How to make clean power look so pretty, that more people will use it? How to make local farms a scalable operation that works in every continent? And how do you get mRNA in the hands of as many innovative people to revolutionise the world of medicine? Solar Visuals, Growy and RiboPro have found the answers to that, which is why they won the Blue Tulip Awards Generation 4.
Solar Visuals: making clean energy look good
The transition to clean energy requires a good amount of solar power. Getting all these solar panels up is easier said than done. Especially in dense, urban environments, space is scarce and cladding entire buildings in regular solar panels can be a bit of an eyesore. Enter Solar Visuals, winner of the Cities & Communities theme of this year’s Blue Tulip Awards.
Get to know the amazing finalists here
Solar Visuals has found a way to print images on solar panels without impacting their performance too much. This allows solar panels to blend into their environment or, if desired, make them stand out like art. Since colour is a reflection of light, any visible image printed on a solar panel will affect their performance. But Solar Visuals figured out how to minimise the loss of efficiency while maximising the visual effect.
Blending in or standing out
The secret sauce is the way Solar Visuals turns images into a raster, explains founder Wouter van Strien. “By grouping the printed parts together in a certain way, your brain is capable of translating it to a clear image. That way we need very little ink to create a visual experience.” Solar Visuals allows solar panels to become nearly invisible on the facade of buildings, by mimicking the look of other materials used in the building.
Besides blending in, the solar panels can also stand out. A recent example can be seen at the train station of the Dutch town Naarden Bussum. From afar, the small building looks like it features a classy picture of the station as it was in the previous century. Up close it becomes clear the building is actually clad in solar panels.
From Naarden-Bussum to Paris
By making green energy pretty to look at, Solar Visuals has the wind in its sails, says Van Strien: “this has a lot to do with the energy prices. The higher they are, the easier it is for project developers to implement these panels into their project.” But the political climate is also in Van Strien’s favour. “The Paris Climate Accord translates to local regulations in The Netherlands, that stipulates that new buildings need to be able to produce parts of their own energy. Apartment complexes or office buildings only have so much space on the roof, they will need a certain amount of panels on the facade as well.”
This not only goes for Dutch buildings. Solar Visuals is currently operating in different countries. They’ve recently delivered panels in a custom designed ‘gold look’ for a 1300 square metre façade of two buildings in Paris. They also have projects coming up in France and Monaco, where they expect to provide 3000 square metre solar panels in shades of grey. Van Strien: “The target is that we embellish buildings in 100 cities. That way we can really contribute to the sustainability of cities. My dream project would be to put a huge image up in one of the large cities in The Netherlands. Like a big Van Gogh or something.”
Growy: next level vertical farming
Similar big-picture thinking is going on at the winners in the Consumption & Production theme of the Blue Tulip Awards. Growy, until recently known as GrowX, offers vertical farms that are fully automated and run on advanced technology. This allows them to grow the best produce there is, literally anywhere in the world. “Maybe Antarctica might be a problem”, says Growy founder Ard van de Kreeke. “But there are not many restaurants out there anyway.”
Growy is the winner of the Blue Tulip Awards in the Consumption & Production theme. Van der Kreeke specifically mentions restaurants, as that is currently his main clientele. “We supply around 60 or 70 kinds of microgreens, herbs and leafy greens to high-end restaurants. Every top restaurant wants our produce, purely based on the taste alone. We have a waiting list.” While restaurants are lining up for their produce, Van der Kreeke says he’d love for supermarkets to do the same.
Farming as a Service
The fact that their plants have the best taste is no coincidence. Van der Kreeke: “We aim to create the ideal climate for every plant. That means we have to do a lot of tweaking. In a growth cycle of three weeks, there are 100,000 data points and around 1,000 photos for 100 kinds of plants. It allows us to find out how we can get more vitamins or minerals in a plant by, for instance, adjusting the light it is exposed to. There’s a lot for us to optimise.”
Those indoor farms are not unique to the world. What is unique, however, is the way Growy set up its business. Together with their partner digital innovation studio INFO, they’ve developed the Plant Manager. This software package operates as a Farming as a Service solution for other similar farms. “It’s labour-intensive to experiment with plants. We now have a tool to gather data from growing produce, which will allow us to better optimise these products in the future.”
‘Better produce, much faster’
“We need data to do that”, says Van der Kreeke. “If we’d develop this technology and then sell it as-is to other farms, we’d never get there. To gather and use data, we need to be the ones behind the wheel. So besides developing vertical farms, we also want to stay involved through our software. If we can connect all the knowledge we gain in the farms we are involved in, we can develop better produce much faster.”
