Countdown begins to Innovation Awards

Three finalists in greentech category of ‘The Irish Times’ InterTradeIreland awards are profiled this week

The shortlisted finalists for this year’s Irish Times InterTradeIreland Innovation Awards are preparing for their presentations to the final judging panel.

In the coming weeks we are profiling the select group who have made it through the first round of judging and a panel including Colin Sainsbury (Byrne Wallace), Dr Ruth Freeman (Science Foundation Ireland), Ann O’Connell (PwC), Prof Frank Roche (UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School) and Aidan Gough (InterTradeIreland).

This week we look at the three finalists in the greentech category.

Climote

Sometimes the most interesting products are also the most useful. The Climote Home Heating Hub is a device that allows you to remotely control your heating through your mobile phone.

Made by a start-up of the same name, the device is built to be as simple as possible. It replaces your existing timing switch on your boiler so you can turn on and off your heating system, set your heating schedules or control your hot water through a web interface or a mobile phone.

Although it can be controlled via a smartphone app, the device doesn’t require access to a wireless network. Instead, a sim card is installed in the hub which gives you the choice of either using the smartphone app or simply sending a text message to the sim number instructing it to turn on your heating.

If the heating system is zoned, you can control each of the zones separately.

The idea is not only to make it easier and more convenient for consumers to manage their heating, but also help save them money by reducing energy wastage.

Climote was spun out of Smart Homes and began operations in January 2011.

“As a consequence of some of the consumer problems with regard to understanding how to programme heating, the team came across an opportunity,” says Eamon Conway, managing director of Climote.

Although the initial RD work was part funded by Smart Homes and State agencies, Climote has won funding from angel investors.

“Our route to market is primarily the energy companies. It takes some time to make the right connections and business models.”

The product was first unveiled in March last year, but the past few weeks has seen it heavily marketed.

Just under a year later, the firm has signed up Electric Ireland and Power NI, and is in talks with other utility firms to sell the hub to their customers.

Climote has already achieved its targets for the first year, and is ahead of schedule from a customer uptake point of view.

“Electric Ireland was first out of the blocks from an Irish utility point of view,” says Conway. “We’re on track against our business plan.”

The company is already eyeing international markets outside of the UK.

“Our short-term plan over the next two years is to get traction in the Irish and UK markets, and in tandem with that explore international markets,” he says.

Trials have also begun in the Middle East. There is the potential to add new devices to the Climote system in the future.

“We have a roadmap of products that is very well laid out,” says Conway. “We want to use the customers’ experience and link on other features.”

Trustwater

Changing from one drink to another on the same production or bottling line has presented challenges for the international beverage industry for many years, particularly when the change is between highly flavoured or pungent drinks.

Ensuring that the taste or smell of one drink is not impaired by the other has required lengthy three and four step clean-in-place (CIP) processes which typically take between two and five-and-a-half hours to complete.

This challenge has now been overcome by a new process developed by Clonmel based Trustwater which reduces the total time required to just 20 minutes. The “Three-Step Pungent Flavor Changeover” utilises Trustwater’s innovative rapid electro-chemical activation (ECA) changeover protocol and enables beverage plants to increase production and to move towards a just-in-time, lean manufacturing model.

ECA is the generation of activated solutions by passing a dilute brine solution through a glow-through electrolytic membrane (FEM), to produce a highly microbiocidal negatively charged catholyte solution with detergent properties known as Aversol which consists predominantly of sodium hydroxide in an excited state.

The system has been tested and validated at a major US beverage plant and the FDA has given its consent for the process to be used in the food and beverage industry.

“The plant in the US where the system is in use has been able to increase production by 25 per cent since installing it”, says Trustwater chief technology officer, Kevin Keane.

“We have been working on the ECA technology for the past 10 years and have some of the earliest patents on that. We moved into CIP applications four years ago and into the pungent flavour changeover area about a year ago. Then we made the breakthrough and have won a number of international awards since.”

The company won the Best Bottling Innovation award for its continuous filler disinfection application at the InterBev 2012 awards in Las Vegas, and was a runner-up in the best processing innovation category for the Three-Step Pungent Flavor Changeover application.

Sustainability award

This is on top of its sustainability award from the International Dairy Federation in 2011 and the Manufacturing Exporter of the Year Award won at the 2010 Irish Exporters Awards.

The ECA system is in use in 25 beverage plants around the world while the Pungent Flavor Changeover process is already in use in two. The new process allows enormous efficiency gains for plants as they will be able to schedule production runs for when they are needed by the market rather than according to the pungency of the products involved,” says Keane.

“We sell systems internationally. We have installations in Europe, North South America, Iran, South East Asia, China and Australia, and we now see this new innovation being rolled out to beverage plants throughout the world.”

Quantum

The Quantum thermal energy storage system developed by Glen Dimplex offers uses greatly improved levels of energy efficiency and comfort control and addresses some of the key challenges presented to electricity utilities by increasingly high levels of renewable generation as an alternative to fossil fuels.

“The Quantum started out as a heater and has become a system,” says Muiris Flynn, technical director with Glen Dimplex Heating. “The idea has grown and developed and evolved as we have engaged with the utilities.”

At the heart of the system is the Quantum space heater, a new generation storage heater with capabilities unlike anything available up to now. It has been designed to fully decouple the delivery of the energy by the utility company from the use of that energy by the end consumer.

The very latest materials, electronic controls and communications technologies have been applied to develop a product that is revolutionary in both the heating and electricity industries.

The ability of the Quantum heater to take in energy at any time of the day or night and release it whenever needed allows it to take electricity from the grid whenever there is excess available and not just at night.

This has a particularly application for a utility which is relying increasingly on intermittent renewable sources such as wind. Sometimes there’s too much wind and other times there’s too little.

Power utilities

The Quantum allows the excess wind power to be taken up while also lessening the load on the grid at peak times and when there might be insufficient wind power available.

The system does this through a direct connection to the grid operator which enables the electricity industry to remotely and dynamically switch on and off the charging circuit according to generation and network constraints.

This means that Quantum storage heaters can be aggregated and managed to effectively become a dispersed energy store. This gives the industry an important tool that can help them to match demand to suit variable renewable generation sources.

And user benefits are considerable as well, with laboratory tests suggesting energy savings of up to 20 per cent and cost efficiencies of up to 25 per cent when compared to older systems.

Quantum has been installed in 143 homes as part of the Greenway project in Dublin and results so far have been very positive. Projects are also ongoing in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Canada, and interest has been expressed in the system by power utilities across the world.

“We launched the Quantum system on the market back in October and we have been struggling to keep pace with demand since,” says Flynn.

“We are now ramping up production at our facility in Northern Ireland to meet demand which we anticipate could be up to 200,000 units annually in the UK and Ireland alone.”