Voltiris wins first commercial client

Sustainable, efficient and optimized agriculture will play a vital role in the food production sector to serve the growing global population. Greenhouses, in particular, will be key for the future of agriculture, and their global surface is expected to grow almost 20-fold by 2050. Maintaining these greenhouses requires energy for heating (gas and electricity), which has a large financial and environmental cost. The soaring gas costs call have increased the demand for better solutions. This is where Voltiris comes in.

The startup has developed greenhouse-compatible photovoltaic modules. Their solution enables greenhouse owners to produce renewable energy to power their greenhouses while growing crops efficiently. Hence, greenhouse owners can improve their energetic autonomy while reducing their costs and improving their sustainability. Voltiris technology lets through the light components needed by the plants (mostly red and blue), while the rest (green and near-infrared) is reflected and focused onto a photovoltaic module. Therefore, renewable electricity is produced without affecting the agricultural yield, as 100% of the light needed by crops is transmitted. Voltiris innovations on both the module and a self-developed sun-tracking system result in a very competitive cost of energy, ensuring a compelling ROI for users.

By launching the first client project at a customer site in the Graubünden area, Voltiris marked a major milestone in its journey to commercialise its technology. The startup has installed 15m2 of photovoltaic panels in a 40-year-old Gysi greenhouse. While enabling various vegetables, ranging from cabbage to tomatoes to grow, its technology will aid energy production without compromising on the agricultural yield. The project will enable local, independent, and green vegetable supply.

“During the next months, we look forward to measuring and analysing in further detail the electricity production of this pilot and optimizing with the grower the way the energy produced is used locally. We will continue to test our solution in different setups: our pilot pipeline is busy, with four pilots scheduled in large-scale industrial greenhouses in the next year (in Switzerland and the Netherlands),” says Jonas Roch, CTO at Voltiris.

Pilot project at Agoscope
To further evaluate the possibility of its technology, Voltiris has installed two modules in a proof of concept project at Agroscope, the Swiss research center for protected crops to conduct an agronomical study assessing the impact of the panels on the yield of tomatoes and pepper.

(RAN)