C Riverside’s Office of Technology Partnerships, or OTP, has extended its initial two-year leadership of the Inland Empire in the Southern California Energy Innovation Network, or SCEIN, for a further five years. 

SCEIN has also awarded UCR a $450,000 grant to help regional clean energy entrepreneurs advance commercial ideas that address energy efficiency, renewable energy generation, energy storage, smart grid and energy services, and clean transportation.

“Clean energy research and entrepreneurial support for this sector are pillars of UCR’s commitment to sustainable energy and environmental management,” said project co-leader Rosibel Ochoa, UCR’s associate vice chancellor for Technology Partnerships. “This new five-year commitment, in partnership with Cleantech San Diego and as an integral part of UCR’s OASIS sustainability initiative, will enable us to support the growth of dozens of young clean-tech companies, which will be addressing the clean energy challenges faced right here in the Inland Empire.”

The Southern California Energy Innovation Network is a business incubator program for clean energy startups based in Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego, and Imperial counties that are developing technologies to help California meet its clean energy and environmental goals.  Entrepreneurs in this program gain access to the resources of regional partner organizations along with industry connections designed to help get their products to market faster. SCEIN is one of four innovation clusters the Energy Commission supports across the state as part of its California Entrepreneurial Ecosystem.

OTP entrepreneurs-in-residence Art Salyer and Doug Kollmyer are working to expand the SCEIN Inland Empire network by engaging with startups that can become candidates for the SCEIN accelerator. This year, they have recruited more than 30 regional organizations and companies with commitments to energy generation or storage to join with OTP and UCR’s Center for Environmental Research and Technology, or CE-CERT, in the new Inland Empire Energy Innovation Council.  

“CE-CERT’s mission is to be a recognized leader in environmental education, a collaborator with industry and government to improve the technical basis for regulations and policy, a creative source of new technology, and a contributor to a better understanding of the environment,” said Nicole Cleary, project co-leader and CE-CERT’s executive director. “We’re proud to be founding members of SCEIN and hope other organizations will join us.”

For more information on these initiatives, and OASIS, write to tp@ucr.edu.