AN ENERGY company which creates electricity from steam has declared its order book is worth five times what it was a year ago as it builds on the momentum of its first contract win in Austria.
Heliex Power sells around half of its GenSet products outside of the UK, with the Italian market having proved particularly fruitful for the East Kilbride business because of its high energy prices.
The company’s technology allows businesses – particularly in manufacturing and industrial plants – to generate electricity from steam, power air compressors, or drive equipment.
The technology, which was developed at City University in London before Heliex Power was formed in 2010 to commercialise it, help businesses reduce energy bills, enhance plant performance and meet environmental targets.
After beginning to sell its GenSet product in 2013, East Kilbride-based Heliex has nearly 50 units in the field, clocking up more than 100,000 operating hours. It has exported its systems to Poland, France, and Italy, among other countries.
In its last year sales were £3.2 million, but Chris Armitage, chief executive of Heliex Power, said order intake in the year had increased 50 per cent to £4.2m, adding: “Coming into this year, at the end of March, our order book carried forward was £1.3m. The last year it was two to three hundred thousand.”
Mr Armitage said the company’s growth would be driven by its international sales.
“Italy is a good market, we have a very good partner there and the industry is supported by high-electricity prices and the bio-mass sector has good incentives, so all the stars are aligned in Italy at the moment,” he said. “We’re actively developing beyond there as we grow beyond Italy and the UK.”
He added that while the preference was to work with local partners, he did not rule out opening offices overseas.
“There is the potential if we were to find a particular location that was particularly strong for us, there is potential to create a local Heilex company or an employee company, but no specific plans to do that yet,” he said.
In Austria, Heliex’s GenSet has been fitted to a modified six-megawatt biomass heating plant in the town of Oberturm, near Salzburg. The installation of the system will enable the plant to create energy out of the “wet”, or saturated, steam produced by its biomass boiler, providing low-cost electricity to the local area.
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