Pushkin. I'm Jacob Goldstein. This is What's Your Problem, the show where I talk to people who are trying to make technological progress. My guest today is Gia Schneider. Ga is the co founder and CEO of Natel Energy, and her problem is this, can you get all the good parts of hydro electric power without the bad? In order to solve that problem, there's sort of two sub problems that Gia has to solve. First, how do you build a turbine that can go into a river and generate
power without chopping up fish? That, as you'll hear in the first part of the show, is an interesting engineering challenge. And then in the second part of the show, Gia talks about a second problem to solve, how do you put dams in rivers without messing up the broader ecosystem? And I have to say I found that part of the conversation particularly interesting. For one thing, it involves beavers, always fun. Second, and perhaps more importantly, that part of
the conversation changed the way I think about rivers. So let's start with the Let's start with the happy. Why is hydro power great?
Yeah, hydropower is a great source of energy because it is reliable and predictable. What that means is that if I'm sitting here today and I'm looking forward at what I can expect to get out of my power plant over to say, the next day, the next week, I have a very good idea of what I will get minute to minute, hour to hour. And that reliability is really valuable in terms of balancing out the operation of a grid and keeping a grid reliable.
Right that, and that is not true. Were not as true importantly of solar power or wind power. Right, those are more intermittent and less predictable. So those are reasons why hydro power is great. Why is hydro power bad?
What's the problem? Yeah, so hydro is The challenges with hydro or the negatives really come from the fact that the way in which hydropower works is by taking water and moving it across an elevation drop through a turbine. And to get that elevation drop, we generally have built dams, and those dams then change the way in which rivers flow in sometimes very material ways, and rivers are effectively
the circulatory system of the planet. And so as you can imagine, as you start to like change those flow patterns, that has some real implications for the ecosystem around those rivers.
Right, So dams can mess up the rivers, correct, and then the turbines themselves can be bad as well.
Right, Yeah, the turbines themselves, and you know have they are amazing machines that have been highly engineered for high efficiency and performance. They are, they're very outstanding engineering products. At the same time, they aren't very safe in many cases for passage of aquatic life.
They're like fish blenders in the middle of the river.
It's not necessarily always quite as bad as fish blenders, but yes, bottom line is you can kind of average it out and say like one in five fish through a conventional turbine generally won't survive.
So there's sort of two levels of problems. One is the dam and the other is the turbine. Correct.
Correct.
So let's start with the turbine problem. Just in the case of the US, What are the main fish of concern species of concern? What fish are getting chopped up by turbines?
Well, there are many fish, of course. The species of concern that raise to the kind of top of the list from a human perspective at least are salmon because sand and as a commercial fishery that has a lot of value, and eel is a more recent species of concern. Eel is less because it's a commercial fishery, but more actually because eel are a critical part of the life
cycle for freshwater muscles. And one of the things that we've really started to understand in the last decade or so is that freshwater muscles are really critical to water quality, and we as humans care about water quality a lot, even if we might not care that much about freshwater muscles or eel.
So just to be clear, like if you put a turbine in a river and the eel get chopped up in it, the water quality.
Gets worse, yes, bottom line, yep.
And I've heard of you know, ladders and things like that for fish, like why didn't pre existing solutions work very well?
So actually we have focused quite a bit on getting fish upstream with ladders and have had you know, some degree of success with that for certain species. Eel and salmon actually are both able to navigate ladders of different types upstream, eel in particular quite well. The thing that we had focused less on is how do we get fish back downstream safely? So actually building ways to get fish to move upstream is in some ways maybe a more accessible problem than how do you deal with getting
fish to move safely downstream? Where from a hydropower perspective, you want most of that water moving through your turbine because the amount of water going through your turbine is directly relevantly on energy you create.
Right, So it's a difficult trade off. You could either route the water around the turbine and then the fish don't die, but then you don't get any power because you rounted all the water around your.
Turb right, right, And so the mitigation, the interim mitigation that folks have started to explore, is to put screens. So not just so all hydropower plants have what are called trash racks to keep like, you know, shopping carts and logs and all sorts of things that rip from going through the turbine, but those trash racks you know, will have you know, an inch to four inch spacing, so quite a few things fish, you know, can make
it through. So folks have looked at screens. But the problem with screens is that the finer the screen, the more likely you are to keep fish out. But the finer the screen, the more efficiency loss you have across the screen.
