Episode 48 Transcript: Water, Water, Everywhere: Quicker, Easier Hydroelectric Power

MW VO: 

Welcome to Everybody in the Pool, the podcast for the climate economy. We dive deep into the climate crisis and come up with solutions. I'm Molly Wood.

Today, we’re talking about the O-G renewable energy source … hydroelectric power.

We’ve been harnessing the power of water since the ancient Greeks created water wheels to grind wheat into flour … using water to power mills and textile manufacturing during the industrial revolution and then finally … in the late 1800s … figuring out how to convert the flow of water … directly into electricity.

For all the talk of wind, solar, and even nuclear … hydropower is responsible for more electricity than every other renewable source combined … and more than nuclear, too … about a sixth of global electricity.

These days … however … hydroelectric power is … like so many things we talk about on this show … becoming decentralized … installing new large-scale hydroelectric infrastructure is expensive … time-consuming… and can have its own environmental drawbacks …

Here’s one company … trying to innovate on our oldest power plants …

Emily Morris:
My name is Emily Morris. I'm the founder and CEO of Emergy, a climate tech startup that is building distributed hydroelectric systems.

Molly Wood:
Amazing. OK, so start by, before we dig into the distributed part and what you're building, if you wouldn't mind, just give us sort of the briefest overview of hydroelectric power and kind of where it sits in the overall mix of renewable energy.

Emily Morris:
Hydroelectric power is the grandfather of renewables, may I say. There wouldn't be clean energy without hydropower. And while we can debate today what the state of existing hydropower is and how clean it really is, we've been using the power of water to do things that enable our quality of life for centuries. And that electricity is still an incredibly critical piece of the global energy mix today without hydro. We'd potentially be in a much worse state carbon wise than we currently are. 

The challenge with hydro is of course that anytime you're dealing with water, environmental regulation and permitting can be very, very difficult and lengthy to get through.

For good reasons. I don't want my rivers and streams being contaminated any more than anyone else. But it's much harder to permit new power generation on a natural ecosystem than perhaps in an unused plot of land in comparison with solar. And so projects tend to be much slower to come online, which then of course drives timelines up.

Which then of course means you want to build the biggest plant you possibly can to make it worth it, worth the time and resources to make it happen. And we see something wrong with that because if energy is going to continue to transition toward a carbon-free future, water has to be a key part of that mix moving forward. It is one of the only controllable renewable resources that we have.

Emily Morris:
Remains an incredibly important priority for climate activists everywhere.

Molly Wood:
How often do you, like what is the pace of bringing new hydroelectric facilities online, you know, compared to power plants or?

Emily Morris:
You know, I haven't checked this fact in quite a while. So I can't speak to something recent. But I guess in hydro, very little is recent. So on average, it typically takes between 10 and 12 years from the ideation of a hydro project through all of the design, permitting, and construction, and financing phases to bring it online. And that doesn't really matter whether it's

Emily Morris:
A hundred megawatt plant or a hundred kilowatt plant in many ways. The regulation of putting anything into a body of water is incredibly onerous at any scale.

Molly Wood:
Yeah. OK, so then how did you decide to tackle this? What's the solution you're building?

Emily Morris:
Well, I can tell you that if the only place for hydropower was in rivers and streams and oceans, then it would be a very daunting outlook. That said, there's water running all over our planet that is not in these locations, that has embedded energy that we should be tapping into. Whether it's 30,000 water treatment facilities in the US that are running water 24-7-365 to treat it for us.

Whether it is agricultural or municipal conveyance canals to move water from one place to another for purposes of farming or urban access. These waterways could, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, is over 2 million miles of linear conveyance of water for these

Emily Morris:
Miles in the US of water that is not classified in these highly environmentally sensitive areas that is moving with embedded energy that we should be tapping into and converting for our use.

And so the opportunity for hydroelectric power to grow in a place that is absent, those heavy environmental restrictions is a ripe opportunity for climate action, especially when those infrastructure segments are often very close to industrial farming operations, close to

Water treatment activities, close to food and beverage production, and very close to data centers as well that need a lot of water for cooling that have direct electricity needs that can be served by the hydro that can be generated in those areas.

