| Sweetch Energy, a World Economic Forum 2025 Technology Pioneer, uses nanofluidics and biomaterials to harness osmotic energy, which is naturally generated by the difference in salinity between river water and seawater, to produce carbon-free, renewable, and non-intermittent electricity at scale.
“When you look at the current challenges in the energy field – including the pitfalls of current renewables - It ticks all the boxes,” says Nicolas Heuzé, co-founder and CEO of the French scale-up “Osmotic power is clean, completely natural, available 24 hours a day in all coastal areas, can be turned on almost instantly and modulated very easily.”
In partnership with France’s Compagnie Nationale du Rhône, a French electricitygeneration company, mainly supplying renewable power from hydroelectric facilities on the Rhône river, Sweetch Energy’s OPUS-1 demonstrator facility began its testing phase at the end of 2024, validating the technology’s operation under real-world conditions, says Heuzé. Located in Port-Saint-Louis-du-Rhône, the OPUS-1 demonstrator is the first in a series of potential installations at the Rhône estuary planned for the coming decade. Collectively, these sites could deliver up to 500 MW of carbon-free electricity—enough to power more than 1.5 million people, equivalent to the population of Marseille and its metropolitan area. Sweetch Energy is also exploring other projects in France and abroad, including in the U.S., Canada and Asia, where significant osmotic resources exist.
Osmotic power systems are one of the ten emerging technologies in 2025 named in a June World Economic Forum report in collaboration with scientific publisher Frontiers. The Innovator is publishing a series of independently reported in-depth articles on the 2025 emerging trends in its FutureScope section, under a collaboration agreement with Frontiers.
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