The screen it just gets covered and leaves Schmitz and whatever. Yeah, okay, so your notion is like, let's let's fix the blade itself. Can we make a blade that will generate power and not kill fish exactly? Exactly? Seems seems hard, Like when you're setting out to do this, what what are you thinking about?
So conventional turbines particularly, you know, probably most folks are familiar with, say a wind turbine. They are circular in nature, and so what that means as they spin is the tips are moving faster than the center of the blade. If anybody's been on the merry ground, you know that. So one thought we had was because speed is directly proportional to the speed at which something hits you, is going to have a relation to how hard or how much it hurts.
Right right, if you're a fish, you're more likely to die by a blade that's spinning really fast, correct exactly.
And so one way to change the ratio and have a consistent speed across the whole length of the blade is to instead of having blades move in a circle around a central hub, to if you think about taking the center hub and a turban and splitting it in two and stretching it apart. It was a very different.
Design, sounds very complicated.
It was hard to picture, yes, And I think bottom line, we realized after a lot of work, we didn't need to do that. We could just make a better blade shape on a conventional turbine design. But that took quite a bit of work to get to that point.
How did you figure that out?
Well, the simple version is a lot of trial and error and a lot of you know, experimentation. Where we ended up is actually I think a very simple and elegant solution, which is which which belies the amount of work that went into it.
Often in the case like it's easy once you know how to do it right, figuring out how to do it is hard.
Right and and the simple elegant solution basically it comes down to two things. One is that the leading edge of the blade itself is fairly thick relative to the size of fish interacting with it, and so that is kind of intuitive. If you have a you have a blunt edge moving through the water as opposed to a knife edge moving through the water. The blunt edge is going to be better for interacting with like things get deflected, fish get deflected, or if.
You think of it from the fish's point of view, like if you're swimming into a knife blade, that's going to mess you up more than if you're swimming into like a little wall right.
Right, like a rounded a rounded wall or rounded rounded rounded. So that's one part and then the other part is and actually the physics around it are fairly interesting because that rounded edge creates a almost like an air bag, like a you can think of it like as a as a field like water water bag, and it basically helps deflect stuff around the blade.
So that part's good stuff, including fish.
Stuff including fish. And then the other part was to solve that problem of the fact that the tips move faster than the hub than the center, and to do that we then introduced a swoop forward of the blade. And that is again you know a little bit of physics is what that. But the way to intutorly understand it is that if you're if you're swimming through water and you get struck with a glancing blow as opposed to a direct blow, the glancing blow hurts a lot less.
Yeah, I want a glancing blo those are my choice, right, And.
So by swooping the blade forward, it simply it basically means that you don't have direct strikes. You have glanc Dange strikes, and the energy of that impact is now dramatically less and that leads directly to survival. So all of this is around the leading edge of the blade, and that's all tied up with fish safety. The rest of the blade shape is all about performance again because
we have to have high performance, hig efficiency machines. And so the twin engineering challenges were this then balancing the shape on the leading edge with the shape of the rest of the blade. So we have a highly fished safe leading edge with a high performing rest of the blade. Right.
So now you've figured out how to not kill fish, but you have to make sure you can still generate power. It still has to work.
It still has to work, still has to work at you know, ninety ninety three percent efficiency. That's these are very very high performance machines. And then I think the other additional construt that we face is a design approach that can design blades that are able to go into all of the existing hydropower plants that we have today.
When we're talking about hydro, we're talking about dealing with a large, existing installed base that we want to upgrade to be fish safe, which means we need to go into the existing concrete and all the other stuff that's there.
So this is essentially a replacement part building a whole new system. We're building a replacement part. So just so you figure out how to build this thing, and just tell me, what does it look like to somebody who doesn't know about all the swooping and the wide blade. Just if you look at it, what does it look like?
It looks like a propeller, but with a very punky, you know, big thick leading edge.
Uh huh, Yeah, I mean I looked at it and I thought like, oh, it just looks like a jet engine kind of right. There's like a around there's like a metal cylinder with the blade inside of it. Correct, Like, yeah, you wouldn't know. You wouldn't know how hard it was or that it doesn't kill fish if you looked at it.
That's correct.
There is there a moment when you when you test it, is there like, okay, we made this thing, let's see if it kills fish. Like, how do you figure out if it kills fish.
We have a water tank and a pump and we recirculate water through a set of pipes through a turbine. That turbine has a transparent housing around it, so we can take high speed video so we can see the fish as they go through.
Cool see what they do. You're just dump fishing and say good luck fish.
