National Renewable Energy Laboratory

It's a vital mechanism that connects ambitious marine startups, who rarely have the capital for advanced testing, with the staggering computational and physical resources of federal laboratories.

And Equinox was granted access to the National Laboratory of the Rockies in Golden, Colorado, which the source notes is the facility formerly known as NREL, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

Yes.

And the lab effectively audited the entire physical logic of the Mobula 5.

She holds a PhD in inorganic chemistry from Yale.

She spent three years as a postdoc at the National Laboratory of the Rockies, formerly known as National Renewable Energy Lab.

And there she was developing low energy catalysts to break down plastic waste.

And in 2024, she spun one of those projects.

So Estercycle is a startup company I founded almost exactly two years ago now.

So I'm a chemist by training and, you know, at heart.

And as during the course of my training, after I finished my PhD, I took a postdoctoral position at the National Renewable Energy Lab, which is now called the National Lab of the Rockies.

Could be a whole other conversation.

I think that was sort of the most fascinating thing for me as I was looking into this idea, was sort of getting, like, talking to so many people and getting so many different people's definitions of sustainability back, and it was really, like, I, the first question I had to ask everyone was, what does sustainability mean to you? Especially because obviously, um, a lot of the researchers that I talked to come from government labs, and certain terms are a little bit more politicized.

During the reporting of this story, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory changed their name to the National Laboratory of the Rockies.

But, you know, it really comes down to you have to look at the word.

Sustain is part of sustainability.

Scaling Foundation Models with Lightning Attention, Minimax Technical Report.

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But when I stumbled upon Chris Clack's work, when I was just starting to kind of report this out and understand whether this transmission would make a difference, it was a revelation.

Some of the work he did, the article he published in 2016 on weather patterns and transmission lines and renewables, and then I learned about the work NREL had been doing similarly with their Eastern Grid integration study.

It was a revelation.

And frankly, it was the first time that I saw a path forward that made sense.

NLR was also recognized as a contributor to an award-winning technology led by our friends at Oak Ridge National Laboratory called Thermophilic One Pot Bioconversion of PET Waste into Value-Added Aromatics, a bioconversion process turning plastic waste into valuable chemicals.

Including this year's winners, the Lab has received 80 R&D 100 awards since our first in 1982.

I'd say that's worthy of a tux and a red carpet.

Winning teams will celebrate at the R&D 100 gala event later this year.

Thanks for joining us.

The podcast will be back in two weeks with more news from the lab.

This episode was adapted from National Laboratory of the Rockies news articles from August 2026, written by Justin Daugherty, Sarah Havig, Hannah Halasker, and Isabel McCann.

Our

That being said, 10,000-foot overview, there's about 80 of us in the country, 80 different coalitions that work with the national labs.

So we work with NRL, which is the National Rocky Lab.

We work with Oregon Labs.

We work with... a host of labs with the DOE.