During the Covid home confinement, Joan Saladich began to develop a technological solution so that companies would stop making decisions without taking climate change into account. She explains that she started alone, but that different mentors have voluntarily joined her initiative, until they integrated the current Geoskop, a startup that was founded in February 2020.
Based in the facilities that the European Space Agency (ESA) has in Castelldefels, Geoskop is dedicated to “making long-term climate predictions so that the industry, for the first time, can make decisions taking into account climate changes,” in the words of founder. Among its clients are, above all, large foreign multinationals in the energy sector, promoters of solar and wind farms. “We help them, for example, to make estimates of how the price of the parks will vary depending on the wind or future solar irradiation,” Saladich specifies, who adds that these are “very complex predictions, many years in the future, and that They must have minimal deviations.” Clients include companies such as Naturgy, ENI Plenitude, Feda and Statkraft.
The predictions are made from the climate models of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to which Geoskop has access as it is “one of the few companies authorized to use the IPCC supercomputers,” according to the entrepreneur. The person responsible for drawing conclusions from climate models is artificial intelligence, with algorithms developed by Saladich himself. “Only I have access to these algorithms because I keep them secret, just like the recipe for Coca-Cola,” says the entrepreneur.
With the help of the ESA BIC Barcelona business incubation program, Geoskop is “developing software with global climate change models with the desire to democratize access to this type of information,” Saladich advances. The ultimate goal of the emerging company is to be “a climate intelligence boutique that offers predictive data on weather,” in the words of the founder, who confesses that he has not taken a vacation since he founded the company.
With a staff of four people plus external collaborators, the startup will end the year with a turnover of 250,000 euros. Before entering the ESA BIC Barcelona incubation programme, Geoskop was incubated and accelerated by Copernicus and EIT InnoEnergy.
