ZEI-Tec GmbH is at the starting line
Germany, Wasseralfingen: The financing plan for the start-up has been successfully fixed with the Kreissparkasse Ostalb.
Image source: ZEI-Tec GmbH
Germany, Wasseralfingen: The financing plan for the start-up ZEI-Tec GmbH has been successfully fixed with the Kreissparkasse Ostalb.
Conversion of the production halls on the SHW site in Wasseralfingen will begin this year.
Dr. Bertram Ehmann feels relieved: “The financing is finally in place!” The managing director of ZEI-Tec GmbH is delighted “that CEO Markus Frei from Kreissparkasse Ostalb has successfully accompanied and guided us through the processes of house bank loans, state guarantees, medium-sized investments and private investors in a forward-looking and result-oriented manner.”
The financial volume of the new company, which has moved into the office and production halls of the former SHW Casting Technologies GmbH in Wasseralfingen, amounts to €35 M, €7.4 M of which came from the innovation program funding of the Federal Environment Ministry. ZEI-Tec will build an innovative, high-tech production facility for new and highly efficient soft magnetic iron cores for transformers used in power grids, generators and electric motors on the place where the first blast furnace of the former royal Swabian Hüttenwerke (SHW) went into operation in 1671.
Power suppliers of the power grids in Germany and the EU are currently using transformers with electrical sheet metal cores. Electrical sheet technology has been successfully used for 150 years. The manufacture and operation of electrical sheet cores is unfortunately associated with high energy and material consumption. The potential for improvement has been exhausted. The solution has been provided in the form of amorphous foils.
With the new ZEI-Tec process, the energy loss is reduced considerably; around a factor of 10. That is roughly the same size as when comparing LED and incandescent lamp. The heart of this is a casting system for rapidly solidifying, amorphous foils with a thickness of 35 µm (equivalent to the thickness of half a hair) and a width of 200 mm. The annual production volume should be 250 million meters. The system uses only electrical energy. When manufacturing 20,000 ZEI-Tec cores per year, 66 GWh of energy (80 %) and 35,600 m3 of water (99 %) are saved, and 73,500 T of CO2 emissions avoided. With an average transformer, up to 2500 kWh of electricity can be saved annually in grid operation.
Six million transformers of this type are currently used in Europe.
“The large energy suppliers such as E.ON, EWE Netze and Netze BW GmbH are pushing us more and more towards the start of production. You urgently need these technologies,” says Ehmann, continuing, “The amorphous ZEI-Tec films are used in transformers for power distribution, in generators and also in electric vehicles, increasing their range by 15 %.”
The market size in Europe is several 100,000 T per year. The ZEI-Tec’s managing director knows about the main advantage of his technology: “Thanks to our high-performance film, energy producers have to generate less energy. This has been evident since the abandonment of nuclear power and the dismantling of coal-fired power plants, because renewable energies are generally volatile and therefore difficult to plan.”
Source: ZEI-Tec GmbH
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