History of finsun

Finsun was founded in 1983 by Gunnar Wilson who came from Gränges Aluminium as general research manager. In the late 1970’s Gunnar Wilson started the development of the Sunstrip absorber and made it feasible to mass produce a low cost solar thermal absorber for the first time in history. The Sunstrip product is still in production, with manufacturing and sales world wide.

In the beginning of the 1980’s finsun developed the LGB solar collector, one of the first attempts to manufacture large scale ground based solar collectors aimed towards district heating applications in the multi MW scale. In the same decade the company Solsam sunergy was founded by finsun in cooperation with a group of investors (incuding Folksam and Göran Bolin). Solsam was renamed to ClimateWell in 2003, and is today one of the largest companies within advanced solar energy storage concepts.

In 1993 the first attempts to design a extreme low cost ”soft concentrator” solar collector was made in cooperation with the state power utility Vattenfall. This technology has so far collected a large investment in research and devepoment with a group of products, eight Phd’s, several actual powerplants being erected. Today this technology are further developed and manufactured by Solarus AB, and it has recieved many awards over the years (the Swedish enviromental innovation Price 2010 was the latest).

Gunnar Wilson recieved the SEAS (Swedish solar energy associasion) Achievements Award 2002. Gunnar Wilson left the operation of the company at 89 years of age. Finsun was assigned to new ownership in 2009. Today finsun has been renamed to finsun inresol. The tradition is still to work in the spirit of Gunnar Wilson, one of the most prominent solar energy innovators.

The Wilson foundation

In honor of mr Wilson, finsun inresol AB, has started a foundation with the major goal to encourage researcher ”off road” the mainstream track

Awards

SEAS (Swedish solar energy associasion) Achievements Award 2002

SUF (Swedish Inventers associasion) Silver price at the International innovations Award 2011.

Memberships

ISES (International Solar Energy Sociaty)
SUF (the Swedish Inventers’ Association)
WWF (World Wildlife Foundation)
Desertec Foundation

Co founder of

Solsam sunergy AB (today renamed to Climate Well AB)
Solarus AB