COAST Announces Four Successful Clean Energy Innovation Challenge Participants

Four British Columbia-based companies are the successful participants of an Innovation Challenge to be delivered through Innovate BC’s Integrated Marketplace and enabled by the BC Marine Energy and Decarbonization Hub, a joint initiative of COAST and the University of Victoria.

This Innovation Challenge is designed to help address the Canadian Coast Guard's goal to decarbonize land-based operations in remote coastal areas of British Columbia. It targets new innovations that can displace diesel at remote locations, utilizing renewable energy sources (including marine renewables), as well as advanced energy management and storage solutions. 

The systems must be rapidly deployable, modular, and scalable to meet the Coast Guard’s operational constraints at remote, often hard-to-access sites.

The four companies, Ascent Systems Technologies, Cleohydron Innovation Inc, Mostar Labs Inc and Voltai Inc, will receive funding of 50% of eligible project costs, up to $100,000, as well as access to office and lab space at the Marine Technology Centre in North Saanich, and direct access to the Canadian Coast Guard technical teams and Accelerating Community Energy Transformation (ACET) researchers to support their development goals.

• Ascent Systems Technologies is adapting its Autonomous Environment Monitoring and Surveillance (AEMS) platform into AEMS-COAST, a rugged, modular clean-energy unit. The system integrates renewable generation, storage, smart power management and communications to operate autonomously. The company will reconfigure and enhance the system for long-term deployment in harsh coastal and marine environments.
• Cleohydron Innovation Inc is developing “Hydrogen at the Edge,” a clean hydrogen production system tailored to remote coastal facilities that currently rely on diesel. It will advance the technology from lab-validated components to an integrated, deployment-ready prototype that can be safely and reliably operated under site-relevant conditions.
• Mostar Labs Inc’s Lighthouse LilyPad is a modular floating renewable energy platform designed to provide reliable clean power to remote coastal operations and displace diesel use. The company will demonstrate consistent renewable generation, high system availability, stable three-phase power and robust storm performance, while establishing repeatable processes for deployment, maintenance, and decommissioning.
• Voltai Inc’s WaveNexus project is advancing a modular wave-energy system intended as a rapidly deployable microgrid component for remote coastal infrastructure. Through its participation in the Challenge, the company will integrate and test the system in a relevant near-shore environment to generate credible performance and emissions-reduction data and show how wave energy can operate as part of a hybrid microgrid.

Strong results from this Challenge will help inform future procurement specifications and could position innovations for consideration through federal procurement processes, subject to operational needs and performance.

To be eligible for this Innovation Challenge, companies had to be registered, licensed or certified to do business in B.C., with at least two years of operating history and ready to run a test or pilot.

COAST is an initiative of the South Island Prosperity Partnership, Greater Victoria’s economic development alliance. COAST received Catalyst Funding from Pacific Economic DevelopmentCanada (PacifiCan) and the B.C. Ministry of Energy and Climate Solutions to catalyze an ocean innovation cluster in Pacific Canada.