Awards & Funding

DesignPro Renewables was a sister company to DesignPro Automation. Their journey began in March 2016 when DesignPro was successful in securing a H2020 SME Instrument Phase 1 project (‘HydroKinetic-25’, project number 719009). This gave them €50,000 to develop out a detailed business plan and feasibility study to validate whether pursuing their goal was realistic or not and evaluate the potential the project could have.

Following the successful completion of our Phase 1 project they set their sights on securing Phase 2 funding. Due to the extremely competitive nature of the H2020 SME Instrument fund their first submitted application was not successful despite it scoring very highly and receiving a ‘Seal of Excellence’. They revised the application and resubmitted and in March 2017 they received confirmation that our application had been successful.

Their Phase 2 project (grant agreement No 766499) started in July 2017 and ran for a total of 31 months up until January 2020.

In June 2017 DesignPro was one of only two Irish SME’s acknowledged for reaching the pinnacle of European research, being awarded the status of a ‘Champion of EU Research’. They submitted their Phase 2 application under SME Instrument Topic 9: ‘Stimulating the innovation potential of SMEs for a low carbon and efficient energy system’.

In the 18th January 2017 cut-off round, 171 eligible applications were submitted for this specific topic, 9 of which were funded. Out of these 9 successful applications, theirs was the #1 highest ranked application, something which they were immensely proud of. This success also meant they were the second highest scored Irish application for a Phase 2 SME project in the history of the programme.

Our Team
The project had a small dedicated team working exclusively for DesignPro Renewables. The core team included:

Sales and Marketing
Innovation and Project Management
Design and Electrical Engineering
Admin and Finance

They overlapped with the DesignPro Automation team in many aspects of their work and had members of the Automation team contributing to the project on a part-time basis.

Deployment Services