Abora's Hybrid Panels: What the EIC Accelerator Paid For

Abora Solar makes hybrid solar panels: photovoltaic cells laminated onto a heat exchanger, so the same square metre of roof produces electricity and hot water. In the EIC Accelerator pilot's October 2019 cut-off, its operating company, Abora Energy SL of Zaragoza, was selected for a project called SHE, "The most profitable Solar collector on the market to supply Heat and Electricity", with blended finance, according to the European Commission's list of selected companies, which names Abora alone for the project. The EU paid a grant of €1,960,084.35 towards a €2,800,120.50 project that ran from March 2020 to June 2023, according to CORDIS.

The project was meant to put an entirely new panel, the SHE collector, on the market. Abora told Energías Renovables in August 2020 that it expected SHE to be on sale in April 2022, after three pilot installations in different European climates. No SHE panel has been launched. On 17 June 2026 the commercial section of Zaragoza's court of first instance declared Abora Energy insolvent at its own request, according to the Official Gazette of the Commercial Register (BORME).

Where Abora Stands Now

The BORME entry, published on 17 July 2026, records a voluntary insolvency (concurso voluntario) declared on 17 June 2026 by the commercial section of the Tribunal de Instancia de Zaragoza. The court did not remove the management: their powers over the company's assets are placed under the supervision of the insolvency administrator, Concursos Bajen y Roca SLP. The register services empresia and eInforma show the same entries, and eInforma lists 15 employees for 2026.

The start-up news site Ecosistema Startup reported on 21 July 2026, citing El Periódico de Aragón, that Abora is looking for an investor to put in €1 million to restructure its debt, and that it had reported four consecutive quarters of positive results before the filing. Neither claim could be checked against a filing: the most recent accounts in the register are for 2023. The size of Abora's debts has not been published.

The company kept trading into the insolvency. Its press page lists media coverage of installations up to October 2025, and its website still carries a 2026 copyright notice for Abora Energy SL.

The Technology: Two Energies From One Roof

Rooftop solar usually means a choice. Photovoltaic panels turn about a fifth of the sunlight into electricity; solar thermal collectors turn more of it into heat but produce no power, and both compete for the same roof space, the SHE objective on CORDIS notes. A hybrid, or PVT, panel puts cells on top of a water-cooled absorber. The water carries away heat that would otherwise lower the cells' output and delivers it to hot-water or heating systems.

Abora's existing panel, the aH72SK, combines an electrical efficiency of 17.8% with a thermal efficiency of about 70%, for an overall 89% that the company says is certified under the Solar Keymark scheme, according to pv magazine, which lists a 350 W electrical rating on a 1.96 square metre panel. The same publication's Spanish edition gives the same 17.8%, 70% and 89% figures. That overall figure adds heat and electricity together, which flatters a hybrid against a PV panel: a kilowatt-hour of low-temperature heat is worth far less than a kilowatt-hour of electricity.

SHE was meant to go further. Instead of laminating PV cells onto a separate absorber, as conventional PVT makers do, Abora said it would build the collector "from scratch" with direct contact between the PV layer and the absorber, no lamination furnace and less material, which it said would raise both efficiencies, extend the panel's life and cut manufacturing cost, according to the project's final report on CORDIS. The proposal promised "5 year payback" and "5 times more energy than a photovoltaic panel". The company's own project page now says "4 times".

What SHE Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The proposal asked for the grant "to finalise the development of our solar panel and the manufacturing line to accelerate the market launch in 2021", with a goal of "50,000 panels manufactured in Europe and sold worldwide in 2025", CORDIS records. The final report sets four objectives: an optimised collector, a production line ready to make it, a validated collector, and a commercialisation plan to "take off growth". Abora's project page still gives a duration of 24 months, which Energías Renovables also reported in 2020; CORDIS shows it ended on 30 June 2023, 40 months after it began.

