Climatenza - Solar Heat for Industrial Processes

Solar Heat for Industrial decarbonisation to achieve Net-Zero vision of Industrial sector

According to the International Energy Agency, in 2018, the global share of renewable energy used for process heat in the industry sector was only 2.5%. This is significantly lower than the share of renewable energy used for electricity generation, which was 17.4%.

In 2022, industries around the world consumed 11,890 million tons of oil equivalent (MTOE) of fossil fuels, with 8,841 MTOE coming from oil, 1,945 MTOE from natural gas, and 1,104 MTOE from coal. This accounted for around 36% of the world’s total energy consumption.

Industries are responsible for around 24% of Global greenhouse gas emissions. This includes emissions from energy Production, manufacturing, and other Industrial Processes.

The C160 Parabolic Trough Solar thermal Collector has already been successfully implemented in India and is now scaling in Bangladesh. The C160 has the highest measured optical efficiency at 76% of any concentrating parabolic trough collector for supplying heat in the range of 60°C-200°C and received the Solar Keymark Certification in 2021. It has excellent durability with a lifetime of at least 25 years, making it competitive with its low cost of heat and low operational cost.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF9YhsHCTkk

For the recently completed Solar thermal Project at Rallis India (Tata Chemicals subsidiary), Climatenza provided opportunity to 47 people. Additionally, we are currently deploying project in Coca-Cola and Unilever factory and providing job opportunities to about 68 people for combined projects.

Until now 33,800 tons of CO2 emissions has been saved. We are also conducting a detailed engineering study for Tata Chemicals for 30MW project. Once this 30MW project is deployed it can save about 286,018 tons of CO2 emissions.

Climatenza Solar is winning in Indian market because of 3 major advantages. India is a price-sensitive market and it is critical to provide efficient technology at competitive price. Due to this, Climatenza is mass-manufacturing in India and developing our local supply chains. We have seen the impact of this where the prices have fallen by 48% from USD 650/kW to USD 338/kW. 

Additionally, our system has to be manufactured and integrated on the Industrial site. Therefore, land utilization factor has to be specially designed. Climatenza’s Parabolic trough collector can be installed on-ground, on-roof or even on parking sheds because of 10 times smaller size compared to closest competition while our efficiency remains same. Our efficiency is 76.6%.

Main reason for Concentrated Solar thermal technology not scaling up is the fact that the cost of Manufacturing has been high since majority of the manufacturing is been done in European countries including Nordic and Spain.

Additionally, there have been no efforts to scale the production and with lack of mass manufacturing, the costs have been substantially high.

CLIMATENZA believes, with net-zero carbon focus for Industries and customers and with our innovative Financial Models and the Scale-up opportunities, we can reduce the initial costs while providing efficient and scaleable solutions to the customers.

Within India, we are currently focusing on Textiles, Food Processing & Beverages, Dairy, Chemical and Pharma Industries. Collectively these Industries uses around 1.15 Billion tons of fossil fuels including Coal, Natural Gas and Oil. With an average cost of about $35/ton, the total Addressable market is about $40.25 Billion.

We are working with leading Companies like TATA Group, Coca-Cola, H&M and AB InBev. Within TATA, we are getting word of mouth, for example we were working with Rallis India, a subsidiary of TATA Chemicals and got the opportunity to get in touch with TATA Chemicals (parent company) that is providing us an order of 5.4 MW as Pilot and an opportunity to scale this to about 40MW in next 18 months. 

Additionally, we have got in touch with Management team of TATA Coffee and TATA Consumable Products which aims to pilot our solution as well. Also, the company is using Linkedin to reach to customers in India.

1. Highly efficient Solution - Efficiency of 77% recorded in testing provides one of the most efficient solution in market

2. Easy to Install - Due to small size collector can be installed both on rooftop& on-ground easily with minimal foundation cost

3. Innovative Business Model - CLIMATENZA is working towards scaleable Projects and providing Heat Purchase agreement to customers which makes it easy for them to install, pay on monthly basis

Impact Goals for next 3 years:

For the upcoming 30MW Plant at Tata Chemicals, Climatenza plans to provide job opportunities to 300+ people which can provide valuable skills and experience that can help them to secure better employment opportunities.

Additionally, Climatenza has the opportunity to scale our projects in 84 Coca-Cola (owned & partner’s plants), 28 factories of Unilever in India, 29 factories of Pernod Ricard, 5 factories of Rallis India which could provide employment to over 760 people (including full-time and contractual).

Solar thermal technology promises to be a significant component of the future Renewable energy mix. As the most mature Solar thermal technology, Parabolic trough concentrators are our focus for Renewable research. Conventional PTC are evacuated receivers which contribute 30% of the Solar field cost, not including significant failure (55% due to broken glass envelopes and 29% due to loss of vacuum arising due to failure of glass to metal seal).

We are developing a novel receiver and Collector Parabolic trough assembly to reduce the cost from $600/ square meter (in the market) to $190/sq. meter with our technology.

We have developed Parabolic Trough Collector (PTC) Assembly for generating low to medium temperature process heat for Industrial Application. It consists of a reflector which is supported on a parabolic frame, a central receiver tube at its focus, a sun tracking system and piping network. A detailed description of individual parts is provided herein:

1. Reflector

To bring down the cost of a single unit parabolic mirror or multiple facets, a new concept of mirror strip-based design has been implemented. Bundles of mirror strips are placed on a parabolic frame which provides a region of concentration on the receiver tube. This address two key issues namely the cost of the reflector and damage related issues.

The parabolic frame is laser cut with high precision and supported on a torque tube assembly. The length and width of the mirror strip and the positioning of the receiver has been optimized by coding an in-house ray-tracing algorithm using Monte-Carlo approach. The predicted spread of beam at focus was measured against the actual one was found to be within the limits. An Indian patent has been filed on the product.

The results in the Pilot Demonstration shows a very high efficiency of 79.4% and over cost reduction is 36% compared to current technologies in the market.

Climatenza Solar has recently developed 500kW Solar thermal project at Rallis India in the state of Gujarat.

In the past 2 weeks (from January 01, 2023), 3 major companies has signed Climatenza as their Sustainability partner. We have signed the Letter of Commitment with Coca-Cola, Pernod Ricard and Unilever.

For Coca-Cola, Climatenza will be piloting 180kW solar thermal plant and this could be scaled to their 84 factories in India upon success.

For Unilever, we are working with one of their factory to demonstrate 560kW solar thermal plant and this could be scaled to their 28 factories in India

For Pernad, we are signed one their factory to demonstrate 850kW solar thermal plant and this could be scaled to their 29 factories.

Additionally, we are working with Tata Chemicals to do detailed engineering for their 30MW Solar thermal Plant.

Climatenza need to raise Seed Investment of US$8.3 Million to manufacture our production line for manufacturing the Solar Collector and meet the demands of the customers in India and beyond.

Everything is being developed In-house

Our Solar Collector technology can be deployed as industrial-integrated solar thermal project, with or without storage to deliver cost-competitive dispatchable Energy for Industrial processes.

We usually work on following models:

1. CAPEX - Where we engineer and manufacture the plant and customer pays for the project

2. Heat Purchase Agreement - We invest and engineer, construct and Operate plant while customers pays for the energy consumption on monthly basis for a specified period of time. This model is ideal for scaleable projects like the one we are doing with TATA Chemicals in India.

3. Operation & Maintenance of Solar fields - Customer pays annual cost for O&M of the solar fields.

We are already profitable on the projects we are developing right now. We have net margins of 11% and this will be increased to 24% once the development of Solar fields are being mass-manufactured in India.