With their first vertical farm in Amsterdam, Growy has the goal to provide the entire city with certain greens by next year. That sounds audacious, but for Van der Kreeke, it is only the start. “Supplying Amsterdam is not an issue. Next year, we will open three large farms in America, the Middle East and Europe. We can build a farm anywhere we can find a local partner to supply to. We’re focused on Africa as well. To get locally produced, fresh vegetables there would make a real impact.”
RiboPro: specialising in mRNA before it was cool
Making an impact is also what RiboPro is looking for. The winner in the Health & Well-being theme of the Blue Tulip Awards specialises in affordable, custom made messenger RNA (mRNA) for the development of vaccines and cures. The company was founded at the beginning of 2020, when the pandemic started to take serious shape, and well before anyone knew that mRNA-based vaccines would offer a possible solution. Well-timed, one might say. And none of that is a coincidence.
In fact, RiboPro’s founder Sander van Asbeck has been working towards this for almost a decade. He started his studies of biomedical sciences in 2008 and in 2016 co-founded Mercurna, a company that uses mRNA technology to find a cure for chronic kidney disease. “My whole career is focused on this”, says Van Asbeck. He would’ve eventually found RiboPro, COVID-19 just moved that moment forward. “At the start of the pandemic, we received emails at Mercurna from investors about possible pivots. We figured that if everyone is panicking, now must be the time to double down and even start a new venture. At the time we didn’t know mRNA vaccines would thing be such a big part of the solution already, but the huge promise of mRNA was clear enough to take the risk.”
Aiming for maximum impact
RiboPro makes the molecules that researchers or pharmaceutical companies can use to do research and create new medicines. “We don’t just deliver the right mRNA, we also work together with the clients to help them achieve what they want. Our customers do not always know how they need their source material made. We do. And once we’ve delivered our product, the service won’t stop. We stay in touch to advise on quantities or applications and we can help with analysing results if needed.”
Read also: After winning Blue Tulip Awards Generation 3, Naturbeads, Gradyent and Voyc aim for audacious goals
The fact that RipoPro doesn’t keep its knowledge to itself to create medicines, allows it to make much more of an impact, says Van Asbeck. “What we do is pretty unique. We’re in between service providers and manufacturers. Developing cures takes a long time. At maximum, you can create 10 or 20 in your life. Instead, we’re going to get this technology to as many innovators as possible to see what they can do with it. That way we can much faster move to a future where the vast majority of medicines are mRNA based.”
Keeping water clean
And why would we want that? “Most importantly, for the patients it’s safer and more efficient, making it a better medicine”, according to Van Asbeck.” It is also better for the environment, he says. “Making medicine is a chemical process that uses many solvents. That is waste that often can’t be recycled. For some traditional medicines, one kilogram of pharmaceutical active ingredient can easily create about 20,000 kilogrammes of waste. The mRNA production method is based on water and produces very little waste, which is often non-toxic.”
Once our bodies are done with regular medicines, traces of it end up in sewage and eventually pollute our water supplies. “These effects will only increase as the population gets older”, explains Van Asbeck. “It forces us to make a massive investment in water treatment. mRNA on the other hand, can be fully recycled in our own bodies.”
Bonding over Blue Tulips
Creating mRNA is however a deeply scientific topic, so from time to time it is a struggle to wrap it in a slick pitch. For Van Asbeck, that was the most important thing he learned during the Blue Tulip Awards. “You’re repeatedly pitching in shorter and shorter periods of time. So for me, the challenge was how much to cut back while still making sense. I also found it great for team building. To go through the whole Awards really makes the team bond. It’s a great challenge and you’re doing it together.”
Wouter van Strien also got to polish his pitch for Solar Visuals during the Awards. “It really forced me to rethink my pitch and make it shorter and more powerful. To explain the core of what we’re doing.” One of the things that made Solar Visuals stand out to the judges, was the excellent partnerships they have, for instance with international glass supplier AGC.
Van Strien: “It will also help for brand awareness. There are still many architects or building companies that are unfamiliar with the concept. There are many stakeholders involved in a building project, so we need to find a way to educate everyone in that vertical. Current regulations may work in our favour but it is still a niche market.”
‘We’re building something cool here’
Growy’s Van der Kreeke admits he rarely enters these kinds of competitions. “But this one was good, there were good judges. They asked a lot of questions we also asked ourselves. They talked more about the impact than about the technology behind our product, to make sure this was something scalable and not just a one-off project.”
“That scalability has been our goal from day one and it’s the reason we partnered with INFO. Vertical farming is a hype right now, but nobody has a business model that works. To make this work, you need something that’s applicable everywhere and is easy to scale. The fact that the judges picked up on that, confirms for us that we’re on the right track. We’re building something really cool here.”
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