Basically, yeah, and then we I mean, this is all very scientific, right, So we tag each fish that goes through the turbine, we capture it at the end, we have we inspect the fish before, we inspect the fish after we hold the fish for forty eight hours after they go through the turbine. We have a control population.
So traditional turbines you said kill about twenty percent of the fish that pass through them. What percent of the fish that passed through your turbine are killed by the.
Turbine less than two percent. So we have done tests that have one hundred percent survival, so zero fish die.
So you got your turbine. It doesn't kill fish. And by the way, how does it compare in terms of efficiency? How is it at generating power compared to comparable turbines.
Similar So it's not the case where we can always say that there is no trade off. Some of the most efficient hydroturbines out there, you know, approach efficiencies of ninety four ninety five percent. I think right now we top out at around ninety three percent. So for the most efficient, there will be some turbines that are a
little bit more efficient. However, when you think about prioritization of fish passage, and you think about a very efficient turbine, but now you need to put a screen in front of it, you end up with net net delivered cost of energy relative to fish safe performance is definitely better when you can pass fish safely through a turbine, even if it's ninety three percent instead of ninety four percent efficient.
So you got your turbine. It works. Where are your turbines in the world today generating energy?
Today? We have three projects installed, one in Oregon, one in Maine, and one in Austria.
And are these like pilots? Are these like big utility scale? Are they like? What is the nature of these three?
They're commercial installations. They are generating electricity connected to the grid. We're looking at things in Virginia, in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Switzerland, France, and now most recently up in Ontario, and I should be very clear, these are all deals that we're working on that are not yet closed with a couple of
different utilities. So I think what we are I think really at an interesting tipping point from a commercial perspective, where the industry is finally realizing that there is a way to upgrade all of these old assets, maintain or actually improve in some cases the power output simply because we're replacing really old turbans with new turbans, and the new turbines are higher performance and do so without killing fish.
And at the end of the day, our value proposition simply is, if you're going to spend billions of dollars on equipment that's going to run for forty or fifty years, and you could put in a conventional machine which will kill fish, or a machine that is not going to kill fish, why would you not choose the machine that is not going to kill fish.
Are there regulatory requirements that make it that sort of push utilities towards choosing your turbine? I mean, is it like if they don't choose your turbine, then they have to put in a really fine screen and it's going to be worse for them anyways, that's correct.
Yes, I think where we're seeing the most immediate uptake is places where there are regulations for safe passage which require either of putting in a screen with a bypass, so you generally are reducing energy because you're putting more water around the turbine instead of through in addition to the screen, which adds to costs, or in some cases you're having to shut down at night for three or four or five months out of the year while fish are moving. Things like that.
We'll be back in a minute to discuss gia's long term problem. Once you fix turbines, what about dams? How do you put a dam in a river without messing up the ecosystem? Part of the answer, It turns out you ask yourself what would beavers do. There's another problem with hydro power, right, which is the dams themselves mess up river ecosystems, and a turbine that doesn't kill fish doesn't solve that, right, or it doesn't solve it entirely. What are you going to do about that one?
Yeah, well, I think the answer is multi layered, and in general our view is that there are certain existing dams today that make sense to be removed. That's a position that and in general I would say that you'll find that to be a position across the industry. They're just are in some cases stuff that we built, maybe even one hundred years ago that just don't make sense to keep in in today. And they should be right.
And it's a basic cost benefit, like it's a high ecological cost, it's not generating that much power, I mean, it's not the basic calculus.
Or it's also just a high operations cost. So it's a combination of commercial and environmental factors driving the decision making. So the next layer after dam removal is what we think of as reconfiguration. So if I have an existing project, it makes sense to stay in economically it's a good,
good asset. But maybe there are some things that I can do in addition to putting in fish safe turbines that will improve the upstream passage by having a better bypass or a more naturalistic upstream passage zone for example.
Those are reasonable, But you have this big dream. Tell me about that.
Yeah, So the big dream is what we call restoration hydro, which is to go full stop in taking the lessons learned from river restoration over the last couple decades take inspiration from nature's engineers, which are beavers, which do build dams. And what's fascinating when you look at beavers is that you can find beaver dams that are very large, hundreds of feet long, fifteen feet high. You can find beaver dams that have been around for a century, can be
very persistent. And what's interesting when you look at those structures is they actually have very positive impacts on the river ecosystem with respect to groundwater recharge. They slow water runoff down that helps get war water into the ground, that helps to benefit the water table. They create more habitat, more diverse habitat around in that particular part of the
river reach, which is beneficial for FIT. So the big picture dream is to is to take is basically a nature based approach to thinking about rethinking hydro, certainly for new build projects, but potentially also for reconfiguring more dramatically existing projects.
