Rome - An Italian startup has created two innovative heat pumps, Tina and Retina, now protected by an international patent. The pumps tap existing water resources such as aquifers to produce heat with zero emissions. The project was designed in a plant near Turin, in Piedmont, but the company's offices are based in Milan, where there is also a team of entrepreneurs.
The Italian company's name is TEON and it focuses on energy efficiency and highly innovative solutions with zero emissions of polluting gases. In these past few years, the company has designed, developed and built zero-emission heat generators. The entire design, development and production process has taken place in Italy.
The startup was established in January 2015 and stemmed from the meeting of VEOS, a company working in the energy and environmental sectors, Ferdinando Pozzani - currently TEON's CEO - and the creator of this new technology, Gianfranco Pellegrini. "VEOS was created at the end of 2013 with the aim of investing in technology and innovative business models, with a special focus on energy efficiency," said Riccardo Bani, founder and vice-president of the VEOS Group.
"For this reason, when Ferdinando Pozzani came up to us with this innovative technology at the end of 2014, we decided to invest financial resources as well as our own industrial skills in the energy sector, and established TEON. The development of our project is based on a reiterated question: how can we increasingly reduce emissions of polluting gases from heating systems?," explained Mr Pozzani. TEON is seeking to provide a concrete answer to this question and has set itself the goal of offering a viable solution to polluting gas emissions from heating systems.
The entrepreneur explained that "traditional heat pumps heat the supply water up to approximately 55 degrees Celsius and, for this reason, they can be used in the so-called 'low temperature' or 'low enthalpy' heating systems but cannot be employed in the traditional heating systems with radiators, which are currently used in the large majority of urban buildings nationwide and need water to be as hot as 80 degrees Celsius. Our solutions, which exceed a temperature of 80 degrees Celsius, do not require the traditional heating systems to be dismantled."