Sine Delta: Bladeless power
If you close your eyes and picture a wind turbine, you’ll imagine a tall pole with large blades rotating in the wind. Now imagine turbines without blades.
– I looked out the kitchen window and saw the neighbour's flagpole osculating in the wind, and I thought: hmm, can I make power out of that?
And from there, an idea was born. Steven wanted to use his engineering skills and experience from a career in oil and gas to make a sustainable and renewable energy source.
– The blades from conventional turbines are made from composite materials (such as fiberglass and resin), which are difficult to recycle.
When you change the blades, the old ones get buried in the ground, Steven says, making conventional turbines a renewable energy source, but a less sustainable one.
– I wanted to do something about that and make something less invasive on surrounding wildlife and made of recycled materials.
Bilde: Sine Delta teamet. Fra venstre: Natallia Barratt, Steven Barratt, Görel Wirenborn, Nikolai Skorpe Aasprong og Mirjam Engelsvold.
Google, who do I need to team up with when starting a company?
Nordic Edge of course!
– I googled around looking for something of relevance when starting a company. I already had solid business experience, what I lacked, however, were the right connections in the renewable energy industry, fundraising experience, links to universities and scientific communities, and access to specialised advisors, so I knew I needed some sort of assistance and guidance. That’s when I discovered clusters and eventually Nordic Edge.
Steven, literally Googling around, bumped into Nordic Edge randomly, and immediately met with Nordic Edge and became a member as the company registration papers were processing.
When Sine Delta is asked about the impact of cluster membership, the answer is simple: network, network, and network.
– And in addition, you become part of a co-working community. We share many common challenges and common goals. Having an extended village around you—both professionally and socially—is invaluable, he explains.
For Sine Delta, having this “village” has been essential during the establishment phase. It’s not only about formal events and networking arenas, but also about the informal ties formed between companies in the cluster.
– You get a sense that “my house is your house.” For example, we share board members with Kakadu, and we regularly support each other across businesses.
Sine Delta is a strong example of how startups can access the right building blocks when they join a cluster network like Nordic Edge.
– When we say we are a connector for our members, it’s not just about matching the right investor with the right company. It is equally about all the smaller connections that happen within the cluster, between the companies and the people, says Trygve Meyer, Cluster Lead for Smart City, and continues:
– This is what makes cluster collaboration unique and valuable—the added value extends beyond what you can measure in numbers and results, yet we see the benefit is significant for our members.
Conventional to unconventional
Coming from a career in oil and gas – to this date, the most conventional energy source, to creating an unconventional and renewable one. Steven went from a comfortable career to trailblazing in unchartered territory.
– I still worked full time in my old job while building a new one from 2017 until 2023, when I officially registered the company.
Steven spent a lot of time researching the technology, patents and maturing the idea.
– There’s a giant world of intellectual property. Building a company with hardware technology, you need to be 100 percent certain that you don’t do something that someone else already has a patent on or is already developing.
Building both a technology and company from scratch requires a lot of time and research, and even more when you’re developing actual physical technology.
– Every entrepreneur devotes time and effort to product development and testing, but the requirements for hardware are on a completely different level. Unlike software companies, where an error can often be corrected by quickly tweaking the code, hardware development involves many more variables. Each adjustment requires not only design changes but also real-world testing — often with several iterations of both the hardware itself and the software that controls it — before you can prove that it truly works.
– It’s high-risk building hardware, because you need to invest upfront building the product, and further invest if you need to change it.
Regardless, Steven wanted to take the risk and has led the company from a one-man-operation to a scale-up tech-energy company with five employees.
Become a member
Join the agritech cluster and gain access to a valuable network, expertise, and events. As a member of the cluster, you will have a dedicated partner focused on your company’s success.
