Bloomberg New Energy Finance has announced its selection of the 2016 New Energy Pioneers – those that it sees as innovators revolutionizing the energy sector. The diverse group represents a broad range of industries including advanced transportation, bioenergy, energy storage, solar, wind and energy smart technologies.

The 10 winners were recognized at the ninth annual Bloomberg New Energy Finance Summit, in New York City. By recognizing these innovators, BNEF hopes to illustrate and accelerate the profound transition that is underway in today’s energy system, towards new business models, technologies, market structures and commercial opportunities.

An independent panel of industry experts, assisted by BNEF’s analysts and technology experts selected the 10 winners from a large number of applicants from around the world. Each candidate was assessed against three criteria: potential scale, innovation and momentum. Each New Energy Pioneer has demonstrated a combination of innovative technologies and business models, substantive progress in its activities, and the potential for global scale.

Michael Wilshire, selection committee chair and head of analysis and transformation at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, said: “This year, we were impressed by the very strong set of candidates we received for the New Energy Pioneers program, and the range of activities that they cover – including solar, wind, storage, transport, bioenergy, energy smart technologies and machine learning.

"We were delighted to see the breadth of innovation that is happening in the industry and struck by the impact that those organizations could have on the energy system of the future. We are as always very grateful to our group of external judges on the selection committee who had the challenging task of narrowing the field of entries to a final set of 10 winners.”

The 2016 New Energy Pioneers are:

• 24M (USA) addresses the world’s need for affordable energy storage with a new, more cost-effective approach – semi-solid lithium-ion technology.
   
• AutoGrid Systems (USA) is a leading provider of intelligent and scalable software-as-a-service solutions that optimize supply and demand flexibility across a diverse portfolio of distributed energy resources.
   
• Emergya Wind Technologies (The Netherlands) is revolutionising wind energy by providing localised, distributed energy, at below grid power pricing, to a wide variety of customer segments.
   
• FirstFuel (USA) offers advanced data analytics and insights that help improve and optimize energy consumption in buildings.
   
• Mobisol (Germany), since 2012, has equipped more than 40,000 rural homes and businesses with solar home systems in Tanzania and Rwanda – making it one of Africa’s largest and fastest growing providers of off-grid solar systems to homes and businesses.
   
• Newlight Technologies (USA) uses carbon capture technology to convert greenhouse gas emissions into AirCarbon, a high-performance material that replaces a wide range of oil-based plastics by out-competing on price and performance.
   
• Sentient Science (USA) predicts failures in wind components before they happen, using materials science and high performance computing to determine the earliest point in time when cracks initiate and grow within rotating metal components.
   
• SolarKiosk (Germany) offers modular off-grid solar powered business centers, enabling last-mile distribution of products and services to untapped markets in remote rural areas worldwide.
   
• Verdezyne (USA) is a bio-based chemicals company, with a synthetic biology platform that produces a variety of chemicals from renewable, non-food sources.
   
• Vigilent (USA) is pioneering the use of internet-of-things, machine learning, and predictive analytics to deliver dynamic cooling management in mission critical environments such as data centres.