State Officials Unveil Plan to Create Green Jobs

Paul Bemis is President of Applied Math Modeling Incorporated.
The three year old Concord-based company designs software that helps businesses reduce energy use in large data centers.
Bemis says data centers have a huge carbon footprint.
“if you take a look at the commercial sector itself, the data center is the largest consumer of electricity consuming in 2006 dollars around $7.4 billion worth of energy, just to power the data center alone.”
Not only are the servers in data centers using energy, but it takes energy to cool them.
Bemis says Applied Math Modeling has designed software that creates a virtual data center.
5:59 “what we allow the user to do is through a very simple to use interface, layout the data center where the cooling units are, where the servers are, define what the wattages are of each one of those things respectively and the software will compute for you a temperature gradient across the room.”
That allows clients to know where hot spots are, and how moving servers or a-c units around could save energy.
For a three year old company, Applied Math Modeling’s client list is impressive, Delta Airlines, Harley Davidson, Leahy Clinic, among others.
Bemis envisions expanding this software to help not just data centers but the energy efficiency of all buildings.
There’s just one problem: capital.
“The venture market at the moment was not interested in us, we were going to try to raise capital privately, and we tried through a variety of sources, banks like to lend when there are hard assets at work, they like lend when there is something they can tie onto in case the company goes out of business they could liquidate.”
Bemis and three other staffers all work from home.
He contracts out work even though he’d like to hire full time workers.
That’s where the Governor’s Green Launching Pad might help.
The joint venture between the state and the University of New Hampshire will use 750-thousand dollars in stimulus money to help grow companies like Applied Math Modeling.
Jesse Devitte, with the Portsmouth venture capital firm Borealis Ventures, is part of the review team for the Green Launching Pad.
335 :53 “this is a perfect example of where some seed capital and mentorship will enable them to launch their product out, that fits the example of the existing company that may come to UNH for help and we’ll pair them up with some graduate and undergraduate students and also some professors to help bring that next generation of the company together”
The Green Launching Pad will also help start up or launch green companies.
UNH Economics Professor Ross Gittell says teams of researchers and entrepreneurs with green products or services will have to compete for help.
“We expect a lot of applicants it’s going to be very competitive, because each team could get up to 90-thousand dollars for this intensive support period, and we’re going to do our best with a lot of people with a lot of experience to make sure at the end of this three month period they’re launching a business.”
Support for selected teams or companies will include marketing, engineering, legal advice, developing a strong business plan and connections to angel investors.
Gittell says the Green Launching Pad –which is modeled on other business accelerator programs in the nation -will help form connections between researchers who may have a great product and entrepreneurs.
While the green launching pad may not create lots of jobs really quickly, Gittell says New Hampshire needs to think long term.
“Nobody’s calling out we desperately need the Green Launching Pad, this is opportunity based, I think we’re not going to come out of this recession strongly unless we think about the future, we can’t just think about how do we save what we have, we have to think how do we create what we need in the future.”
The Governor plans to unveil the Green Launching Pad on Wednesday at UNH.
For NHPR news, I’m Amy Quinton.