Project description
Eco-friendly smoothing of nature's inherent unpredictability ensures energy stability
Ensuring a stable and reliable energy supply in a sustainable way is one of the most important challenges of the 21st century. As the world transitions to renewable energy resources, the inherently fluctuating nature of the sun and wind adds variability to power generation. Voltage stabilisers are often employed to smooth out these fluctuations, but they are typically expensive and lacking in effectiveness. The EU-funded SSR project has developed an alternative that can stabilise much higher fluctuations in a continuous rather than stepwise manner. Even better, thanks to innovative materials, the voltage stabiliser promises significant energy savings and lower CO2 emissions. EU support is helping the team break into the existing market and create new opportunities.
Objective
The mission of Castoldi&Moretti (C&M) is to design, produce and commercialize devices for electrical grids’ control and in particular voltage stabilizers and other devices that have similar aims.
The growing % of unstable and unpredictable renewable energy sources (RES) used for power production and the wider presence of distributed generation alters the current standards for electric grids and creates further disadvantages in terms of voltage fluctuations, and thus strengthens the demand of voltage stabilizers in industrialized and emerging countries.
The innovative voltage stabilizer SSR-Shield Stabilizer Regulator can stabilize the voltage level at the nominal value for fluctuations up to ±20% (compared to ±10% of competitors).
Differently from current solutions available on the market, in SSR the voltage is controlled in continuous way and not by steps. This is done by means of a brushless motor that automatically and dynamically adjusts the position of a mobile isolated, short-circuited coil over the fixed coil in the magnetic core.
The other very innovative element is the fact that its magnetic core will be made of amorphous materials, which limit losses (-20%) with consequent 20% energy savings and 8% CO2 emissions.
In terms of revenues, they will move from 3,0M€ in Y1 to 21,0M€ in Y5, and cumulative EBIDTA will be 20,19M€ by Y5. With a further investment of 970K€ to finalize SSR, the ROI will be 12,44. Thanks to the above-mentioned figures, C&M will be able to hire 29 new staff.
It has to be highlighted that C&M aims not only at entering the current global market for voltage stabilizers but at creating a new market that, because of the high costs and low performance of competing solutions has never been properly addressed.
This new market comprises small and medium sized industrial and civil entities as well as electricity distributors, for which SSR could solve their issues in voltage regulations.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-1 - SME instrument phase 1Coordinator
20124 MILANO MI
Italy
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.