CE+T Power winner of Google Little Box Challenge
At the ARPA-E convention held in Washington from 29 February to 2 March 2016, the Liège SME CE+T Power won the Google Little Box Challenge, a competition organized by Google and the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). The prize of Google's challenge was 1 million dollars. The goal of the competition was to develop a technology making an inverter as small as possible. CE+T succeeded in manufacturing the compact converter Effy, which has the size of a pack of cigarettes.
The jury chose CE+T Power's innovative solution which represents a major improvement compared to the competition's original specification, requiring 50 W per cubic inch. The winning design not only boasts 145 W per cubic inch (8,848 W/litre), it only measures 13.77 cubic inch (0.225 l), much smaller than required. This was achieved by only making use of technology already available on the market. The prize-winning development is the result of the 'Red Electrical Devils' team, a collaboration between industrial partners, universities and research centres and with the support of the Walloon Region.
The Little Box Challenge was launched in 2014 and is jointly managed by Google and the IEEE in their search for new technologies to successfully reduce the size of an inverter to a small laptop. For CE+T, winning the competition provides an opportunity to express the dynamism, the spirit of innovation and the ambition of the company to become part of the global leaders of the energy industry.
The products CE+T develops aim to change the rules of the game in different industries: the telecommunications industry, the data centres and a few industrial industries. There are also prospects in the military and governmental sectors. One of CE+T's offices is in Atlanta and consists of 6 people under the coordination of Daniel Rixhon, Director Sales & Business Development NA. This branch in the United States allows the company to increase its visibility on the market and especially in Washington.