Nikolas Salomaa – “You can never know too much of physics”

Nikolas Salomaa has worked years with energy efficiency of buildings.

He started out by building the first Passivhaus Institut-certified Passive House in Finland. It is still today the most energy efficient one family house in Finland.

His passion is to find the most profitable combinations for saving energy in buildings.

“I get great satisfaction from solving challenges, especially when the solution is win-win-win. I get motivated by finding the best possible solution.”

In 2009 Nikolas became an employee and a minority shareholder of a small Finnish start-up company Savumax Oy. The company had developed a breakthrough zero energy technology for heating up small houses in the northern climate. He worked planning and selling the systems to hundreds of houses in Finland, Sweden, Russia and Japan.

In April 2014, he started his own start-up nollaE Oy and became a full-time planner without any sales activity.

“In nollaE I get to use all available technologies available to find the financially best combination of solutions instead of just working with the products of one supplier.”

The problems he solves are related to how much energy a building consumes and what are the changes that together bring the biggest ROI to the owner. The financially best solutions are always the best also environmentally.

“In the field of energy efficiency of buildings, the best solutions are almost always something that nobody has done before. To be the best problem solver you have to know not only what has been done before, but also why. Then you have to know what is possible, and you can never know too much of physics.”