Molly Wood:
Hmm.

Molly Wood:
Yeah, fascinating. I mean, I love a decentralized solution. I just have to stipulate that upfront because even if it's for redundancy, even if it's for resilience, it feels like it's a really powerful unlock.

Emily Morris:
Absolutely. I mean, as we think about what 2050 is going to look like, it's going to take an array of different solutions, both your, you know, multi-billion dollar pumped hydro solutions, all the way down to our sort of 5 to 25 kilowatt modules that are scaled in, you know, single megawatt arrays. 

But, you know, you're exactly right. When you think about energy security, when you think about resiliency, when you think about the firmness of what's needed in a

In a renewable world, water play is such a key piece in having that firm aspect and being able to control it. 

We often say one of the big differences in what we're doing is, you know, we're not, well, of course, there are some macro weather and climate trends at play. It's not a

A day by day is their cloud cover or is their wind. 

Somebody is upstream actually opening and closing that gate and making a decision to let water into the canal and flow. And so the ability to align incentives where everybody wins when we are, you know, flowing water, producing crops, powering those activities with clean 24-7 hydro, things really make sense at the local scale.

Without even thinking through some of those larger centralized facilities.

Molly Wood:
Right. Well, and I know that some of those larger, I was reading a Wall Street Journal piece actually about how Canada had really invested a lot in becoming a hydro giant and drought has upset those plans. So is this also a solution that in itself is more resilient to the intermittency of rain?

Emily Morris:
Yes and no. So, you know, for example, I will not sit here and say that this system is drought proof and that, you know, no matter what happens drought wise that these will continue to run. 

Absolutely not. You know, there has to be water for these to be effective. That said, you know, there are many, many industries that rely on this water being available and being operated in a certain format.

Molly Wood:
Yeah.

Emily Morris:
We're not placing these, these are not run of river that is truly just up to the availability of what's in the watershed in the stream. These are placed into operated environments where if the water isn't running, it means, you know, wonderful company is not getting their crops, or their crops, you know, watered for almond milk, or, you know, we're not able to produce apples for our US grocery stores or things like that. And so,

Getting into alignment with how water decisions are made, the politics and rights around water to be able to run it in certain areas, and to align especially Emergy's early installations with water conduits that have a high level of security based on how those are operated, how the water is bought and sold through the system is something that is a really unique part

Folks who use sunshine or wind really think about because it's a resource that's either there or it's not, whereas ours is a resource that is purchased and sold in many ways and making sure that we are installing within essentially a feedstock that is going to be available and high producing is a great way that we're able to enter the market in a high economic environment.

Attractiveness environment, dare I say profitable at an early stage because of essentially the ability to select sites that have very high capacity factors, meaning waters running 24-7, if not 365 long seasons out of the year. And they're doing it not because the rain falls all the time. They're doing it because the stakeholders around that piece of infrastructure are buying and selling water.

Molly Wood:
Right, got it, because the crops need to grow and the data centers need to, so you're more like a succulent, you're like drought tolerant. Hm. Ha ha ha.

Emily Morris:
I guess you could say that for sure. And you know, I think one other comment, you know, we work with a number of water districts around Arizona where they are very, very accustomed to getting annual power from Hoover. 

And you know, as Hoover and has seen, of course, all of the drought conditions that I think many of us are very familiar with, and that availability of Hoover power has reduced quite a bit.

I would say that it's not that we can come in and just replace Hoover or anything like that. Like this system can do that. Certainly not. But as you think about the amount of water needed just to cut in those very large turbines, just to get them kicked on and started, just to make it worth having them generate and transmit that power over long distances, that same in what many might consider trickle that's coming out.

Emily Morris:
A really nice set of on-site power that isn't going to completely take the city of Phoenix offline but is going to overall reduce grid demand in that same general area is something that, you know, certainly I can't call it drought proof but it's drought compatible in many ways unlike the larger and larger plants that just require so much additional water to be able to have meaningful economical power generated.

Molly Wood:
Right. So then tell me more about the product itself. You have referenced modules and data. So what is the MRG selling overall?

