I wrote this story for Grist, where it first appeared.
Four months ago, General Electric fired up the imaginations of would-be entrepreneurs tooling away in garages everywhere when it offered up $200 million as part of an “Ecomagination Challenge” to crowdsource smart grid and renewable energy ideas.
On Tuesday, the global conglomerate announced the first set of winners, a dozen startups that collectively will secure $55 million in investment from GE and two venture firms collaborating with the company, Foundation Capital and RockPort Capital Partners.
The winners hail from everywhere from Silicon Valley to Sweden. Most are developing technology for the smart grid.
Others are focused on smart buildings. ClimateWell of Stockholm is making heating and cooling systems designed to operate not on electricity, but on solar-heated hot water. Soladigm of Milpitas, Calif., meanwhile, manufactures windows that incorporate electronics that allow them to darken — keeping buildings cool during sunny summer months. In winter, they lighten to trap the sun’s heat.
The payoff for these companies goes far beyond the cash. Given GE’s involvement in just about every aspect of the electricity distribution system as well as its smart home efforts, the global behemoth is a huge market for their services.
“We are working with these new partners to accelerate the development and deployment of these concepts on a scale that will help drive a cleaner, more efficient, and economically viable grid,” Jeff Immelt, GE’s chief executive, said in a statement. “The partnerships formed through this Challenge represent a new way of doing business at GE as we continue to expand our broad digital energy offering in the growing power grid market.”
GE also named five Innovation Challenge award winners that will each score $100,000. Among the most intriguing startups is Capstone Metering, a Texas company developing a smart water meter, and WinFlex of Israel, which is developing an inflatable wind turbine.
GE and its venture capital partners received nearly 4,000 entries in the contest.
“This is perhaps the largest participation in an open innovation challenge a company has ever generated,” GE executive Beth Comstock said on a conference call Tuesday.
Another executive noted that the company received many ideas from individuals, which will prove valuable to GE.
“It gives us insight into how consumers are thinking about energy and energy efficiency,” he noted.
Green Wombat 
Why is a Smart Water Meter “intriguing? I’m sure you are aware that such devices are in no way new and certainly Capstones is not. So what is the special element? It is certainly well hyped (for the last two years) by the company and may well be a “good” product in that it is reliable and functional in Texas. There are however many questions about its robustness that remain plus the fact that it allows remote turn off of water and inadvertent turn off of water and these are capabilities that have important social issues particularly for the poor attached. Shipping Product!
Also why do you think yet another horizontal windmill design that uses very non-robust inflated elements is in any way an answer for wind power which is not constrained by turbine or windmill design but by the erratic and inconsistent winds and the total lack of significant, central power storage.
This is not an early stage project since Winflex is building its third generation windmill, and has been funded over the last thirty years by the Israeli military. There is only a business risk here it is just another flavor of windmill, maybe better for some installations maybe not.
It appears to those of us who actually competed in this Challenge that GE chose companies that qualify as mezzanine start-ups as winners. No actual risks on new ideas are represented by any choice made by GE or its conservative bankers masquerading as VCs.
Neither of the these investments will do anything to help the environment, reduce greenhouse gases or solve the basic problems of adopting solar, wind and wave alternative energy.