InnoEnergy has presence in different countries and its aim is to become Europe’s sustainable energy innovation engine. To achieve that, it becomes essential to bet on new ideas, products and services that will make the difference, as well as on new business and people who want to introduce these technologies in the market.
The organization supports and invests on innovation in all the stages of the process: from the laboratory until the final consumer. With its 200 partners network, connections all over Europe are established, linking the industrial sector with researchers, graduated, workers, businessmen, entrepreneurs and business market.
One of the strategic lines of InnoEnergy has to do with the acceleration of innovative startups from the sustainable energy sector that share ideas with the energetic industry to create technologies that can be marketed and that can offer real results to consumers. Under this premise, InnoEnergy carries out every year an acceleration program that lasts two years. The program is clearly focused on sales and it has investments that can reach one million euros in three or four years. In each program, the 2017 starts on May 29, there is first a selection of companies that are in a seed or growing phase in order to be accelerated in their two programs (Highway and Boostway). InnoEnergy offers an initial investment between 70.000 and 250.000 euros to these startups. For further information consult this link.
The program pursues the professionalization of the startups so they can be competitive in the market and they can materialize their projects. InnoEnergy heavily enhances their development and becomes part of their capital with participations between 10% and 20% or through revenue sharing. To be able to access the program, the projects have to be focused on topics such as: nuclear instrumentation, renewable energies, efficient and smart cities and buildings, energetic efficiency, energy storage, chemical waste energy, smart grid or clean coal and oil technologies.
Success cases
PLACTHERM
Smart underfloor heating system
Most of the heating systems warm uniformly the space and don’t allow creating different zone temperatures in the same area. Due to this need, this startup has created a smart underfloor heating system. It is a tile with embedded sensors, an isolation layer and an electronic structure that compose the first remote controlling heating system, highly efficient, compatible with renewable energies and able to generate independent thermal zones in the same space. The system is focused for working spaces and it can be controlled through the cloud by using an intuitive application, thanks to which each worker will be able to enjoy his comfort temperature improving his performance and saving over 30% energy consumption. The company has already closed 4 pilots with other companies such as Repsol, Endesa, Carrefour and Ferrovial.
TECNOTURBINES
Electrical energy solutions through hydraulic control turbines system
The increase of electricity bills has generated the need to reduce the water extraction and distribution costs in order to increase the energetic efficiency of the process.
Tecnoturbines has patented an electronic control system based on regenerative braking technology. It consists in the recovery of the surplus energy from the hydraulic pressure that along with Tecnoturbines’ hydraulic turbine allows producing electrical energy without having to access the power grid. This energy can be auto-consumed or sold to the electricity company to generate income. Tecnoturbines has closed contracts with distributors in England, Colombia and Japan.
SMARTIVE
More efficient wind energy
Smartive provides real time SCADA processing data to diagnose windmills’ state. The startup is focused on the development of low cost systems based on cloud computing and smart devices.
Through accessing to IT platforms, Smartive allows the supervision, monitoring and diagnosis of wind turbines’ performance. Between 3% and 30% of wind turbines have breakdowns and maintenance problems that lead to worldwide estimated losses of 2.9€ billion euros annually. Smartive offers improvement solutions that by means of smart devices such as smartphones and tablets allow quickly detecting system failures, to plan maintenance operations and to obtain online data. Nowadays they are working with large companies of the sector to monitor wind farms.
Nnergix
Renewable energy forecasting and micro smart grid management solutions
Nnergix put forward customized cutting-edge solutions combined with weather data and energy production values. Renewable energies are clean and endless but they depend on changing weather conditions. Due to it, companies need to predict their energy production in order to integrate it correctly and efficiently to reduce economic costs. Nnergix enables prediction and monitoring of wind and solar energy production in the short term and to integrate it into the electricity grid through customized solutions.
PRO-DRONE
Technology for inspection of energy infrastructures
Pro – Drone is a project that develops technologies to carry out the inspection of efficient energy infrastructures and airborne solutions. This startup is specialized on solutions for wind turbine blades inspections, which includes a customized hardware platform, flight algorithm settings and, specific sensors that allows to streamline and to automate the process.
The renewable energy market in general, and the wind sector in particular, is looking for ways to lower OPEX costs to be more competitive. Pro – Drone has an integrated approach of air inspections with the customization of the whole process, including the UAV’s, its sensors and the whole post-process of data recovering.