History
AQUASOLAR Water Desalination & Environmental Technology AG / ASET Automotive & Environmental Technology in brief:
AQUASOLAR has first been incorporated in 1992, being specialised only on seawater desalination systems in those early days. Initiated by Oliver Jahnel, the founding CEO of AQUASOLAR AG, the new incorporation of the shareholder company (AQUASOLAR AG) in February 2000, was our response to changing requirements in terms of development, production and sales. AQUASOLAR AG has taken over the complete activities of Aquasolar GmbH (Bremerhaven) and also adopted all the experiences gathered in that period.
Furthermore the sector for small wind generators has been included in the activities of the company, early in 2000 just after the incorporation. This was an independent development, designed to serve the needs of stand-alone systems in remote areas. It was the key decision that led to the durability of the enterprise, its capability to diversify and adapt to changing market situations through time. This record today provides know-how of over twenty years of experience to the company.
Continuous development and improvement
One of the company-aims of AQUASOLAR is the permanent search for components, being capable to improve the availability and efficiency of the installations and the technical solutions.
Therefore we permanently monitor large areas of modern, applied environmental technology to complete and optimize our devices and services.
AQUASOLAR AG – the Company
The Development of AQUASOLAR AG
1992 - Incorporation as GmbH (private limited): small seawater desalination units.
2000 - Foundation as a shareholder company: expansion of services and product range, small wind generators.
2001 - Foundation of subsidiary company AQUASOLAR (PVT) Ltd. in Sri Lanka, as production facility and service-center in the market. The intention was to be close to the customers and the market and also to create higher efficiency of the products.
2003 - Installation of the independent consultant division Alternative Energy Consult (AE Consult), to cover the huge demand of praxis-oriented consultancy in the field: location-analysis, financial schemes, product selection ....
Not for us!
We came here with our enterprise in 2000 from Munich in Germany.
Up to then, we have had years of getting to know the environment in which we were planning to focus our new enterprise of environmental friendly technology and services.
Back in Germany we have been active in various environmental companies, in leading position or as managing partner. We have been developing large scale Wind farms in Germany, Hydropower plants and other renewable energy projects. We have also been the driving force in developing a "Zero Emission" House developing company into a promising public share-holder company.
We did not come to Sri Lanka, to pocket in a short term profit and vanish – had that been our intention nothing would have been easier than to make such profits on the booming German solar market back then. In far over 20 years on the renewable energy market, we have the best of connections to key stake holder in the fast growing German renewable energy industry, which at that time already had a history of far beyond 2 decades.
Here in Sri Lanka, we have continued developing our product range and took care of those consumers who were really interested in "Renewables", consulted them and gave advice, installed small to medium size, mainly inverter off-grid-systems and developed our own facility – step by step.
At the same time we learned about the market mechanisms in Sri Lanka and as a logical effect stayed out of this hot race of promoting 4 or 5 – light solar home systems on soft-loans to poor villagers without regular income.
Since 2004, after shifting from Ja-Ela to Dankotuwa, we are completely independent form the CEB and the provided power-cuts at drastically rising prices. We do have an old German diesel generator at our site but we have not used it since 2005, when we installed our existing and gradually growing solar-system.
In June 2010 we installed our first grid connected solar system with a capacity of 20 kWp, at that time one of the largest grid-connected systems in Sri Lanka. Since then, we have developed our components further and built a strong partnership towards our purely German suppliers of original solar equipment, Made in Germany.
Another milestone in our company development took place in 2013, as we partnered with two NGO´s in order to improve our resources of skilled and well trained technicians to help us developing our efforts to satisfy our clients requirements in terms of fast growing demand for net-metering installations and necessary service on one side as well as manpower and infrastructure to sustain our new field of Automotive Technology on the other.
Don Bosco Technical Center in Negombo.jpg)
and
UNESCO Village – future for children in Kosgoda.jpg)
After a first introductory presentation to the students of "Don Bosco Technical Center" in Negombo about our company history as well as a detailed demonstration of our equipment in combination with a site visit of a previously installed 3 kWp Solar net-metering system in Negombo, we started our co-operation with Don Bosco by building our installation teams with the support of Don Bosco professionals and trainees.
