Applications for Starter Business Acceleration, a global accelerator for startups in the energy sector, start this Monday, February 17, and will continue until April 20. This year, the program created by EDP to unify the several instruments that support the group's entrepreneurship, reinforces its position as a business accelerator with startups and SMEs.

Starter Business Acceleration will have modules in three cities: São Paulo, Brazil, from June 30 to July 2; in Houston, United States, on July 21-23; and in Vienna, Austria, on September 16-18. During these three modules, participating startups will have the opportunity to present their solutions for the energy sector to EDP, EDP Spain, EDP Brasil, and EDP Renováveis, which together have an installed production capacity of 27GW, 74% of which comes from clean energies (wind, solar and hydro), serving 12 million customers. Three other utilities participate in the program: the American company Electric Power, which has more than five million customers in 11 US states, Verbund, Austria's largest electricity supplier, and Turning Tables, an innovation company of Cuerva’s Spanish group.

The ten projects with the greatest potential will later be selected for the final and the winner will be announced in Lisbon, in November, during the Web Summit, and will win a prize of 50,000 euros.

The seven categories available for application are aligned with the priority business areas for EDP and are the following: clean energies, customer solutions, digital innovation, energy storage, smart grids, access to energy and innovative internal processes.

“Starter Business Acceleration works as a call that EDP makes to startups and SMEs around the world that have developed innovative products, services or business models in line with our strategy aimed at decarbonization, decentralization and digitalization. We have been strongly committed to open innovation and we could not be more satisfied with the results achieved,” explained Carla Pimenta, EDP's Innovation Director.

“Although this is a global program, and EDP is present in 19 countries, we are a company of national origin that continues to invest in ideas that are born in our country, so we have the participation of more Portuguese startups and SMEs in this edition”, stresses the director.

In the last edition, Starter attracted around 500 startups and selected a total of 30 from 13 countries to work directly with EDP and the program's partner utilities, which resulted in a pipeline of 50 pilot projects and 10 potential investments.

Applications can be submitted until April 20 at: http://theenergystarter.com/.