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MIT announces center for sustainable energy

Print | Comments () Posted by David Beard, Globe Staff April 12, 2008 04:28 PM

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A new center dedicated to developing solar energy and energy efficiency will rise in Kendall Square, with a goal to stoke the state's growing clean techology sector.

The new MIT-Fraunhofer Center for Sustainable Energy Systems was announced Saturday by Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Susan Hockfield, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Ian Bowles, Massachusetts secretary of energy and environmental affairs.

The center, with $5 million in initial funding by the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative and $1 million from National Grid, is a partnership between the university and Germany's giant Fraunhofer Institute. About 60 jobs will be created at first, officials said, with hopes that innovations born and/or developed there can be licensed and spun off to for-profit companies.

Bowles said the state investment reflects Governor Deval Patrick's ''commitment to making Massachusetts the national leader’’ in clean energy. He described the German institute as a leader in alternative energy research, roughtly comparable in US terms to a combination of the Battelle research consortium, the National Scientific Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. "This should pay real dividends for us'' with a vast number of potential partners available in the area, he said.

One of those partners may be National Grid. Lawrence J. Reilly, senior vice president and general counsel of the energy company, said the institute will be working in ''the sweet spot'' in increasing energy efficiency, a focus for the company.

Bowles noted that the announcement came days after a Marlborough-based company, Evergreen Solar, said it was doubling its Massachusetts workforce. Evergreen, Bowles said, also has benefited from German investment in a huge solar project in Germany.

MIT professor Ernest J. Moniz, who directs the MIT Energy Initiative and will be an advisory board member of the new venture, is hoping that it will rapidly grow to a $10 million-a-year operation.

The German institute has several other branches in the United States, including a center for manufacturing innovation at Boston University, said William Hoffman of Fraunhofer USA. ''This one has significant promise of rapid growth,'' Hoffman said.