Emily Morris:
Yeah. Yeah, so the heart of what Emergy does is a very low impact, portable, removable hydro turbine that can be placed into a waterway, take advantage of that natural flow of energy going through the system on its way to the farm, and recapture that, convert it into electric power, and deliver it either to a meter for distribution.

Level power or direct on farm. And that's where Emergy all started. You know, we've been focused on not just how do we take energy out of water, because obviously the Romans proved that a long time ago that we could use water to power certain things, but what has been yet to really be proven is how we can take those little bits of energy collected along the way and convert it and deliver it cost effectively.

To a modern grid and do that in a way that is scalable globally. And what, so a lot of our innovation has actually been outside the water. It's been how do we bring together solar power electronics and conduit and architecture that when we deliver it to the grid is done at the same cost as distributed solar and done in a way that utilities can look at our single line diagrams and say, yep, I get that.

And you can put it right onto the system. That has been a major focus of ours because much of the balance of system electrically that's been developed over the last several decades for distributed renewables has been very solar centric for good reason. There hasn't been a lot of distributed hydro plants out there. So being able to not invent our own hydro

Electrical balance of system to deliver to the grid and then get that certified at PG&E and get it certified at Rocky Mountain Power, get it certified over here. 

What we did was we developed software that enables us to have, to purchase everything out of the solar industry or smart inverter industry and have it communicate effectively and at high efficiency with a hydro system and to optimize how we aggregate generators over miles.

Emily Morris:
To a place where cabling costs make sense, where power conversion costs make sense, and that we can compete on an LCOE basis. And so we focused on the module, and now we've focused on how that module actually delivers electricity to the grid, and not just that grid, but any grid.

MW VO: 

Time for a quick break. When we come back, we’ll talk about how this thing that Emily and her team built … at Emergy … was fine … and then they realized that as with all things … it was even MORE powerful … when it was combined with OTHER solutions … because of course.

MW VO: 

Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool. We’re talking with Emily Morris … founder and CEO of Emergy … about distributed hydroelectric power … and the need for layering clean energy solutions … to get to the best possible outcome. Because you know … everybody … in the pool. Emily told me the original plan … was simple …

Emily Morris:
When I first started Emergy, the idea of partnering with water districts to sell them electricity at a discount to their existing electricity bills was sort of the, you know, 101 of what we were trying to do. And today we do have PPAs with water districts that are at a discount to their current rates and that model works. But as we've gotten to know these

Molly Wood:
Got it. So just to clarify, so the original, and then just to put a fine point on that. So the original idea was we will, like you originally described, we'll install this in this distributed way and it will help generate on-site power for just you, Water District.

Emily Morris:
For just you, but probably through a net metering fashion or something, it will be grid facing, not totally off grid, but it would mostly benefit the water district itself to reduce the amount of money they spend every month on electricity. As we have gotten further into the market and really expanded our knowledge of this space, this is absolutely critical infrastructure,

Molly Wood:
Right.

Emily Morris:
In some cases to, you know, residents in Los Angeles or to residents all over the West, really, we found the opportunity is so much bigger than we ever thought. And when we're meeting with water districts and they tell us, hey, you know, the energy side is cool, but I don't know how I can split my focus on this when

Molly Wood:
Yeah.

Emily Morris:
I have a hundred year old canals that are losing 30 to 50% of their water as it runs down the canal. And if I'm going to have water security in future years, I got to stop that seepage.

MW VO: 

The Emergy team has a project installed in New Zealand … and it came about because a water district there realized it was losing a lot of water … and so the agency went in and retrofitted a canal with all new lining that improved the water flow so much … that they then needed capture the energy from the running water … or risk actual overflow or flooding.

So they bought an Emergy turbine … and that caused Emily and her team to realize oh hey … maybe WE should combine these services for future customers … retrofitting to prevent water loss … and then create way more efficient water flow for Emergy turbines … so that they end up generating even MORE power … than they otherwise would have.

Emily Morris:
And so we are now putting projects together that utilize, of course, our distributed hydroelectric modules.

As the heart of the system, but then partnering with others that we can add value that also increases the profitability of the system when you're boosting power out of the same mileage. 

