Inside Aurelia Turbines' EIC Accelerator Project on Gas Turbines

Small factories, dairies and breweries need heat and power, but the gas turbines that make both efficiently are mostly built for plants many times their size. Aurelia Turbines, founded in Lappeenranta in 2013 to commercialise a turbine developed at LUT University, set out to fill that gap with a 400 kilowatt machine that its EU project summary said would reach 40.2% electrical efficiency and burn anything from natural gas to hydrogen and gas made from waste. In the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2 cut-off of 3 April 2019, the European Commission's list of selected companies named Aurelia Turbines as the sole beneficiary of FUTURBINE, a project that CORDIS records at a total cost of €3,273,000 with an EU contribution of €2,291,100, running from September 2019 to August 2022. The Commission's list gives the company's city as Lahti; the Finnish Trade Register places it in Lappeenranta.

The turbines did ship. But the final report concedes that the first A400 reached only 75 to 80% of its original specification for output and efficiency, and the Finnish company's accounts show revenue stuck near €1.2 million in 2024 and 2025 while its operating loss nearly doubled. In 2026 the brand is marketed from Katy, Texas, as Aurelia Technologies, with data centers at the top of its list of customers.

Where Aurelia Stands Now

Aurelia Turbines Oy is an active company. The open data of the Finnish Trade Register (YTJ) lists it as registered, with no bankruptcy, restructuring or liquidation entry, and the credit agency Asiakastieto shows it in the prepayment, employer and VAT registers with accounts filed for 2025. Those accounts are weak. Revenue was €1.21 million, down 3.2%, the operating loss was €7.76 million and the equity ratio was 0%, with capital loans counted as debt, according to Asiakastieto; Finder.fi gives the same figures to within €1,000 and a net loss of €7.77 million.

The commercial face of the business has moved. The company's old domain, aureliaturbines.com, now redirects to Aurelia Technologies, which sells 400 kW and 800 kW turbine packages for data centers, oil and gas sites, hospitals and farms and lists a single address, 25430 Clay Road in Katy, Texas. The company's LinkedIn page, still under the Aurelia Turbines address, names Katy as headquarters and Lappeenranta as a second location. A customs record compiled by ImportGenius shows Aurelia Turbines Oy shipping a used A400 demonstration unit from Bremerhaven to Aurelia Technology LLC in Katy in July 2025. Who owns the Texas business, and whether it owns the Finnish company or the other way round, is not public.

In June 2026 Aurelia Technologies and the 3D printer maker Velo3D announced a programme to qualify printed metal parts for Aurelia's turbines, according to Velo3D and Turbomachinery International. On LinkedIn the company has also described a 232 MW partnership to power a 1.18 GW data center development over four years; no partner, customer or contract value has been published, and no independent report of the deal could be found.

The Technology: Two Shafts and No Oil

Aurelia's design, which it calls IRG2, splits the machine into two spools, cools the air between the compressors and recovers heat from the exhaust; the company says this lifts electrical efficiency above 40%, up to 20% more than other microturbines of the same size, according to Bioenergy International and Renewable Energy Magazine. The shaft is held in place by magnets rather than oil-lubricated bearings, which project coordinator Tony Hynes told CORDIS is one reason the turbine copes with dirty fuels such as gas from gasified plastics and farm waste, whose particles would otherwise contaminate the oil.

The efficiency figure is the company's own. The project's last report, discussed below, says the first commercial A400 did not reach it, and no independent test of a production unit has been published.

What FUTURBINE Promised, and What the Record Shows

The project's goal was to validate the A400's fuel flexibility and efficiency "in an operational environment", build an integrator partner network and prepare global market entry, with the company forecasting a cumulative profit of €30.6 million and a return on investment of 514% by 2025, according to the CORDIS fact sheet. The final periodic report describes a mixed result. It says the efficiency validation would come four months after the project ended, that fixes to the design would take until mid-2023, that certification "will take longer than the project", and that integrator training had not happened. Against that, it reports customer acceptance tests passed at Aurelia's site, orders for turbines running on synthesis gas, 25 sales channels against a target of 15, and 19 patents. The report also says Aurelia cut all links with Russian partners in mid-2022, after showing the turbine at a Moscow power grid fair in December 2019.

