The Energy and Innovation Awards were presented on 22 March.

The Awards Jury includes: expert team from Technology Centre Merinova, EnergyVaasa, EnergySpin and Vaasa Region Development Company VASEK led by Marko J Koski, EnergySpin Operations & Partnerships and Kristoffer Jansson, EnergyVaasa Communications & Brand Manager.

Winner of 2023

Green Industry Park - the technology to harvest common reed and make biogas out of it

Green Industry Park from Turku does not only create carbon sinks, but also improves the ecological status of vulnerable archipelagos. Once method is created and demonstrated, it is scalable globally. Green Industry Park wants to use the innovative technology and creativeness to boost technological know-how and scale it up to global business by using weed as the biomass for carbon sink of our own.

The company has built technology over the decades to be the world leader in Forest Industry know-how, an is in the position to create the technology to harvest common reed (Aalto University Mechatronic project on-going), make biogas out of it, use the solid reject of the bio gas production as the raw material for pyrolysis technology based bio char production, and use the flue gas of the pyrolysis process for methane production (QPower microbe based technology). The bio char itself can be used for improving the soil conditions for our agricultural activities thus guaranteeing the carbon will be stored for thousands of years.

By using and harvesting the annual growth of common reed at the end of its lifetime and using bio char on our crop fields, the technology does not only improve the status of Archipelago, but can also create carbon sinks.

The technology and business concept based on income from biogas production, methane production, bio char production and the income from carbon sinks, once created and demonstrated, can be scaled up to global markets as the need for moving towards carbon neutrality is urgent and the existence of common reed is globally vast. Currently common reed is rotten at the seafronts and thus causing methane emissions by itself without a possibility to be utilized as raw material in mass production.

The People’s Choice 2023

CloEE - increasing overall equipment effectiveness in Industry 4.0

CloEE is a Helsinki-based company that provides industrial enterprises with a leading IoT software-as-a-service that helps to increase overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) and measure and control carbon emissions due to reducing energy consumption and minimizing the number of required machine tools.

Approximately 60% of our electricity comes from burning fossil fuels, mostly coal and natural gas. At the same time, industrial enterprises account for approximately 27% of global CO₂ emissions. World Economic Forum and its partners aim to reduce the carbon footprint of the manufacturing industry by exchanging data in the supply chain. CloEE plans to join in achieving this goal and to become a sustainable partner for industrial enterprises.

70% of industrial plants fail to achieve 40% equipment efficiency and that billions of industrial machines at 10 million enterprises globally are only utilized at the level of 40-60%, far from the desired 90%.

By increasing the efficiency with CLoEE, enterprises can significantly reduce specific emissions, thereby increasing useful energy consumption. Moreover, there will be a significant decrease in the number of new machines required, which when added to the optimization of current equipment, can result in a huge reduction in carbon emissions.

CloEE has over 100+ ready to use CNC protocols and digs into all the analytics and reports generated based on real up-to-date data and provides useful insights on a weekly basis. CloEE works 24/7 helping to increase OEE and catching all the important trends of how equipment actually works. CloEE provides industrial enterprises with ECaaS (Efficiency Center as a Service) – a team of highly qualified SMEs (subject-matter experts) of the production process.

• Read more about all the finalists

Photos: Jukka Vähälummukka