Cody Friesen
Fluidic Energy™, an energy storage solutions company launched out of ASU as a startup in 2007, has been recognized as one of the top 100 private firms best positioned to solve tomorrow’s global clean technology challenges.
The Global Cleantech100 represents the most innovative and promising ideas in clean technology, featuring companies with the highest potential to make the most significant market impact. Fluidic Energy was chosen from more than 6,000 nominations across 17 sectors of innovation. A panel of representatives from multi-national corporations active in technology and innovation and leading financial investors made the selections.
The company’s core technology stores and delivers energy with the world’s first, high cycle-life zinc-air battery at a cost that is a fraction of lithium ion batteries. In addition, Fluidic’s technology has established a new benchmark for environmental friendliness and reliability, making the product ideally suited for customer-sited micro-grid and telecommunication applications. Since 2011, Fluidic has been providing its global customers with proof of high reliability via unparalleled remote monitoring through its FluidicIQ™ system, now operating at thousands of sites across Southeast Asia and Latin America.
ASU Associate Professor Cody Friesen’s group began researching safe, effective, low cost energy alternatives at the School for Engineering, Matter, Transport and Energy (SEMTE) in 2006. The Office of Knowledge and Enterprise Development (OKED) and Arizona Technology Enterprises (AzTE), helped Fluidic Energy to spin-out and the company has now raised about $150 million in equity financing from investors and project partners. And the company has been awarded two separate Advanced Research Projects Agency — Energy (ARPA-e) grants, one of which was in collaboration with ASU. Fluidic, Inc recently received a sizable investment from Caterpillar, Inc. And even more recently Fluidic, along with Caterpillar and PT Perusahaan Listrik Negara (PLN), Indonesia’s state-owned Electricity Company, agreed to provide renewable electricity to 500 remote villages throughout Indonesia — one of the largest rural electrification projects in the world.
Friesen is the Fulton Engineering Professor of Innovation within the Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering and a Senior Sustainability Scientist at the ASU Global Institute of Sustainability. He is a 2015 Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network. He continues to serve as Founder and a director on the board of Fluidic, and is currently focused on Zero Mass Water, a new startup launched out of his ASU research group, Zero Mass Labs, with a mission to enable individual ownership of renewable, high-quality drinking water.
