Aiding engineering for the renewable energy market.

National Instruments has announced that it will renew its Green Engineering Grant programme in 2012. In the last two years, the programme has provided assistance to more than 40 companies developing next-generation control and measurement solutions in the renewable energy market. The programme helps small companies and research groups around the world with up to  €30,000 (£25,000)  in software and training for graphical system design tools and techniques.

“The NI Green Engineering Grant programme is helping clean-tech startups get the training and graphical system design tools they need to accelerate the crossover to the era when clean energy is cheaper and more abundant than fossil fuels,” said Brian MacCleery, Principal Product Manager for Clean Energy Technology at National Instruments. “National Instruments is proud to work with leading green engineering innovators like Xtreme Power, whose utility scale energy storage technology can make it possible to get a greater percentage of our power from intermittent, renewable sources.”


“Thanks to NI hardware and LabVIEW system design software, we were able to use a single integrated development environment for everything from FPGA and real-time targets to user interface and diagnostic PCs,” said Richard Jennings, Software Engineering Manager at Xtreme Power. “The NI graphical system design approach helped us focus on our application instead of getting bogged down in low-level syntax and implementation details.”


Grants are designed for companies or groups planning to use LabVIEW system design software and reconfigurable I/O (RIO) hardware to rapidly develop and commercialise their green technologies. The grant awards engineers and scientists developing systems that could make a significant contribution toward a clean energy future. It assists the creation of innovative solutions that can address today’s complex renewable energy and electrical power challenges associated with the advancement of smart-grid, energy storage, electric vehicles and grid-tied power electronics control systems.

Previous grant recipients case studies may be found here!


The deadline for grant applications is November 1, 2012, and grants will be distributed by January 2013.