Solenco Power's H2 Storage: From EIC Accelerator Grant to Collapse

On 30 June 2026 the Antwerp enterprise court, sitting in Turnhout, declared Solar Energy Conversion Power Corporation NV bankrupt. The company, which traded as Solenco Power, had spent the previous decade developing the Solenco Powerbox, a cabinet-sized unit that turns surplus solar power into hydrogen, stores it, and turns it back into electricity and hot water when the sun is gone. The court appointed two curators, Paul Van Rompaey and Niels Feytons, and set 30 June 2026 as the provisional date on which the company stopped paying its debts, according to the bankruptcy notice in the Belgian Official Gazette of 6 July 2026. The Crossroads Bank for Enterprises records the same legal situation, "opening of bankruptcy procedure", from that date.

More than six and a half years earlier, the European Commission had picked Solenco Power in the 9 October 2019 cut-off of the EIC Accelerator pilot, listing it alone, without project partners, as a grant-only winner from Turnhout under the acronym Powerbox. CORDIS puts the EU contribution at €1,955,109.63 towards a total cost of €2,793,013.75, for a project that ran from 1 April 2020 to 30 June 2023 with the aim of putting the Powerbox into series production.

A Bankruptcy Three Years After the Grant

The bankruptcy did not come out of nowhere. The company's filed accounts show equity of €679,968 at the end of 2022, the last full year of the EU project, minus €568,723 a year later and minus €1,650,668 at the end of 2024, with debts of €3,297,082, according to both Staatsbladmonitor and Companyweb. The 2024 accounts were filed with the National Bank on 5 February 2026, less than five months before the bankruptcy. Companyweb puts the net loss at €1,248,691 for 2023 and €1,081,945 for 2024.

Until shortly before the court ruling the company still presented itself as an active hydrogen storage supplier. An archived copy of its website from 16 June 2026 lists projects and vacancies and an office and warehouse at Slachthuisstraat 68 in Turnhout. In early October 2026 solencopower.com returned a server error. In July 2024 Jos Rutten joined Hugo Vandenborre and Julien Nyst on the board, according to the enterprise register and a December 2024 notice in the Official Gazette. Creditors had until the end of July 2026 to file claims, and the curators' first report on them was due on 11 August 2026. Neither the size of the claims nor any buyer for the technology has been made public.

The Technology: Hydrogen as a Seasonal Battery

A household lithium-ion battery can shift solar power from the afternoon to the evening, but it cannot economically keep summer power for winter. Solenco's idea was to store the surplus as hydrogen instead. Electricity from solar panels or wind splits water into hydrogen and oxygen; the hydrogen is compressed and stored, and later a fuel cell turns it back into electricity, while the waste heat comes out as hot water at 80°C, according to the CORDIS project summary. Hugo Vandenborre, the company's president and chief executive, told CNBC in 2017 that the system rested on a reversible fuel cell that both splits water and produces power from hydrogen, a catalytic boiler that burns hydrogen for extra heat, and a hot water tank. The boiler came from Giacomini, the Italian heating group, which described itself on its 2022 website as a shareholder of Solenco Power and the Powerbox as a single stack with "an electrolyzer, a fuel cell system and a hydrogen boiler". The size of Giacomini's stake is not public.

The project summary claimed "over 90% conversion efficiency" and a working life of more than 30 years; the final CORDIS report raised the figure to "95% overall conversion efficiency for both electric and heat output". Neither document gives the share that comes back as electricity alone, which is the figure that decides whether hydrogen storage can compete with batteries for power. No independent test of the efficiency claims could be found.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What the Record Shows

The Powerbox grant was the company's second EU award. In 2015 a €50,000 SME Instrument Phase 1 grant paid for a four-month market study of the "Solenco Power Box", though CORDIS names a different company, Vandenborre Energy Systems NV, as its beneficiary. The 2019 award was signed on 23 March 2020 and is filed on CORDIS under the SME Instrument Phase 2 funding scheme of the Horizon 2020 EIC pilot. In its proposal the company wrote that it had won the Hansa Green Tour Startup Challenge in 2018 and "will earn 530,000 Euros in 2019". Its abbreviated accounts publish no turnover, but its gross margin for 2019 was €39,136.

According to the project's published report, the aim was to install an assembly line able to make 1,000 Powerboxes a year, prove the product in pilot installations with certification, select distributors and run joint publicity. The report, covering April 2021 to June 2023, says the production process, tooling and work instructions were defined; three 5 kW units were installed in single houses, and two 15 kW units in an office building with more than 20 workers and a block of eight flats. Photographs in the report show installations at Giacomini's site in Bierges, Belgium, and in Wolfheze in the Netherlands. A risk assessment was completed and a declaration of conformity issued, which the company says approved the units for field use. Distribution talks in the Netherlands and Belgium were described as "advanced", and partnerships were said to be in place "to enable installation of the first 500 units". The company's final project newsletter of 29 June 2023 closed the project with thanks to those involved and no sales figures.

1. Pilot installationsDeliveredThree 5 kW and two 15 kW units installed, per the CORDIS report.
2. Assembly line for 1,000 units a yearNot shownProcess and tooling defined; no evidence the line was built or ran at that rate.
3. CertificationPartlyDeclaration of conformity issued; no third-party certification named.
4. Distributors and first 500 unitsNot achievedNo distributor or volume sale announced; gross margin negative in 2023 and 2024.

CORDIS lists the project as closed and gives no sign that it ended early. Whether 30 June 2023 was the original end date or an extended one is not shown. The project budget split is below.

The Money

The accounts tell a clear story. Before the grant, Solenco Power ran small operating losses of between €99,585 and €156,791 a year from 2016 to 2018. While the EU project was running, its gross margin turned positive, reaching €703,135 in 2021, a year in which it made an operating profit of €244,666. After the project ended, the gross margin fell to minus €481,800 in 2023 and minus €562,596 in 2024, meaning the company spent more on goods and outside services than it earned. The figures come from the filed accounts as published by Staatsbladmonitor and match the 2021 to 2024 figures on Companyweb.

Share capital was raised from €518,600 to €1,018,600 in July 2018, according to North Data, and the enterprise register still shows capital of €1,018,600. No later equity round, venture investor or loan has been announced. The company does not appear in the EIC Fund's list of invested companies, which fits its grant-only award. North Data also lists €140,000 of state aid in 2023 without naming the grantor; this could not be verified in a second source.

Staff stayed small: 5.2 full-time equivalents in 2022, 6.3 in 2023 and 5.4 in 2024, according to Companyweb. The company registered as an employer on 1 June 2019, according to the enterprise register.

What Cannot Be Checked

Why Europe Should Care

The European Commission's hydrogen strategy of July 2020, published a few months after the Powerbox project began, set out to scale up renewable hydrogen, and the Commission's energy storage policy treats storage as necessary to balance wind and solar power. Seasonal storage at the scale of a single building, with heat recovered for heating, addresses a real gap that batteries do not fill, and Belgium's hydrogen cluster WaterstofNet, itself based in Turnhout, listed Solenco among its members. Solenco's record suggests that the hard part was not building working units but selling enough of them to cover costs.

The Verdict

Solenco Power's curators and the EIC have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based on public records and published statements, linked throughout.