Gia Schneider, founder and CEO of Natel Energy — an 11th Hour Project impact investment, discusses why she became interested in climate change and “transforming our energy landscape” in a podcast with MIT’s Energy Initiative. At the core of her company’s approach is making hydropower more compatible with local eco-systems, especially fisheries.
She explains her technologies this way:
Restoration Hydro is our overall design philosophy that incorporates our fish-safe turbine with some innovative analytics that combines satellite imagery and machine learning and weather data to provide more accurate information about water flow through a watershed. We put these together, those two innovations, more on the technology side, with proven environmental and civil engineering techniques that have been deployed over the last decade and a half in dam removals and river restoration projects.
We put all of that together into a design approach that enables us to now design distributed hydropower projects that have multiple individual plants on a river, where each individual plant maintains or improves the connectivity for fish and sediment and water and people to move upstream and downstream around each plant. We integrate then all of those plants together into a virtual power plant framework leveraging a lot of the amazing work that’s happened on distributed energy resource management.
In some cases, now, we’re also looking at hybridizing in batteries or solar as well. Because, at the end of the day, if you now have energy infrastructure, you’re interconnecting to the grid, you’re managing the whole thing with a computer system that understands, “I’ve got these distributed elements to manage.” If there’s market value, it’s pretty natural to think about, “Okay, I can put a little bit more solar here, I can put some batteries there, and then integrate the whole thing as an integrated VPP,” or virtual power plant.
That overall is Restoration Hydro. The core differentiator, from a hydropower development perspective, is that Restoration Hydro is grounded in a philosophical approach, which is that we prioritize river function along with the reliable, renewable energy generation aspect.
Read the transcript.