And so that includes the lining I just mentioned. It includes adding floating solar in between our modules, feeding it all through the same line so we're not building anything additional except for the solar modules themselves, which

A benefit of already buying all the balance of system from the solar industry. And we're currently doing that in Denver and really hybridizing this to where Emergy is a leading company focused on the energy water nexus, sort of in all its forms, conserving water, generating electric power, and refining how we interact with water infrastructure and then upstream at the watershed altogether.

Which has been a really cool thing. I mean, it's not exactly the pitch deck of a tech startup because it's a lot of impact and perhaps a little bit more infrastructure than tech, but it's just been a really nice organic evolution where now water districts are, the word of mouth is spreading, water districts reach out to us saying,

To we need to modernize, we need to reduce our electric costs, we need to bring in some more revenue, we need to reduce our seepage and inefficiencies in the canal. Can you help us do all of these things? And it started just with the tech solution. And then even one step beyond that, these machines capture energy, but they also capture data.

Molly Wood:
Wow.

Emily Morris:
We know how deep the water is, how fast the water is. We know what flow rates are going through our turbines instantaneously. And when the average maintenance technician in this industry that's manually taking that data is over 50 years old, just having the data insights of what's happening in their canals is a value that we never expected. And we've had water districts say we have such a hard

Issue with labor, that part of the most valuable thing we're getting out of this is being able to avoid having to hire more personnel across the plant or across the infrastructure and use your system and the data that's coming out of it for us to make smart decisions and be able to modulate flow accordingly. So we are still in the process of monetizing that aspect and that's essentially where

Molly Wood:
Mm-hmm.

Emily Morris:
Where our story has taken us is that we have unit economics around a singular value proposition that we are commercializing and then having a lot of market feedback on other things that we can deliver value on that we're trying to figure out what fits in our scope and drives company growth versus what is best to partner.

Versus what is best to just let go because you can't be everything to everybody. Ha ha.

Molly Wood:
Right, right. Totally. It sounds, it sounds like a good and terrible problem that now these, you know, districts are like, cool, we're going to need to do the retrofit and the maintenance and the ongoing service agreement and also PS like provide a little power. And you're like, we kind of started with the provide the power part.

Emily Morris:
Haha

Emily Morris:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And but you know, I think to the to the message I mentioned earlier about how at the end of the day, our system works better when all of these things come together.

Molly Wood:
Yeah.

Emily Morris:
When we meet with water districts, they're not making, you know, five year payback decisions. If this pays back in five years, I'm making it. And I don't care if it's trash in six years. Like that's not their mentality.

Certainly decisions made in clean energy where you're you are expecting the life of your asset and The payback period to be the same in our case, you know the these water districts are typically generationally led where you have a grandfather who ran it or Was in the community and then a father and then a son and they think about this in generations. 

And so they're interested

When they think about the calculus of should we do something, it's really thought of as what is what is this going to look like in 20 years, in 30 years, in 40 years? And the great thing about hydro is you maintain it and or overhaul it and it just keeps going. 

I mean the average hydro plant is I think 80 years old in the US today because they're properly maintained. So they can think of this as a long-term asset but it's it is yeah it's a very different thing than when I started

Transactionally, place some widgets here, place some widgets there, and grow as a function of how many turbines are in the water.

Molly Wood:
Yeah, fascinating. And overall, would you say that this is, as kind of part of the mix, it sounds pretty complementary to other renewable energy sources, right? It's like it can boost power in places where maybe solar isn't deployed yet or isn't practical. But just it sounds like generally what I'm hearing, I would say, across all of the energy-related interviews I'm doing is we just need more.

Emily Morris:
We just need more. And we will continue to need more. The more data centers that are coming online, the more vehicle electrification succeeds, we will just need more. And yes, this is not intended to be a silver bullet. It's not intended to replace other renewables. It's intended to be highly complementary in an ever distributed world. And the more that we can.

Build out a system that can take community solar and community hydro, so to speak, and put them together and make sure that community has power 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 with the minimal amount of storage. 

You'll likely need storage, no question, but the more you bring in of the hydro, the less storage and really the less overcapacity and solar you'll need as well.

