On April 22, David Talarico, a TCNJ alumnus and current Rutgers student, won the top prize from the U.S. Department of Energy-sponsored business pitch competition for his new device for harvesting wind power. Talarico and his group won $50,000, which will be used to help fund a new business around his novel wind-harnessing device.
Talarico and his group members, Antoni Milewski and Ryan Annibali, new graduates of the Rutgers MBA program, will advance on to the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) national competition in Colorado in June 2016, where they will be competing for $100,000 that can be used to take the winning product to market.
Talarico, a doctoral mechanical engineering student, had the idea of building a company around a new device for harvesting wind power when he was working on his senior project as an undergraduate at TCNJ. He has been working on the winning technology for six years.
David Talarico, Antoni Milewski and Ryan Annibali
Although Talarico started his work on the wind-harnessing device at TCNJ for a senior project, he continued to develop the device in his spare time. It wasn’t until he went to Rutgers and took the course Collaborative for Technology Entrepreneurship and Commercialization, which focused on taking new technologies to market, that he started to develop a start-up business around the device.
It was in this course that Talarico was put into a group with Annibali and Milewski, who chose to work on Talarico’s idea for their class project. His group members knew right away that Talarico was on to something with his device, “It became very clear that this was a viable technology,” Milewski said of Talarico’s idea.
Talarico and his team’s business plan included a 15-foot sail that moves back and forth on a track harvesting wind that is converted into energy. To put the device in perspective, it would only take 18 of their devices to generate enough power for all of a 17-story office building’s energy needs. The roof-top turbine is also a great price; it is about half the cost of a solar array that generates the same amount of power.
After working on the device for so long, Talarico was thrilled to have made progress with his team and realized his dream of building a company generated on wind power finally had the support of a serious entrepreneurial effort.
“It was a validation that I hadn’t been wasting my time,” he said.
The team then heard about the LaunchR pitch competition, and found that the U.S. Department of Energy had selected Rutgers as one of eight institutions in the country to host a regional Clean Tech University Prize Competitions. The regional competitions are designed to help fund and develop viable, innovative clean energy business ideas at universities across the country.
Talarico supports the DOE’s competitions that try to turn these clean energy business ideas into reality, as they work to ensure that the U.S. meets its goal of relying on renewable energy sources to provide half of the country’s power needs by 2050.
“The great thing about this space,” Talarico said, “is that even if we don’t win, everyone is trying to get this green technology out there, so it’s a win no matter what.”
Talarico and his team already won big with the top prize of $50,000 at the regional competition and the chance to win $100,000 at the national competition in June. They also received a mention of their device in President Obama’s speech at Rutgers’ commencement.