• Home
• Event
• Finalists
• Newsletter
• News
• Press Room
• About

EIT Finalist: One man's journey from art to ads to solar panels produced Naked Energy

Artist-turned-entrepreneur Christophe Williams catalysed a London start-up, now nominated for an EIT Award

By Anna Jenkinson, Science|Business

For a career path, Christophe Williams has not made the obvious choices. He started at St. Martin's art college in London, and went on to be a creative executive in the ad world. But then he went solar, founding Naked Energy, a renewable energy company. And now his company has been nominated as a finalist in the European Institute of Innovation and Technology's (EIT) entrepreneurship awards.

Williams is the first to say he has an artistic, not technological, background. Nonetheless, engineering isn't entirely foreign to him: his grandfather designed a renewable energy system in the 1960s and his father was a mechanical and aeronautical engineer. "It must have rubbed off on me," said Williams, whose own past projects have included working with the government on its global climate-change advertising campaign, 'Act on CO2'.

Soon after setting up Naked Energy in September 2009, Williams was joined by Richard Boyle and Norman Cottington, co-inventors and in Williams' words "virtually co-founders". Boyle and Cottington have been building and designing renewable energy devices for the last 30 years and together came up with a new type of hybrid product that combines photovoltaic and solar thermal technologies to generate both hot water and electricity. These technologies are normally separate - one converting sunlight directly to energy, the other using it to heat water. But "with our system, end-users can have the best of both worlds," said Williams.

What differentiates Naked Energy from its hybrid competitors is that its product, which is being developed with Imperial College London and has already been patented, is a vacuum tube rather than the more familiar flat panel mounted on an A-frame rack. "No-one else is doing it in a vacuum configuration," notes Williams. A tube means more versatility in installation, he says, because it can be directed towards the sun if the roof is not directly south-facing, or it can be mounted on a flat roof. The vacuum improves insulation and energy efficiency. "You get a lot more useable energy per square metre than standard technology," he said.

The combination of photovoltaic and solar thermal technologies also means that in the UK end-users are eligible for two government subsidies: feed-in tariffs, for producing their own electricity from PV panels, and renewable heat incentives, for generating heat from solar thermal panels. While acknowledging that government subsidies provide a "massive" boost to the business, Williams is keen to point out that the company does not want to depend on such incentives. "We want to make a system that is so efficient that even if you strip away the subsidies completely, it will still give a good return on investment," he said.

Naked Energy's initial target market is the UK, mainly because that is where they are based, that's where their investors are from and that's the market they know best. "But we're looking far beyond the UK," Williams said. "We've already had significant interest from around the world," he noted. For now the company's focus is on securing a second round of investment and optimising its demonstrable prototypes, with the aim of the technology being on the commercial market in the third quarter of 2012.

And does Williams ever miss his previous creative life? "Not at all. I love this adventure. The career change was a big risk, but now I get to work with professors and engineers, which is very stimulating. And it may sound a bit of cliché but we're also doing something for the betterment of society."

Naked Energy, nominated for an EIT Award by Climate-KIC, is one of nine finalists competing 21 February for recognition at Start-Up! The European Entrepreneurship Summit.

Read more about this finalist: The Finalists – Just the Facts