Finding the Flow: Atlanta’s Emrgy Aims to Unleash Distributed Hydro Power Around the World

With power demand skyrocketing around the world, proven low-carbon energy sources like hydro may seem like they’d be all the rage in 2025. 

But for all its established benefits, traditional hydro power has a few setbacks: Dams are expensive, and both regulation and community opposition make them challenging and time-consuming to build, especially in the United States. 

What if someone could create a distributed, modular system, offering plug-and-play generation capacity that makes use of the water already flowing through man-made irrigation canals and water treatment plants? 

That was the question that drove the creation of Emrgy Inc., an Atlanta-based innovator that emerged about a decade ago out of U.S. Navy research into turbine technology that could turn flowing water into a tool for empowering communities and cutting carbon. 

Emily Morris, Emrgy’s CEO and founder, sees its solution as a best-of-both-worlds approach, borrowing the economic models (and some of the technologies) that have powered other renewables to widespread adoption, while keeping the core of what makes hydro attractive. 

“We’re taking principles from solar and wind that have enabled those industries to grow idnsturies to grow exponentially, and we’re bringing those principles into water,” Ms. Morris told Global Atlanta in an interview.

Unlike solar and wind, which often require battery storage to offset times of darkness or stillness, hydro is pretty much always churning. And it’s a proven technology — the average age of a hydro plant is about 80 years old, Ms. Morris says. 

Having raised $30 million to date including an $18.4 million Series A round in 2023, Emrgy (think “embedded energy”) has been “laser-focused” on proving the tech through thousands of hours of testing in pilots and commercial deployments across four states, while refining its maintenance and manufacturing, bringing the latter back to the U.S. at an Aurora, Colo. facility. (In its early days of commercialization, Emrgy’s turbines were made in China through a commercial partnership with GE Renewable Energy).

This summer, Emrgy has been installing a system for a microgrid in New Mexico that includes its patented floating solar panel system. Utah, California and Colorado all have Emrgy projects. In Idaho, Emrgy is helping a rural community whose irrigation systems were previously powered by diesel generators. 

Growth Mode: Global Expansion to Come

Now, Emrgy is in growth mode, Ms. Morris says, and taking small steps toward reaching the world-changing potential she has seen from the beginning.

But preparing to reach scale has required honing the business model even further.  

“With the $18 million, we evolved our business model to become more of a renewable energy developer,” she said, comparing Emrgy to solar companies that pay homeowners or commercial building owners to use their roofs by lowering their energy costs. “Now, we lease a canal from a water district, install the equipment, connect the system, sell electricity to the power grid, and we pay a portion of that revenue as a lease payment.”

The model is a bit more capital-intensive than one-off sales of turbines, but the reward is substantial over time. 

“It’s tough to get in, but once you’re in, you have those really nice, predictable recurring cash flows for a very long period and then can sell projects to create liquidity, generating near-term cash flow.” 

Emrgy’s modules, only produce 5-25Kw each, but they can be sequentially chained together in arrays, enabling them to be set up quickly and without huge upfront cost. They also can be dropped into existing infrastructure with no construction, making a good portion of the world’s estimated 2 million miles worth of canals fair game for expansion. 

Plus, they hold the potential of bringing energy production into rural areas where it’s needed most.

“In Africa or the Caribbean, one of the biggest issues is that these big facilities that are being installed only export power, and the local communities get none,” Ms. Morris explained. 

Companies building these plants call Emrgy, looking for a solution to the sometimes-vocal pushback they receive.

“Distributed power is becoming way more of the norm. Community energy is really big — people are starting to see how resilient it is and how risky it is to transport your power for hundreds of miles.”

But as exciting as it is, the global opportunity largely lies ahead; in the meantime, Emrgy’s main target is canal operators and utilities that can easily see the payback equation.

One of Emrgy’s first big tests, both of its modular technology and ability to deliver globally, came during COVID-19, when irrigation canal manager Morven Glenavy Irrigation Company Ltd. in New Zealand sought to harvest energy from its system of earthen canals, some of which were losing 20-60 percent of their water. 

One problem: Emrgy’s team couldn’t travel during the pandemic, so they kitted out the modules and shipped them (IKEA-style, as Ms. Morris described on a recent podcast) for local assembly. Even without boots on the ground, it went off without a hitch. 

Since then, Ms. Morris has worked to keep an eye on international opportunities — taking in inquiries in places as far away as Laos and India — while staying focused on the plan here at home, especially as the use of artificial intelligence (and the huge data centers that power it) has power companies fighting for every kilowatt hour. 

So far, one system has been sent to South Africa, where it has yet to be installed, and Italy, where the renewable energy arm of Enel, the country’s largest electric company, has taken an interest. Enel is also weighing bringing Emrgy’s modules into its plants in Chile, another strong potential market.

Ms. Morris will travel to next week to Costa Rica during Procomer’s Sept. 1-5 Costa Rica Trade & Investment Summit, which has explicitly targeted Georgia firms. Her focus will not be on leasing canals in the Central American country, but on finding partners who may be able to employ Emrgy’s turbines in a similar way. 

For now, she’s taking on inquiries from around the world in stride, leaving her some 20 employees in Atlanta and Colorado to focus on engineering and sales, respectively. As Emrgy scales up, it will build out project-management teams with real estate and finance experts, much like a solar developer would have. 

Ms. Morris doesn’t envision hiring an export sales manager in the short run.

“I sort of just take it on myself,” she said of the technical questions or product inquiries that come in from places like Nigeria and Pakistan. “A lot of early international business is a pretty slow burn.” 

Emrgy was named one of Time‘s top-10 American green-tech companies in 2024.