ON Semiconductor announced a sponsorship to IEEE’s Empower a Billion Lives (EBL), an interdisciplinary, biennial global competition to identify and promote innovative solutions to energy poverty. EBL seeks solutions from innovators of all backgrounds that leverage cutting-edge technologies and are designed to scale.

“ON Semiconductor prioritizes addressing the challenge of achieving a high level of performance and power efficiency to enable carbon footprint reductions. The solutions seeded by EBL are fundamental to scaling clean energy in a commercially viable way,” said Ali Husain, senior manager, corporate marketing and strategy at ON Semiconductor. “We are excited to assist these novel and creative businesses, which focus on providing energy access to all and look forward to the innovative technologies that might emerge.”

“We hope Empower a Billion Lives will accomplish a lot of vetting and due diligence in the energy access market, and let investors and other interested parties identify great companies to work with,” said Dr. Deepak Divan, Empower a Billion Live’s Chair. “We also want to give innovative teams the resources and profile they need to succeed.”

Twenty-three teams from around the world have been named Global Finalists in IEEE’s Empower a Billion Lives, an innovation competition to identify and promote cutting-edge, high-impact solutions to extreme poverty and lack of access to energy in the developing world. Having succeeded in two previous stages of Empower a Billion Lives – including regional “pitch” competitions, the last of which was at IEEE Power Electronics Society’s Decentralized Energy Access Solutions workshop in Atlanta – these teams will now undertake a field test to prove their solutions in advance of the Global Final in Baltimore in September of this year.

Learn more at www.onsemi.com.