Naturgy Innovahub is the vehicle through which the energy group channels its research and innovation work in technologies and new business models linked to sustainability and energy transition, such as clean fuels (biomethane, hydrogen, ammonia or synthetic gases), The search for efficiency improvements for new energies or energy storage.
Despite its youth, Naturgy’s Innovahub has already promoted important industrial projects, has created various companies and incubated different startups, within its Connecting Energy program, an incubator oriented to accelerate projects of very diverse nature, from technologies linked to efficiency in operations to sustainable mobility solutions.
New companies for new challenges
The recycling and reuse of materials have become, in all industrial sectors, also into the energy, in a true challenge in order to reduce the environmental impact and promote a more responsible use of natural resources.
Instead of discarding equipment and pieces, companies like Naturgy choose to recondition and reuse them. This recycling focuses especially on the wind industry where turbines and their components can have a prolonged useful life through maintenance and repair.
Thus is born Girawind, one of the companies launched by Naturgy’s Innovahub, which has as its main objective the integral recycling of wind turbines and the recovery of materials from blades and other parts of the equipment to give them a second life.
To reduce industrial solid waste (RSI) Naturgy, it has constituted W2BM, a company also launched innovahub Industrial solid waste.
He has also promoted his first project to convert vehicle batteries in energy storage systems and has reached an agreement with the Australian company Wildfire Energy to investigate and develop a new gasification technology to obtain high quality green hydrogen, with net carbon emissions negative, from the treatment of a wide range of urban and agricultural dry waste.
“Naturgy Innovahub’s goal is to project the company’s roadmap beyond strategic plans and develop an ecosystem that allows addressing collaborative and open innovation, capable of quickly responding to the signals of change in the environment,” he explains Jesús Chapado, director of Innovation at Naturgy.
Open innovation
Innovahub, is a space that, under the concept of open innovation, develops several of the most leading technologies in industry 4.0, robotics, internet of things (IoT), connected house, virtual reality, blockchain, etc.
“It is probably the best tool we have to be able to develop open innovation”, and advance in different areas of action such as continuing to enhance the advanced digitalization of our assets, fundamentally seeking processes efficiency; advancing in the path of distributed generation and self -consumption; Fasing sustainable mobility, trying to imagine how future energy vectors linked to that mobility can be, and also, in the field of circular economy, we continue to investigate neutral carbon processes, so that we continue to progress in the transformation of waste, into Fuels linked to hydrogen and biomethane, ”says Naturgy’s director of Innovation.
Three d
In Innovahub it is based on the so -called three D, digitalization, decarbonization and decentralization to address the different projects.
As for digitalization, “everything that has to do with artificial intelligence, the ‘Machine Learning’ and other technologies that will digitize not only assets, but also the processes and customers are enhanced.”
With regard to decarbonization, the circular economy is enhanced, looking for new low -carbon transition fuels, with an eye on 2050, in which Europe must reach carbon neutrality.
And finally, in the field of decentralization, its analysis and possible diagnoses occupy an increasing role since as Jesus plays states “we are living a period, which began with the smart networks, in which customers play a role every paper More important, among other things because they will be able to produce their own energy and self -manage thanks to storage, among other technologies. ”