Start up! The European Entrepreneurship Summit
Brussels, 21 February 2012
Thomas de Leeuw, Sunuru
EIT finalist: A Dutch spin-out wants to see solar panels - everywhere
Two Delft graduates, named as EIT Awards finalists by the Climate-KIC, are working at Schiphol airport to develop lightweight, flexible solar panel supports.
Thomas de Leeuw and Jan van Kranendonk, who both graduated in December 2011 with a Masters in Mechanical Engineering from Delft University of Technology, were far more ambitious than most students. During their studies they founded the solar energy company Sunuru, wrote their respective Masters theses on the commercial and technical feasibility of Sunuru, and secured a Dutch patent for their product.
De Leeuw plays down their achievement. "It's a relatively simple product, combining standard technology in a smart way," he says. "We were quite surprised that nobody had thought of the same thing."
Sunuru's innovation is a customisable, lightweight support structure that tracks the sun and onto which solar panels can be installed. The structure can be easily installed at any angle, above, onto or in front of things, which means it can be integrated into almost any urban situation and be installed where conventional photovoltaic systems would be too expensive or impossible. "Your parking lot, building façade or driveway can be turned into a source of green energy within a day," De Leeuw said.
So how did the two mechanical engineering students hit upon the idea? "Jan was puzzling over how to make solar energy more cost-effective, looking at it very generically," de Leeuw explains. After a while, they homed in on the extremely low energy density of solar and realised that the only way for solar energy to become cost-effective is to cover large areas with little material. And from there, they started developing a light support structure that can hold solar panels, and ended up with Sunuru. The product, they say, greatly improves the efficiency of solar electricity with a price reduction of up to 50 per cent compared with a standard design.
One concrete example of how Sunuru could be effectively used is in an open-air parking lot of an airport or a supermarket. The support structure would be hung, between street lights for example, over the area where the cars are parked. In this way, extra value is generated from an otherwise empty space and shade is created for the cars beneath, de Leeuw notes.
To prove that the lightweight structure is also robust, the entrepreneurial pair headed off to Rotterdam harbour, which de Leeuw describes as "one of the windiest places in the Netherlands." In a pilot project there, they investigated how their support structure behaved in strong winds. It passed the test with flying colours, according to de Leeuw.
The next pilot project took place at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport, where the system was tested on a nearby field. A further pilot project at Schiphol is planned for 2012, bringing the system "step by step closer to the real person," de Leeuw enthuses. With the Masters degrees now completed, 2012 will be dedicated to product development and testing, with the aim of introducing the product into the commercial market by the third quarter of 2013. Quite an achievement for what started out as two Masters' theses.
Read more about this finalist: The Finalists - Just the Facts
 |
|
 |
Organised in cooperation with the Science|Business Innovation Board |