Turbines did reach customers during the project. Aurelia shipped its first commercial A400 from Lappeenranta in August 2020, according to Renewable Energy Magazine, and in August 2021 shipped an A400 to a client near Bremen as part of FUTURBINE, according to gasworld; Hynes told CORDIS that trials in Germany had succeeded. When Hynes took over as chief executive in April 2023, the company said it had supplied turbines to customers in Germany, Mexico and Taiwan, according to Cyprus Shipping News, which carried the announcement. Whether the A400 now meets its 40.2% target is not documented anywhere public.

1. A400 operating at customer sitesDeliveredShipments from 2020; Germany trial in 2021.
2. 40.2% efficiency validated in operationNot achievedFirst unit at 75-80% of spec, per the final report.
3. Fuel flexibility on syngasDeliveredSyngas orders and waste-gas customers in Taiwan.
4. Integrator partner networkPartly25 channels named; partner training not done in time.
5. CertificationUnverifiedStill under way at project end; no later result public.
6. €30.6M cumulative profit by 2025MissedNet losses every year from 2021 to 2025.

Orders After the Project

Two larger orders followed, both through integrators that assemble Aurelia's turbines locally. In November 2023 Jhuo Sih International of Taiwan ordered 20 units, following an A400 delivered to Taiwan that year to burn gas from gasified municipal waste, according to Bioenergy International; Hynes had told CORDIS in January 2023 that a Taiwanese waste management customer had placed orders. In August 2024 the Paraguayan company Acte ordered 10 turbine configurations for waste-to-energy projects in Brazil, nine of them to be assembled in Paraguay, according to Bioenergy International. No value was published for either order, and no delivery or installation of these 30 units has been announced. The accounts do not suggest they have been shipped at scale: revenue in 2024 and 2025 was about €1.2 million a year.

The Money

Beyond the EIC grant, Aurelia's largest disclosed outside financing is public. In December 2021 the state-owned Finnish Climate Fund granted it a €5 million capital loan, with terms linked to how much of its business comes from hydrogen and other low-emission uses, according to Power and Power Progress. No equity round has been announced since. Investor databases such as VC Backed list LUT University, Loudspring and First Imagine! among earlier backers, but their current stakes are not public. The company is not in the EIC Fund portfolio; FUTURBINE was a grant-only award.

Aurelia also kept winning EU research money as a partner. It received €789,204.50 for a biofuel-ready combined heat and power unit in ROBINSON, an island energy demonstration on Eigerøy in Norway (2020 to 2025), and €1,771,900 in MARPOWER, a LUT-led project running until 2028 to adapt the two-shaft turbine for ships burning hydrogen, ammonia or methanol. Its first EU grant was €50,000 in 2014 for the EFFGT feasibility study.

The Finnish accounts tell the cost of that effort. Net losses from 2021 to 2025 add up to €22.13 million, and the 2025 operating loss of €7.76 million was more than six times revenue. Staff numbers rose from 20 in 2021 to 29 in 2025; for 2024, Asiakastieto reports 29 and Finder.fi 20.

Why Europe Should Care

Small industrial sites use about a fifth of Europe's energy, by the project's own estimate, and most still buy grid power and burn gas separately for heat. A compact turbine that runs on biogas, hydrogen or gas from waste fits the EU's push under the Green Deal and REPowerEU to raise efficiency and cut dependence on Russian gas, a link the FUTURBINE report makes itself. The technology also grew out of decades of Finnish university research, at LUT and with the German Aerospace Center, which Aurelia credited in its 2021 Climate Fund announcement. That the commercial push now runs through Texas, toward American data centers and oilfields, means the European grant money has produced a product whose main sales effort is outside Europe.

The Verdict

Aurelia Turbines and Aurelia Technologies were not asked for comment for this article. It is based on public records and published statements, linked throughout.