat to distill water makes the process more energy efficient—up to 10 times more efficient than state-of-the-art thermally driven distillation, Lopez said.
Through the West Gate program, OsmoPure will work at NREL to scale up the membrane’s active area, a key step toward making the technology viable for industrial deployment.
“We’re excited to work with NREL to build a pilot-ready membrane module by the end of the program,” Lopez said. “We have a pilot partner ready.”
The main goal of the work with West Gate will be to increase the membrane’s active area, thereby boosting water output to meet industrial demands. But Lopez said they also need to create the technology’s specifications necessary for industrial drop-in integration in ultrapure water treatment systems.
“It’s cool to see NREL’s holistic approach to technology development, where you start with the original idea for a material and see it through to large-scale manufacturing,” Lopez said. “It’s really exciting to be a part of that.”
Rare Flora’s Ying Sun
Rare Flora uses plant roots to recover valuable elements from low-grade ore, mine tailings, and contaminated soils. This process, known as phytomining, uses specialized plants called hyperaccumulators that naturally absorb metals through their roots and store them in their stems and leaves. Once harvested, these plants can be processed to extract metals like rare earth elements, nickel, and cobalt, all critical for technologies ranging from smartphones to electric vehicles.
Sun said the West Gate partnership will help Rare Flora scale up its extraction process and improve efficiency, not just to recover more critical elements but also to make the technology compatible with existing ore-processing systems.
“Plant biotechnology has already allowed us to develop entirely new crop varieties and innovative plant-based products,” Sun said. “Now, we have a unique opportunity to apply this technology to a new sector, using plants to meet a critical need in domestic security.”
Sun is particularly excited about West Gate because of its proximity to key technical partners. The Colorado School of Mines brings deep expertise in mining engineering, while Colorado State University offers agricultural insight that can support Rare Flora in refining plant–soil interactions.
“What’s exciting about West Gate is that it places us at the center of everything we need to build transformative partnerships and establish phytomining as a real solution in the United States,” Sun said. “Through this program, we’ll be able to take Rare Flora to the next level of technology readiness and better understand how our innovation fits into commercial metal supply chains.”
XFlow Energy’s Ian Brownstein
People have been harnessing the wind for energy for thousands of years. While horizontal-axis wind setups have been the dominant approach for the last half century, Brownstein built XFlow around the lesser-used vertical-axis wind energy.
Vertical axis turbines do not need to turn into the wind like traditional turbines, removing the need for yaw systems. XFlow has also demonstrated these turbines can operate efficiently without pitch systems. Together, these lead to a mechanically simple design. Brownstein said that reducing components and complexity also reduces costs.
XFlow has built multiple prototypes and has collected data to validate complex engineering models. Now, with NREL, they will validate their design and make sure that the design can handle predicted loads through accelerated fatigue testing.
The physics behind vertical axis wind energy is complicated. Cyclical behavior produces a lot of fatigue, Brownstein added, so designing a turbine that is highly efficient and boasts a long lifetime is a challenge. “That’s why the validation step is so important,” he said.
“NREL leads in distributed-wind analysis and testing, so I’m excited to work with NREL on validating our rotor design through accelerated fatigue testing,” Brownstein said. “I’m also excited about working with market analysis folks to locate untapped markets for when we are ready to take our product live.”
Brownstein hopes that validating the design at NREL will accelerate the turbine’s certification to international wind standards and XFlow’s path to market.
Cohort 4 of the West Gate program allows innovators to utilize laboratory expertise and resources to refine their technologies on the path to market applications. As these technologies are refined, they could improve industry energy efficiency and amplify U.S. energy leadership.
Learn more about the West Gate program.