The final report, covering March 2021 to June 2023, describes design work, not a product. It says the collector was optimised "to a complete virtual and manufacturable design" and tested in Abora's laboratory, that several absorber geometries were made by European suppliers, and that a production line of 10,000 units a year was designed and offers for its equipment gathered. It says industrialisation had "started" with the goal of a semi-automatic plant, and that the European Patent Office had recognised an inventive step in a preliminary examination. It reports no pilot installations, no certification and no sales of SHE, and much of its commercial section still describes 2020, when the pandemic cancelled four trade fairs.

1. Optimised SHE collector designDeliveredManufacturable design tested in Abora's laboratory, per the CORDIS report.
2. Production line ready for SHEPartlyLine designed for 10,000 units a year; the company links its November 2023 line to the EIC programme, but no source says it makes SHE.
3. Validation in three pilot installationsNot achievedNo SHE pilot has been reported by the company or CORDIS.
4. Market launch (2021 in the proposal, April 2022 in 2020)Not achievedAbora still sells the aH72SK it sold before the award.
5. 50,000 panels made in 2025Not achievedNo production figure announced; the company entered insolvency in 2026.
6. On timeLate40 months against 24 announced.

Credit is due for the engineering: a grant funds development, and the report documents real design and test work. But the deliverable the EU paid for was a product on the market, and Abora's catalogue in 2023 and 2024 was built around the aH72SK, the panel that Energías Renovables described as already on sale in 2020.

The Equity Question

The EC list marks SHE as blended finance, and Energías Renovables reported in August 2020 that the award included "a 500,000 euro equity stake through the EIB Group". Abora Energy does not appear on the EIC Fund's list of invested companies, checked across all 16 pages for this article, and the share capital changes in the register (from €3,000 in 2017 to €5,150 in 2025) do not name the investors. Whether the EIC equity was ever paid in could not be verified.

What Abora Achieved Alongside the Award

The business around the old panel did grow. In November 2023 Abora opened a new line in a 6,000 square metre plant in Zaragoza, with a stated goal of making 200,000 panels a year, after an investment of €2.8 million; the company then had 38 staff and about €3 million of 2022 revenue, which it expected to double in 2023, according to Renewable Energy Magazine. Later reports by Interempresas and pv magazine give the line's capacity as "over 180,000" panels a year. eInforma reports that 2023 sales rose 78.28% on 2022 and that the company made a net loss equal to 6.49% of its operating income; empresia puts annual turnover above €2.5 million.

In May 2024 Abora announced a €2.64 million capital increase, formalised at the end of 2023, and named a deputy general manager with a finance background and a business development director who had worked for Viessmann and Schüco, according to Interempresas. Neither that report nor pv magazine names the investors. pv magazine adds that Abora had "successfully" completed the EIC Accelerator programme, "thanks to which it invested 2.8 million euros" in the new line, the same figure as the SHE project's total cost. In November 2024 the company raised €110,900 in loans from 87 investors on the Bolsa Social platform to buy an automatic framing machine, and said it had installed more than 40,000 square metres of panels in 38 countries, according to Capital-Riesgo.es and the company's press page, which also lists an exclusive distribution deal with Yack for France in October 2024.

Abora had other public backing. Before the EIC award it ran two projects with Spain's innovation agency CDTI, a Neotec project with a budget of €410,407.17 and an R&D project of €393,212.43, both listed on its R&D pages. The founder told Emprendedores in 2020 that he raised €850,000 of private capital in August 2017 and €200,000 from EIT InnoEnergy. CORDIS also lists Abora as a partner in the Horizon Europe building renovation project InCUBE, with an EU share of €67,771.33, and marks its participation as ended.

Why Europe Should Care

Heat is the part of Europe's energy use that solar has barely touched. The Commission's Solar Energy Strategy of May 2022 calls solar thermal "cheap, predictable" and notes the EU's strong manufacturing base in it, and its rooftops initiative pushes solar onto new and public buildings. The Net-Zero Industry Act names solar photovoltaic and solar thermal technologies among the net-zero technologies whose European manufacturing it wants to cover at least 40% of annual deployment needs by 2030. A Spanish factory making panels that deliver both, with European suppliers, fits that agenda closely.

What Cannot Be Checked

The Verdict

Abora Energy and its insolvency administrator have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.