With the increasing energy consciousness, humanity needs to exploit waste energy as much as possible. Energy harvesting (EH) is the process by which minute amounts of energy from one or more of naturally-occurring energy sources are captured and stored. This energy can take the form of vibration, temperature differences, light, or magnetic forces. One of the most promising technologies for harvesting energy from these sources is photovoltaic solar (solar PV) technologies. The socio-economic relevance of energy harvesting technologies is relatively straightforward, with an estimated market potential of EUR 3 billion in 2020.
Several technical solutions are being developed, experts on the field agree that there are still technical limitations to overcome, such as energy efficiency, connectivity to existing networks, environmental problems with the production of highly efficient materials, such as solar panels.
PLATIO from Innovatív Térburkolatfejlesztő Llc. is an unconventional, a primarily outdoor energy producing paving system and an alternate to usual pavements. Contrary to most of the applied pavements nowadays, PLATIO does not take material (such as stone, gravel, cement and wood) and energy from nature to build human environment, but uses the normally appearing garbage and energy. Consequently PLATIO is a paving platform made of recycled plastic. The planned product integrates different types of environmental friendly technologies such as solar panels to use the solar power. The units are compact and modularly connect together making electronic contact without additional wiring by a powerline communication system which connects automatically during the establishment.
PLATIO can be used for several scenarios from B2G to B2B solutions, such as smart city street applications or feeding EV chargers. Market validation results confirmed that PLATIO’s primary applications should be smart cities and digital environment in public spaces (B2G) as well as island mode operation energy source of electronic vehicle (EV) charger stations.
Our overall objective is to successfully commercialize PLATIO solar PV pavement system by 2018 and become a significant market player on the field of surface integrated smart energy harvesters and sensor systems in Europe. We used the SME Instrument Phase1 project to validate our international commercialization strategy in the form of a Feasibility Study investigating critical technical and market conditions before investing into a Phase2 innovation project.
