Naked Energy’s business journey
By Christophe Williams, CEO & co-founder of Naked Energy
I returned from the United States a few weeks ago after attending the opening ceremony of Graves Hall, a modern student accommodation building at Creighton University located in Omaha, Nebraska. The building has 96kW of our unique VirtuHOT solar collectors installed and marks the launch of Naked Energy in the US.
The system will deliver 74,584 kWh per year of renewable heat for sanitary hot water, reducing the demand from the existing gas boilers and resulting in significant financial savings as well as an estimated 800 tonnes of carbon savings over the next 20 years. Please do check out the fantastic video on the project below.
This represents such an important milestone for the business and adds to my personal journey. The business I started a decade ago with my co-founder Nick has indeed come a long way in its mission to displace fossil fuel in global commercial and industrial space.
With our Virtu product range, we’re proud to have designed and developed the World’s highest energy density solar collectors for flat roof installations.
Naked Energy’s VirtuPVT collector combines solar photovoltaics (PV) and solar thermal (T) technology to generate both electricity and heat from a single collector. Our VirtuHOT collector, which generates solar heat, received the gold standard TÜV international certification. An achievement we’re incredibly proud of.
From the first small-scale installations of Virtu to ever larger projects with several thousand tubes and MW in energy generation, we are a business contributing wholeheartedly to the global energy transition by decarbonising heat in the built environment.
While I was traveling to Omaha, I thought about my grandfather, a true pioneer of renewable technology in the 1970’s. An engineer leading the ‘Alternative Energy Division’ for John Laing, he developed flywheel storage technology, bi-directional tidal turbines, and early iterations of solar, wave and wind power.
I hope and believe he would be proud to see what we’ve achieved with Naked Energy in recent years. It has become an established solar design, engineering, and manufacturing business with a leading position in the sector and multiple international projects. Our Virtu installations are already saving 5100 tCO2 in carbon emissions per year in sectors from manufacturing to hotels and leisure centres. And now we’ve just added our very first project in the United States of America. Our ambition to ramp up the deployment of Virtu is as strong as ever.
Our US distribution partner ELM Solar, who delivered the project with Core construction LLC at Creighton University, is preparing to manufacture Virtu locally from early in 2024 for our American customers, taking advantage of the country’s ambitious net zero goals.
The decarbonisation of heat below 100C now presents a £650bn opportunity, and solar heat is set to play a critical role in the industry’s growth. The IEA predicts that the number of solar thermal systems will grow from 250 million now to 1.2 billion in 2050 and will directly contribute roughly 250,000 green jobs by 2030 in Europe alone.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing global energy crisis, and with the latest IPCC report reporting the month of July 2023 is the hottest month on record, the need to pave our way towards a green energy future is more critical than ever.
The world has poured endless investment into oil and gas and its supporting infrastructure over the last decades. We must now redirect these funds into technologies and services that can deliver carbon savings right away, not in 10-15 years’ time.
The global energy transition provides a huge investment opportunity to build domestic supply chains, revitalise national industries, strengthen economies and mitigate the worst effects of climate change.
The time to change energy for good is now.