Periodic Reporting for period 1 - TurboSol (TurboSol: Turbo-Solar Thermal Power for Industrial Drying Processes)
Reporting period: 2018-03-01 to 2018-06-30
Drying operations are major consumers of energy, currently taking up approximately one quarter of the world’s energy output. Wastewater treatment (WT) operations consume vast amounts of electricity, accounting for more than 1% of Europe’s electricity consumption. Wastewater plants must dry and stabilize the sludge they produce so that it can be put to its end usage and eliminate pathogens. The objective of the TurboSol project is the industrial adaptation, scale-up and commercialization of our solar powered sludge dryer.
A complete technical plan comprising the scaling-up of our pilot plant into a demonstrator unit prototype, the prototype’s techno-economic validation by the end users, and IP Management & Regulatory requirements were developed. Our commercial strategy was defined, identifying municipal wastewater treatment services as our target market; and Spain, Germany and France as our target geographical areas, where we expect to be servicing 5 plants by 2021 and 40 by 2025. Our potential clients were identified as private environmental service providers running the plants for the municipalities such as Cadagua-Ferrovial, FCC Aqualia, ACCIONA Agua and SUEZ Treatment Solutions. Our main competitors are solar sludge dryers using greenhouse-like infrastructure and conventional sludge dryers using alternative fuels, diesel or biomass. Additionally, we identified our potential stakeholders and we stablished a communication and dissemination strategy, carried out a successful freedom to operate analysis, identified regulatory and certification requirements. The required investment for the project is € 1,070,000. We will start selling by 2021, reaching a turnover of € 19.1M and an accumulated net profit of € 9.1M by 2025. The ROI for Demede after five years will be 6.1.
TurboSol is the first solar powered sewage sludge dryer to reach 300 ºC without consuming electricity, fuel or heat carrier fluids. Conventional sludge dryers consume between 700-1,400 kWh tonne-1 and alternative solar powered dryers require electricity, fossil fuels and heat carrying fluids to reach our temperatures. The expected potential impacts of TurboSol are manifold: a 240 kW TurboSol system providing hot air at 300 ºC producing 480,000 kWh year-1 year would save over € 60,000 per year compared to an equivalent diesel system, and preventing over 125 tCO2 from being emitted.