How to make small hydro more like solar

In this episode, Emily Morris of startup Emrgy discusses the promise of small-scale hydropower and the opportunities it could provide for both power infrastructure and water management.

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David Roberts

Hello Volts listeners! I thought I would start this episode with what I suppose is a disclaimer of sorts. I suspect most of you already understand what I’m about to say, but I think it’s worthwhile being clear.

Every so often on this show, like today, I interview a representative from a particular company, often a startup operating in a dynamic, emerging market. It should go without saying that my choice of an interviewee does not amount to an endorsement of their company, a prediction of its future success, or, God forbid, investment advice. If you are coming to me for investment advice, you have serious problems. I make no predictions, provide no warranties.

The fact is, in dynamic emerging markets, failure is the norm, not the exception. My entire career is littered with the corpses of startups that I thought had clever, promising products — many of whom I interviewed and enthused about! Business is hard. In most of these markets, a few big winners will emerge, but it will take time, and in the process most promising startups will die. Such is the creative destruction of capitalism. I'm not dumb enough to try to predict any of it.

More broadly, I am not a business reporter. I do not have much interest in funding rounds, the new VP, or the latest earnings report. (Please, PR people, quit pitching me business stories.) I do not know or particularly care exactly which companies will end up on top. I am interested in clever ideas and innovations and the smart, driven individuals trying to drag them into the real world. I am interested in people trying to solve problems, not business as such.

Anyway, enough about that.

Today I bring you one of those clever ideas, in the form of a company called Emrgy, which plops small hydropower generators down into canals.

Now I can hear you saying, Dave, plopping generators into canals does not seem all that clever or exciting, but there’s a lot more to the idea than appears at first blush. For one thing, there are lots more canals than you probably think there are, and they are a lot closer to electrical loads than you think.

So I’m geeked to talk to Emily Morris, founder and CEO of Emrgy, about the promise of small-scale hydropower, the economics of distributed energy, the ways that small-scale hydro can replicate the modularity and scalability of solar PV, and ways that smart power infrastructure can help enable smarter water management.

Alright, then, with no further ado, Emily Morris of Emrgy. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.

Emily Morris

Thank you for having me. It's exciting to be here.

David Roberts

You know, I did a pod a couple of weeks ago about hydro and sort of the state of hydro in the world these days. And one of the things we sort of touched on briefly in that pod is kind of small-scale, distributed hydro, but we didn't have time to really get into it. And I'm really fascinated by that subject in general. So it was fortuitous a mere week or two later to sort of run across you and your company and what you're doing. Your sort of model answers a lot of the questions I had about small-scale hydro.

Some of the problems I saw in small-scale hydro, just because it just seems to me so at once small, but also kind of bespoke and fiddly. And your model sort of squarely gets at that. So anyway, all of which is just to say I'm excited to talk to you about a model of small-scale hydro that makes sense to me and some of the ins and outs of it.

Emily Morris

Yeah, absolutely. And I'm thrilled to be here. I'm thrilled to tell you more about our model. And I love that you called small-scale hydro bespoke because I was talking with one of the larger IOUs a few weeks back and they referred to hydro as artisanal energy. And I got such a kick out of that because it is in so many ways, hydro can often be a homeowner's pet project that has a ranch or something like that. And bringing hydro into a world in which solar panels are taking over distributed generation and utility scale, and doing it in such a standardized, modular, repeatable format, bringing that architecture into water, is something that hasn't yet really been done successfully. And what we're trying to do here at Emrgy.

David Roberts

it is kind of like a lot of this echoes solar. It's sort of an attempt to sort of replicate a lot of what's going on with solar. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's start the business model is, to put it as simply as possible, is you make generators and you plop them down into canals. So let's start then with canals, because I suspect I am not alone in saying that I've gone almost all my life without thinking twice about canals. I know almost nothing about them. Like, what are they? Where are they? How many are there?

This water infrastructure kind of surrounds us is almost invisible. So just talk about canals a little bit. What are they used for and where are they and how many are there? What's the sort of potential out there?

Emily Morris

Yes, canals are almost invisible, but my goal is that after this podcast, you'll never look at a canal the same way you'll look at it, as a source of energy. That, man, we should be tapping that energy and using it. Canals are our main target market. They're really our only target market right now. We get asked all the time, well, couldn't you do this in a river? And couldn't you do this in tides? And the answer is yes. If you're focused on the engineering but as a commercial founder at Emrgy, I'm focused on the market and where can we install projects today that can be immediately delivering economic benefit and environmental benefit.

And so canals are that market. A canal is an open channel of water conveyance that's moving water from one place to another for a specific purpose. That purpose might be because it's raw water that's being delivered into the city to be treated for drinking water. It could be that it's an agricultural channel taking water from a river out to farmland. It could be an industrial flow of water that's coming from a large brewery or a large factory and delivering that into either a river or another piece of water conveyance. But canals are seemingly invisible. I'll be honest, when I started Emrgy, I thought that the technology would first thrive in a water treatment environment.

There's 30,000 water treatment plants in the US. And many tens of thousands all around the world. And that water is running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365. And man, the ability to take something modular that looks and feels like solar in terms of its ability to seamlessly integrate into the surrounding infrastructure, but deliver power in a baseload format was something that immediately, I thought, water treatment. Yet when I was really early in my entrepreneurial journey, we did our first pilot at the city of atlanta's largest water treatment plant. And I went out to Los Angeles and gave a white paper on it at LADWP.

And when I was there, the city of Denver had two representatives there. And they came up to me after my presentation, and they said, we