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PORTLAND — A couple of decades ago, something weird started happening in Maine: Restaurants suddenly became good — like, award-winning, national-recognition good.
Attracted by a combination of low overhead costs, ample local seafood, and farm-fresh produce, big city chefs packed their knives and set up shop in Portland. And lo and behold, a foodie town was born.
Now, Maine is hoping to strike gold a second time, once again drawing on the promise of comparatively low costs and local resources — this time, in the climate tech sector.
This corner of the tech world, focusing on advancements to combat climate change, is well established in Silicon Valley, Boston, greater Denver, and New York. But Maine officials and experts say the state has something unique to offer, including its vast forests and history of forest industries, a large network of shuttered former mills, and a lengthy coastline in a part of the country considered ideal for offshore wind development.
This enthusiasm for Maine was on display on a recent weeknight in downtown Portland, as a hundred or so young-to-middle-aged entrepreneurs huddled around high-top tables and charcuterie spreads for the launch of the Roux Institute’s ClimateTech incubator. It’s an initiative of Northeastern University that will focus on breakthrough technologies to address the climate crisis. Among the companies cropping up here are SeaDeep, which uses advanced computer vision and machine learning to map, explore, and monitor underwater resources; Elipsa, which is using artificial intelligence to make industrial equipment more efficient and less carbon-intensive; and RoamR, a micromobility platform for management of electric fleets.
The “special sauce,” says Warren Adams, director of the new incubator, is providing a physical space for innovators, investors, and policy makers to toss ideas around and support each other’s businesses. Up until now, he said, local innovators have been working out of coffee shops and home offices, with little support. “We think the whole clean tech ecosystem is going to ignite, in a good way,” Adams said.
So far, the 12 startups at the incubator have garnered a total of $24 million in investments, from groups including the Grantham Foundation, Maine Technology Institute, the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, and Lowercarbon Capital.
Joseph Curtatone, president of the Alliance for Climate Transition (formerly known as the Northeast Clean Energy Council), said the growth in Maine is something the entire region is watching. “Maine has been a leader on things like offshore wind, energy efficiency, and so forth,” he said, suggesting that the state was ready to take the next step forward.
As mayor of Somerville from 2004 to 2022, Curtatone helped lay the groundwork for the successful climate tech incubator Greentown Labs. For startups today, especially smaller ones, Maine’s “low cost of entry” and proximity to the well-established network and funding center of Boston are attractive, he said.
“You have this huge ecosystem in Boston that is doing really well,” said Monique Guimond, vice president of capital formation at Engine Ventures, a Boston-based tech investment firm. “There’s billions of dollars of private capital going into companies that are in a really critical moment of scaling.”
But when those companies are looking to scale, whether a demonstration project or a manufacturing plant, they’re not necessarily going to do that in a major downtown, she said.
“And so Maine has a lot going for it, in that it’s in that two-, three-, four-hour radius from Boston,” she said. “These companies need physical space.”
It won’t all be easy. Privately, some express something between skepticism and cautious optimism, noting that Maine’s climate tech ecosystem could be limited by its lack of access to venture capital funding, and the fact that it can take decades to create a leading research community.
But momentum in Maine is building.
In August, the startup Form Energy was awarded $147 million from the federal Department of Energy to build an 85-megawatt battery system that can hold enough energy from wind and solar to last days. It was constructed at the site of a former paper and pulp mill in Lincoln, Maine.
At another former mill, in Madison, Maine, TimberHP is producing building insulation from wood chips, which, according to the company’s website, are renewable, recyclable and “carbon negative” because they can store the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.
The University of Maine, meanwhile, has developed the first 3D-printed house made entirely with bio-based materials, and is innovating floating offshore wind technologies.
And last year, the Biden administration designated Maine as a federal “tech hub” for forest bioproducts. That step is expected to accelerate research and development of wood bioproducts that can sequester carbon while replacing plastics, while opening the door for significant federal investment in the future.
This momentum is thanks, in part, to significant policy changes under Governor Janet Mills, a Democrat who succeeded Republican Paul LePage, who was openly antagonistic to energy reforms, said Brian Deese, former director of the National Economic Council and a mentor in residence at the Roux Institute’s incubator. “For both investors and for companies looking around the region to say, ‘Where are the most interesting places to locate?’ I think it’s gone from being a headwind to a tailwind,” Deese said.
The incubator, launched with support from the Maine Governor’s Energy Office, aims to initially bring in a dozen climate- and energy-focused startups, before growing to 50 by the end of 2027. Many of the startups will lean on artificial intelligence, a specialty of the Roux Institute, while creating products that run the gamut from reducing greenhouse gas emissions in aviation to developing a supercapacitor-enabled lithium-ion battery pack.
Eric Fitz, who runs his startup Amply Energy out of his home in Cumberland, Maine, some 20 minutes north of Portland, is among those whose companies will call the Roux home. His AI-enabled software helps contractors create 3D models of buildings in real time, allowing them to more quickly design properly sized heat pump systems.
“Distributors are saying nine out of 10 issues with heat pumps are related to oversizing the equipment or mis-sizing the equipment,” Fitz said. This technology aims to fix that, and help speed up the rate at which building owners can ditch fossil fuel heating systems for electric heat pumps.
Born and raised in Maine, Fitz, 42, is among the droves of people who historically left the state after high school. He built up his career in California and Massachusetts before moving back to Maine in 2015. “I always knew I was going to come back,” he said.
Hannah Pingree, director of Maine’s Office of Policy Innovation and the Future, said that “boomerang” effect among returning native-born Mainers is something lawmakers had long hoped for because for years, Maine was known as a state that young people left for good.
COVID helped change that. In 2022, Maine’s population growth was more than twice the national rate.
“People came to our state during the pandemic, and people came home during the pandemic and realized what a wonderful place it is to live,” Pingree said. And, if all goes to plan, a wonderful place to work on cutting-edge climate technologies.
Sabrina Shankman can be reached at sabrina.shankman@globe.com. Follow her @shankman.
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