Yellow&Blue Investment Management, ABB Technology Ventures and b-to-v Partners have invested EUR4.8m in ROMO Wind along with the founders of the wind farm optimisation company.
Yellow&Blue, a specialised clean-energy venture capital investor backed by Nuon/Vattenfall and headquartered in the Netherlands, led the investment. It invested alongside ABB Technology Ventures, the venture arm of ABB, a power and automation technology group and global supplier to the wind industry. b-to-v is a venture capital investor backed by a network of 200 entrepreneurial private investors investing across different industries including renewable energy.
ROMO Wind is a product led technology and service company generating its business by improving the performance and increasing the production of wind farms. ROMO focuses in particular on optimising power generation by technically adjusting wind turbine rotors. There is limited availability in the market of accurate wind measurement technology on wind turbines for assessing, correcting and controlling turbine performance. ROMO Wind owns a patented wind measurement technology capable of highly accurately measuring the speed and direction of the wind that hits the wind turbine. The company has signed contracts with large utility wind farm owners jointly owning approximately 18 GW of wind farm installed capacity – the equivalent of more than four times the entire installed wind power capacity of Denmark.
Søren Mouritsen, co-chief executive of ROMO Wind, says: “Current financing conditions are still very difficult for new companies like ROMO Wind. We are extremely proud and excited that these blue chip industry investors with in depth knowledge of the wind power industry have decided to invest in our company. We see this as a strong endorsement of our technology, our team and our business model. We also see it as a major step forward in helping ROMO Wind to penetrate the very substantial global market for optimising wind farms.”
Albert Fischer, managing director of Yellow&Blue Investment Management, says: We have been impressed by the management’s ability to build a sound company based on an intelligent business model and a disruptive technology that accurately measures wind hitting a wind turbine – including wind speed and direction – a notoriously difficult task. ROMO Wind’s patented spinner anemometer has the potential to become an industry standard for performance improvement and monitoring of existing and future wind turbines. Deployment of ROMO Wind’s proven and cost-effective technology brings incremental revenues by increasing the output of a turbine, which benefits all parties in the wind industry value chain and opens up a significant addressable market. We look forward to working with ROMO Wind’s team members in growing the company further.”
