Project description
Thermal energy storage system for greenhouse facilities
Ensuring a sustainable future for the world’s growing population requires increased food production and reduced resource consumption. Greenhouse-based horticulture provides higher quality and quantity of products compared to traditional agriculture and uses less water. However, greenhouse facilities require high consumption of electricity and gas. Netherlands-based company SOLHO has developed an innovative proprietary thermal energy storage system that allows a 24/7 energy supply. The EU-funded SPRHOUT project will work on the commercialisation strategy for the system in Europe, Africa and the Middle East through a B2B approach, targeting large global greenhouse manufacturers. The project will validate the system’s performance, assess the process’s economic performance indicators and refine the business plan.
Objective
There will be 2.5 billion more people living on Earth by 2050, dramatically pushing the need for agriculture to both increase food production and at the same time reduce resource-consumption in order to ensure a sustainable future for humanity.
Greenhouse-based horticulture could highly contribute to this goal, thanks to its unparalleled benefits in terms of reduced use of water and higher quality and quantity of product with respect to traditional agriculture. Nonetheless, greenhouse facilities need both huge amount of electricity and gas to be operated, accounting for energy consumption of about 3.4 MTOE per year only in Europe, which pushed European policy-makers to promote renewable-based energy solutions for the horticulture sector among the priorities.
SOLHO is a high-tech company incubated at Yes!Delft which developed an innovative and fully off-grid energy system called SPRHOUT, that uses solar energy to fulfil the energy needs of a greenhouse facility.SOLHO’s core innovation is a proprietary thermal energy storage system which allows round the clock operation of all other units, enabling 24/7 energy supply during the night or whenever the sun is not available.
We plan to market our SPRHOUT units by 2021 in Europe, Africa and Middle East through a B2B approach, selling the SPRHOUT system to large global greenhouse manufacturers, which will act as EPC contractors. Three global leaders of advanced horticultural projects have already expressed their interest in our solution. The Phase 1 project will be a launch pad for the future commercialization of the system, enabling SOLHO to validate the SPRHOUT performances and the market opportunity in key areas, assess the process’ economic performance indicators, and refine the business plan to attract the future investment needed for scaling up the system production.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
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Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-1 - SME instrument phase 1Coordinator
2629 JD DELFT
Netherlands
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.