I get that beavers are cool, like beavers are indeed amazing, but I don't think I get exactly. I mean, are you just saying we should build dams like beavers? Like I don't really understand practically.
Building dams that fit what you mean. Yeah, The concept behind restoration hydro is to realize that what we see in rivers today is not the way rivers actually were in their natural state. The rivers in their natural state two hundred years ago in North America were full of logjams, woody debris, beaver dams, all sorts of barriers to flow. Those barriers helped mitigate floods because you si water run off down across the landscape. They helped drive groundwater recharge.
They have a whole bunch of.
Ben that's cool. So like when we picture a river and we just picture it free flowing, that's actually not natural either. That is the product of some amount of human intervention.
A huge amount of reream is intervention for navigation for all sorts of reasons. Right, we want to be able to drive a boat straight through the river.
So the dream is is you sort of get a sense of what the natural dams might have been and build those and generate power from them. Like that's the dream.
That's the dream, And the reality, of course, is that it's going to be one step back from that, because you know, we live in an existing built infrastructure with
a lot of stuff that we have to adapt. But I think that that is a pathway that we feel pretty strongly we're going to have to go down anyway in the context of climate change, because if we look at the increase in extreme weather events and precipitation events, both extreme floods and extreme droughts, the common problem is we're getting too much or not enough water in the you know.
At the wrong given moment, right.
And so what dams do, whether they're man made or natural, is help to spread water out across time and across space, and that is going to be a critical part of adapting to climate change, which we are going to have
to do. We have a certain amount of climate change embedded in our atmosphere today, we are seeing it already, and so the view for us around restoration hydros, it's a way to start to blend this future of how do we deal with climate change from a water resource management perspective with also adding to the renewable energy supply.
It's cool, It's a cool it's a cool way of thinking about the world that I had not thought of before. So I appreciate it's fun to have a new way of thinking about the world.
Yeah, I mean, I think that this is critical for us in general, for everyone who's working to tackle the clean energy transition, because if you think about what we're doing, we are basically replacing fossil fuel resource extraction with something else, and that something else is not necessarily a world that is biodiverse. It's a world like I can fully imagine a world where we have made the clean energy transition.
We are using when sun and water and geothermal energy to power all of our energy needs, but in the process of doing that, we have mined the earth massively. We have huge industrial scale build out of everything, and that's a world that is not necessarily very biodiverse, but
is powered by clean energy. And so I think that the one of the other reasons why I find hydro interesting is because hydro has one hundred years of history dealing with and thinking about and having lessons learned of how how can we we can do renewable energy one way that has a big negative environmental impact, or we can embed criteria that prioritizes biodiversity and environmental criteria. And we need to think about that not just for hydro,
but for batteries, for solar, for wind, et cetera. Across the board.
We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round for almost done, but first we have to do a lightning round, which is just a lot of questions somewhat more random than the other questions I've asked you so far. For example, what's one thing you missed about Texas where you grew up.
The farm, being on a farm?
Is it right that you lived in a cabin that your dad built like I sort of caught glimpses of that, but what's the true story of that?
That is the truth. He drove to our Arkansas, brought back logs and built the house in which I grew up with the help of some local high school students, and so that is actually true.
Where are the tacos better Texas or California, Baja Mexico. Well, sure, literally where fish tacos were invented.
I think both Sexes and California are fine. I've had, I've had have equally great tacos in both both places.
What's one thing you learned from setting up the carbon emissions trading tests at Credit SUEEE early in your career that.
It is possible to move policy in a direction that supports environmental outcomes and aligns with the general like capitalist framework, so it is possible to do that. It takes a lot of thought, effort and care.
What's your favorite river, Oh, the McCloud, tell me about the McLoud.
It is an amazing cold, like super cold water river flows into Lake Shasta, and so unfortunately upstream migration is blocked at Lake Shasta, and we're there. We go there once a year, generally in the summers. It's a great fishing trout fishing stream. It's just incredibly pristine, beautiful, just a beautiful place.
Gia Schneider is the co founder and CEO of Nattel Energy. Today's show was produced by Edith Russolo and Gabriel Hunter Chang. It was edited by Karen Chakerjie and engineered by Sarah Bruger. You can email us at problem at Pushkin dot FM. I'm Jacob Goldstein and we'll be back next week with another episode of What's Your Problem.