Country: Spain
Category: Climate
Project Aim: offering industries a viable alternative to traditional solar projects, producing pre-assembled modules connected to form a solar plant. SOLATOM enables industries using fossil fuels, to cut their thermal energy costs by up to 37% with less than 3 years payback.
What is the problem to solve?
Two thirds of the energy consumption in the industrial sector is thermal energy, which is produced by expensive and polluting fossil fuels. In the case of heat intensive sectors, like food processing for example, thermal energy can represent more than 70% of the overall production costs squeezing companies’ margins and competitiveness. Industries looking for solar energy alternatives find that current technologies are only competitive at large scale (over 5MW), making them unviable for most industrials applications.
What does SOLATOM do:
Our design uses mirrors that follow the sun to concentrate the sunlight into a Receiving tube where steam or thermal oil is heated up to 300°C. All components are assembled in our module, which has the same size and transportability of a standard goods container. Once assembled, every module is calibrated and tested, before being shipped, avoiding costly on-site construction, and commissioning. All modules forming the solar plant are easily connected to the client’s production process, becoming operative just one hour after the delivery.
According to the EU-JRC, thermal energy consumption in south European industries amounts to 19.000M euro and grows by 7% each year. Our initial market is food industries located in south European regions which are facing high fossil fuel costs. We have begun in the Spanish market (200 companies C.14M euro). Internationalization will start in 2019, by sending modules built in our factory in Spain.
What did SOLATOM accomplished?
Traction: concept proven with pilot. Two projects have been sold to industries in the last three months, five more in the pipeline (+430k Euro). Invested by Lanzadera (one of the biggest startup accelerator in Spain). Climate KIC startup accelerator phase 2 and winner of the ClimateKIC Venture competition (Spain). Investment and funding: 320k Euro-Lanzadera, ClimateKIC, IVACE and Founders.
SOLATOM team:
Miguel Frasquet (CEO), 6 years of experience in managing solar projects for industrial applications. Raul Villalba (CFO) MBA at LBS, 7years finance experience with solar companies, consultant firms and a cleanTech VC. Juan Martinez (CTO), 6 years of experience in designing and manufacturing industrials equipment in aeronautics. Carlo Terruzi (R&D), 5 years of experience in developing control systems. We also have Dr. Daniel Villalba (U. Stanford-COB) as energy advisor.
CEO’s testimony:
This Recognition represents the work of many people that believed in us, and it will be the first step towards big opportunity yet to come.