Nikola Wins Research Grant From DOE
Scandal-plagued electric powered truck maker Nikola introduced Thursday that it won a $two million grant from the U.S. Energy Office to create hydrogen refueling technologies.
The grant was formally awarded July 7 — a few weeks before Nikola founder Trevor Milton was indicted on a few counts of felony fraud for lying about “nearly all areas of the business” to increase the startup’s inventory gross sales.
“Even before the indictment, the looming legal complications have been effectively recognized as the company disclosed it experienced obtained subpoenas from each the Justice Office and the Securities and Trade Fee,” CNN noted.
Nikola mentioned the grant was for advancing its study into autonomous refueling technologies for foreseeable future hydrogen fueling stations. Some of the electric powered trucks Nikola is acquiring would be driven by significant duty hydrogen fuel cells.
“This funding is important to advance important hydrogen fueling technologies that can make improvements to the total effectiveness of fuel-mobile professional automobiles, when sustaining the basic safety and reliability requirements essential,” Pablo Koziner, who sales opportunities Nikola’s hydrogen fueling organization, mentioned in a news launch.
Milton was forced to resign as Nikola’s executive chairman in September 2020 after quick-seller Hindenburg Study alleged the company was “an intricate fraud developed on dozens of lies around the training course of [Milton’s] job.” Nikola admitted in a submitting earlier this 12 months that an inner investigation showed Milton experienced deceived traders.
In response to the grant award, Hindenburg noted that Milton’s indictment quoted him as stating that “Nikola was manufacturing hydrogen and was performing so at a lowered expense, when [he] understood that in point no hydrogen was becoming generated at all by Nikola, at any expense.”
The quick-seller additional that it doubts “a $two million grant will enable rework that lie into a reality.”
In accordance to The Verge, the grant comes at a time when the Energy Office “is receiving prepared to ramp up funding activity to enable advance the United States’ development of clean up vitality technologies — a priority underneath President Biden.”
The division “makes funding awards primarily based on a arduous, merit-primarily based assessment procedure that features multiple technological know-how authorities reviewing applications,” it mentioned Thursday.
