Why is energy storage such a hot topic? In order to establish completely renewable energy flows that are fully carbon free, you must be able to store the energy you generate. You can put up as many wind turbines as you like – it won’t make a difference if you still have to rely on less environmentally friendly power sources on days that are less windy.

You are also focusing on industrial heat pumps, Why? Unlike the power market, the heat market is yet to be decarbonized. Energy producers have come a long way in producing electricity from renewable sources, but heat is still largely generated through coal or natural gas. Our large-scale heat pump technology could build the missing bridge between the energy and heat production processes and complete the circle.

So, how does heat recovery work? It’s about generating power from heat. Take the fridge in your kitchen, for example. To stay cool, it pumps out all heat out of the backside by using an electric motor. If you would heat up the backside, cool the inside and swap the motor against a generator, you would have a heat recovery system that can generate electricity. In a similar way, energy-consuming industrial processes that generate a lot of waste heat can use our huge turbines to turn that heat into electricity.

Are there any challenges? We were among the first players entering this field and found that the market was not ready at the time. But the maturity level is increasing fast. It’s now up to us to keep innovating for the future.