That the more we can avoid that next peaker plant or the next massive facility.

Molly Wood:
Great. I love to hear it. Will you, just as one quick follow up before I let you go, will you say more about the storage part? So you said this can complement solar and reduce overflow because, is it because of the lack of intermittency? Yeah, just explain that for me if you would.

Emily Morris:
Yeah. So we often get contacted by developers who are putting together either microgrid opportunities or solar and storage on the distributed scale. And they're looking for that missing piece in the middle, because to do simply solar and storage, you need over capacity and storage so you can generate more when the sun shines, so you have enough to store. And then you need a lot of batteries to make sure that

You can keep that energy present when the sun isn't shining. And so having something to sit in the middle that actually is generating 24 hours a day means that you're filling those batteries much more quickly, and you need less of that overbuild on the solar. 

And it also means you need less of the storage because you're going to generate at night, too, when the solar isn't. So you don't need to be on 100% battery at night.

And you don't need to be on 200% battery, or sorry, 200% solar during the day. This allows you to reduce the amount of both storage and solar that you may need. And ultimately look at a cost per watt that is reflective of all, all three. 

And you know, that's where I believe these types of technologies are going and why a multi-technology strategy is absolutely imperative because there's some things that water will never.

Have as an advantage over solar. I mean, solar has the beauty of having every single day generation and it's drought proof and all of those kinds of things. But there's also things that water is very unique in its own right to do, which is generate 24 hours a day, which is to be able to have a controllable firm resource and controllable firm power.

And then there's things, obviously, storage has in its own right. And so as we look toward a carbon free future, all of those characteristics of human life are going to be necessary. We need power every day. 

We need power, you know, that's firm and can be dispatched when it's called for. And we need resiliency and backup. And so I see, you know, I'm shocked more people aren't working on water because there are very, very few renewable resources, maybe geothermal perhaps.

Emily Morris:
That can actually provide a lot of those characteristics of the power that we're going to need as we transition off of fossil fuels. And I'm just proud to be leading my part of it, which is probably small in regards to the terawatts of power that we're going to need by 2050, but it is absolutely hugely moving the needle.

On the distributed scale and super valuable in that right.

Molly Wood:
Yeah. And then how, finally, how did you, what is your background? How did you come to this? And kind of what was the lightning bolt about this solution?

Emily Morris:
Yeah, I don't come from hydro and I don't come from renewables even. I came from technology development and I was working in a firm that was building out a number of different technologies funded in research by the US government, mostly DOD but some other agencies as well. 

And we were building this technology there originally for Office of Naval Research and then under DOE and I first of all I thought it had to exist.

I mean, it's dead simple. It's very obvious. You look at it, you know how it works, and that's actually something that resonates really well with the industry and the market that we serve. But when I found out that this actually didn't exist, and for a lot of those reasons, coming full circle to the beginning of our conversation that hydro is just hard, especially in rivers. 

And while we were in the process of developing it, Congress enacted legislation that exempted

Molly Wood:
Yeah.

Emily Morris:
Man-made waterways from this heavy permitting under FERC, I started to really think somebody should do this. Someone really should go and do that. I would just say someone else should do that. 

Then two years later when this equipment or this technology was still sitting on the shelf and I was still saying somebody really should go do this, I finally realized that someone was probably me. I come from a really entrepreneurial family.

Molly Wood:
Mm-hmm.

Emily Morris:
My dad had a number or has had a number of venture backed and non venture backed companies and I'm no stranger to what it means to say I guess that someone is me and to dedicate and not just a job or career, but a life a lifestyle to that. 

And so I waited until I had a pretty solid launch pad. We brought in, you know, about a million and a half in angel dollars that to compliment

A million and a half in a DOE grant. That was what I knew how to do. So I was able to get a DOE grant now to sort of launch this as its own company and brought in some matching angel funding and then took the leap and haven't looked back.

MW VO:
Teamwork … makes the clean energy dream work … am I right?

That's it for this episode of Everybody in the Pool. Thank you so much for listening and learning along with me. If you like this show … I’d appreciate it if you could rate and review it on Apple podcasts … and of course … tell a friend.

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