Slides That Follow Your Voice: Dutch Accent Investor Pitch

Slide 1: A lake that did nothing for 40 years

0:17Thank you. I'll skip the slide with the uh, the mission statement, because you've seen eleven of them today and mine isn't better than the others. [chuckles] I want to start with a lake instead.

0:28The Markerveen is a shallow lake about twenty-five kilometres from here. It's three metres deep, fourteen square kilometres, and it belongs to a water board whose job, basically, is to keep it from doing anything exciting. For forty years it has produced nothing except reeds, a small amount of pike, and complaints. [laughs]

Slide 2: The Markerveen

0:49Since April it has also been producing two point one megawatts of electricity, from the first commercial array we have ever built, and that's what I'm here to raise money for.

1:01Floating solar is not new. You can buy floats from a dozen suppliers, bolt panels on them, put them on a reservoir, and people do that. Here is what they don't do.

Slide 3: Floating solar is not new

1:11They don't put them on open water with a ten-kilometre fetch, because when the wind comes across a lake like that the waves reach sixty, no, seventy centimetres, the floats pitch, the cables fatigue, and after two winters you have a very expensive raft of broken glass. The inland lakes of this country are mostly like the Markerveen: shallow, windy, and empty. Nobody could use them, so nobody did. That's the whole market, to be honest. Empty water that nobody wanted.

1:44Our array is different in one way that matters. The panels, the system, the panels don't... The panels don't sit on individual floats. They sit on a continuous tensioned membrane, like a trampoline, anchored at the edges, and the membrane damps the wave instead of riding it.

Slide 4: The storm: 0 panels lost

2:04In the storm on the second of February, with gusts of ninety-eight kilometres an hour, the pitch of our panels was one point four degrees. The reference float system in the same lake, installed by someone else, pitched eleven degrees and lost six panels. We lost none.

2:24The water board sent us a photograph of the two arrays side by side the next morning, and I have put it on the slide without a caption, because I could not think of one that was not rude. The man who sent it has worked for that water board for thirty-one years, and the email had no text in it. Just the photograph. No subject line. I asked him later what he meant by it and he said, nothing, I thought you would want it. So. That's the Dutch water sector for you. Anyway. Numbers.

2:56Numbers. The Markerveen array cost one point nine million euros for two point one megawatts, which is ninety cents per watt installed, um, against about one euro ten for conventional floating systems. Yield in the first six months was seven percent above the land-based reference, because water keeps the panels cool.

Slide 5: Numbers: 90 cents per watt

3:18Our membrane is rated for twenty-five years, and our insurer, after the February storm, lowered our premium, lowered our premium, which I'm told does not happen. The insurer called to check it wasn't a mistake. It wasn't. Then he asked if we could do his roof. We can't do his roof. It's not a lake. He knew that. I think he was making a joke. I'm not sure.

3:42There are eighteen hundred square kilometres of shallow inland water in this country alone, and permission for three percent of it would be enough for four gigawatts. We have letters of intent from four water boards and a signed agreement for the second array, at Gooiplas, five point six megawatts, starting in September.

Slide 7: We are raising 12 million euros

4:03We are raising twelve million euros. Seven million goes to Gooiplas and to a second line for making the membrane. three million goes to engineering for deeper water, because the lakes here are the easy case, and the lakes in the rest of Europe are not. The remaining two million is working capital, and I'm not going to pretend it's anything more exciting than that.

4:25I'm an engineer and I'm not a good salesperson, so I'll finish the way I started. [sighs] My co-founder told me to smile more during this part. She's in the second row. I'm smiling. This is the smile. No? Okay. It's the one I have.

Slide 8: 700 homes, from a lake

4:42There's a lake twenty-five kilometres from here that did nothing for forty years. It's now powering seven hundred homes, and it survived a winter that broke the competition. Come and see it, and bring boots, because it is, in the end, a lake. Thank you.