Elland-based green energy business FeTu has invested £1.5m in a new Huddersfield manufacturing base to meet demand from industrial manufacturers and other businesses for its product.
The firm’s technology enables industrial firms to recover their waste heat from temperatures as low as 40°C and convert it into electricity at unprecedented new efficiencies, slashing energy costs and carbon emissions.
The new facility will enable FeTu, which employs 15 people and is currently recruiting additional manufacturing engineers, to produce the components of its pioneering energy motor in house, ensuring quality and reducing delays from outsourcing essential parts.
Founded by Yorkshire-born designer Jon Fenton in 2016, FeTu has secured over £12m in sponsorship, investment and grants. The firm’s new manufacturing arm will enable the commercial roll out of its clean-energy technology to a wide range of pioneering blue chip industrial partners that are taking part in a pilot programme launching this autumn.
Businesses taking part in the scheme include industrial manufacturers, data centres and food production facilities in Yorkshire, the UK and across Europe.
FeTu founder and CEO Jon Fenton said: “Our unrivalled technology has been proven to be pioneering in its temperatures and efficiency. We can generate electricity directly from most heat sources at temperatures as low as 40°C, which is typical of waste heat produced by data centres, manufacturers, processors and a range of other industries. This enables those businesses to drastically reduce their operating costs and carbon emissions.”
He added: “We’re continually working to evolve our system beyond the 300% efficiency advantage it already holds over comparative technology and our temperature thresholds also offer exciting new possibilities for geothermal and solar sources.
“Enabling commercially compelling power generation below 100°C at these new and ground-breaking efficiency levels introduces a brand new weapon against climate change, and it could mark an important moment in history.”
Fenton added: “The cost, speed of delivery, and quality of the parts we outsourced from our UK supply chain didn’t meet our requirements and was stifling the rollout of our pilot programme, so we decided to take control of the manufacturing process ourselves.
“The team has over 100 years of manufacturing expertise between us, so we are very well equipped and excited to meet this challenge – and to enable this new dawn for FeTu and for sustainable energy.”
In the UK alone, low-grade waste heat energy represents a £4bn a year opportunity. Recovering 25 per cent of that and converting it into electricity would offset the power output of Drax and Hinkley C power stations combined. It would also reduce the UK’s annual output of carbon by 80 million tonnes, 20 per cent of the current total.