At the moment we are preparing our first combustion vehicle conversion to full electric by rebuilding a used Suzuki GN 125 to later equip with a modern 11 kW electric motor and state of the art charging and control electronics together with a modern LiFePO4 battery.
The next step will be to develop a training program for our up-coming field of conversion of vehicles from combustion engine to full electric vehicles at the Don Bosco technical training center and our second partner the "UNESCO Village – future for Children" in Kosgoda.
Both training centers have a extremely well equipped motor mechanic garage and highly qualified technical trainers that train dozens of young students every year, while operating a complete automobile garage in a realistic and business-oriented enterprise.
We will start our new segment of electric car conversion in January 2014 in Kosgoda and we will establish a new and so far not introduced technical qualification course for "Mechatronic technicians" to Sri Lanka that will guarantee our requirement for the necessary highly qualified technicians for this new Technology.
At first we will convert our own fleet of vehicles to 100% electric vehicles and parallel to that we offer the same to all owners of old and even very old combustion engine vehicles!
Since 2006 we are exploring the upcoming new development in individual and public transportation, known as "e-Mobility", which stands for "electric Mobility". We regularly visit the relevant exhibitions in Munich and developed a strong Network of stakeholders in this industry by communicating to various entrepreneurs and developers in Europe. We started developing options and strategies to introduce this new main-stream lifestyle, that is rapidly developing in Europe and North America in the past view years, to the consumers, the tourism sector and the business society in Sri Lanka.
In 2013 we decided to go public with that approach and started introducing some of the options of this new movement "e-Mobility" to our closer friends and potential clients.
We are proud to be able to offer the absolute icon amongst the world famous sports cars exclusively to our customers in Sri Lanka from November of 2013 on. The unique "Porsche 356 speedster" replica as a complete and 100% electric vehicle, developed and produced by one of our new partners, the company called "Turn-e", Munich Germany.
Besides that, for the smaller budgeted driver, we offer the state of the art "FEDDZ" a futuristic appealing dynamic electric motorcycle, also Made in Germany.
At the moment we are negotiating with one of the leading European car manufacturers to introduce their complete fleet of full electric vehicles exclusively to our customers in Sri Lanka.
Another key partner in our portfolio of Automotive & Solar Environmental Technology will be an extra-ordinary and rapidly growing new start-up company in the field of modern charging infrastructure, negotiations are on the way and we expect to be able to present this promising partner very soon.
General thoughts of the existing power-struggle
While above mentioned solar home systems where sold on "soft-loans" at the same time the government and certain industries had heavily increased the installation of diesel-power-plants to the national grid island-wide, mainly outdated and un-efficient technology, slowly but surely running the country and its consumers into un-payable depth towards oil supplying nations. Diesel energy became the largest single cost-factor to the countries budget and of course the largest consumer of valuable "Foreign Exchange" and that way contributes a big deal to the countries huge and constantly growing annual deficit.
So, if nearly 60% of the production capacity of the country's electricity supply is depending on Diesel power, who would be surprised if sooner or later the price for electric power would have to be equivalent to the cost of diesel?
That is exactly what happened back in April 2012 and again this year April 2013 with two price increments of 40% each and make no mistake, if the power-dependency of the country / the consumers is not changing drastically, the next increment for electricity is just around the corner! How could it be otherwise?
This island has enough and more resources to cover its entire power demand with renewable energy – since the sun delivers every day about 800000 GWh of energy free of charge onto the island of Sri Lanka directly.
The total society consumes probably less than 100 GWh per day that includes electric power production, traffic and industry!
Those who keep wanting to sell additional fossil fuel in the form of Oil, Gas and Coal to the society do have a certain agenda and it has nothing to do with protecting the beautiful flora and fauna of Ceylon. Its legitimate need for modern power- supply for a healthy and modern economy is certainly not compromised if its consuming population decides to favor the free of charge and absolutely clean sun-power in all aspects of life instead of the ever more expensive and health threatening fossil nightmare!