Meet this year’s inspiring Swiss ClimateLaunchpad Contestants

EMISSIUM – an AI powered software to track, certify and offset the emissions of electricity

Emissium offers a tracing software for power companies to track and reduce the carbon emissions of their provided energy.

Power companies are urged to report the quality of the distributed energy and to decarbonize grid infrastructures. This has proven to be a great challenge as power companies currently lack solutions to determine the real carbon emissions of the energy they manage, due to an absence of complete grid information. This is partly because the true origin of exchanged energy flows is scattered over multiple entities and not easily traceable. Thus, data on energy quality is currently being analyzed and evaluated once a year in tedious and laborious work. Currently existing solutions in the field of electricity tracking further rely only on publicly available data, which is highly aggregated and incomplete.

To solve this problem, Emissium offers a decentralized calculation mechanism that allows the real-time carbon footprint of any electricity generated or used, including renewable energy sources like photovoltaics and wind turbines. This calculation system is accessed and managed through a unique platform, which integrates a marketplace for energy producers and consumers to engage in transparent traceable transactions. The platform leverages advanced artificial intelligence (AI) tools to help track the environmental impact of electricity across the grid. Unlike traditional methods that track emissions only from energy sources and transactions that are recorded, Emissium’s technology considers all types of electricity flows, including renewable and fossil energy, storage, and exchanges on transmission and distribution levels.

The two founders Rafael Castro Amoeda and Alesssio Santecchia are energy and software engineers and have been working on their green business for a year. Through Emissium the teams wants to work towards “a world without intermediaries, in which information is not controlled by the appointed few, but by the empowered many.”

Learn more about Emissium here.

DEEPMOSAIK – an all-in-one bio stimulant made from collected organic waste and micro-organisms

Deepmosaik offers an All-in-One bio stimulant and fertilizer made from collected organic waste and micro-organisms. The aim of Deepmosaik is to focus on a large scale fully organic product that can enhance nutrition efficiency, abiotic stress tolerance and crop quality traits that optimize the soil for plant production. This stands in contrast to the usually used mineral fertilizers, which expel 40’000 tons of nitrogen per year only in Switzerland. As a fully organic product Deepmosaik will hold the nitrogen and make it 100% plant available. This will support a 100% nutritional efficiency of the plant, higher growth potential and a strong increase in plant resistance.

In addition to the product, Deepmosaik will offer a collection service that will allow for a 1/3 reduction of waste to be burned or sent to landfills.

Through their bio stimulant and fertilizer products, founders Tina Kontuniemi and Giuseppina Moresi envision to reduce two-thirds of nitrous oxide emissions generated on farmland with organic waste from end consumers.

YUON CONTROL – a predictive heating control system

Yuon Control has developed a predictive heating control system for district heating networks.

The Yuon Control system independently learns the thermal characteristics of a building and optimizes its heating practices. Inefficient heating and incorrectly set heating values can be massively reduced by a one-time and inexpensive retrofit of the heating control. The system also offers an online platform, where operators of district heating networks can access continuous information. This enables additional optimization of the system in terms of utilization, which means that consumption can be further reduced or more parties can be connected to the system.

Buildings consume 42% of the total energy in Switzerland, 72% of which is used for space heating alone. Yuon Control optimizes the heat energy usage by adapting it to the thermal dynamics of a building, thereby significantly reducing their ecological footprint and CO2 emissions.

Yuon uses Model Predictive Control for its system: they employ machine learning to build a mathematical model of each individual building which captures the thermal losses, the thermal mass, and other properties. The automated process can readjust itself to changes such as renovations or different residents.

The founding team consists of electrical engineer Lorin Mühlebach, who is responsible for the software and hardware development, Josef Jenni, who is an expert in the field of control systems with vast experience in the energy industry and Sebastian Hersberger, who holds a PHD in Economics and Management Consulting and will oversee business development.

Together the founders envision to “contribute to the reduction of energy consumption and raise awareness among the population on energy control”.

Read more about Yuon Control here.