CapTop wins the Optima Award at Innovation Village Award 2024

We are honored to announce our Optima Award win, which is awarded within the Innovation Village initiative.

On Friday, November 15 we participated in the final of the Innovation Village Award, an award established and supported by Knowledge for Business, ASviS and ENEA and sponsored by the Regione Campania and the Comune di Napoli. CapTop was selected among the three finalists in the sector “Environment, Blue growth, Sustainable building, Energy” and its project “Energy saving and sustainability of buildings” won the Optima Award.

The latter was established by Optima Italia S.p.A., main sponsor for the third consecutive year of the Innovation Village Award, and has been reserved for the development of innovative technologies, solutions and services in the field of energy efficiency.

We are proud of this milestone that has rewarded our ongoing commitment to innovation in the energy storage sector and believe that our project focused on energy saving in the use of lifts and freight elevators can really offer an important contribution to the development of the energy efficiency sector.

From Il Mattino, 18/11/2024

Our project “Energy saving and sustainability buildings” in summary:

Most existing buildings have lifts. New buildings, to minimize land use, will be multi-storey and equipped with lifts. The one related to lifts and freight elevators represents one of the main energy consumption of buildings (not only public) although the work done against the force of gravity on the ascent could theoretically be recovered on the descent reducing very much the actual consumption. The current systems in use do not allow such recovery. CapTop is the first company in Italy to produce supercapacitor and LTO storage systems. Our proposal for the public buildings challenge is a recovery system kit based on supercapacitors or LTOs, adaptable to existing or newly installed lifts.
The expected benefits of adopting the solution are:

• Energy recovery on downhill >80% of what is consumed on uphill
• Storage provides additional power for the start up on uphill, allowing lower connection costs (lower required powers) for the supply of energy from the grid
• In the event of an electrical blackout, the system provides emergency power to reach the nearest floor and open the doors, securing any passengers.
• Easy installation, no maintenance/replacement. Taking into account the counterweights that compensate for the weight of the empty cabin, we have the following estimate of the recoverable energy for a single plant under the following hypothetical conditions:
• 100 kg of weight lifted/braked on average
• 100 A/R trips per day for 5 days/week and 50 weeks per year
• 10 m lift average (3-storey building)

The energy spent on a trip uphill is mgh=1009,8110=9810J=2,725Wh

The energy recovered annually is 1005500,82,725 = 54,5 kWh