Fish passage | Inspired from a young age
After her recent appointment to the board of the International Hydropower Association, Gia Schneider, co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer at Natel Energy, discusses her career in renewable energy, the innovative solutions her company offers for sustainable hydropower, and her vision for the future of the industry
Please give an overview of your
professional experience and expertise. I’ve been interested in renewable energy since I was a kid. After graduating from MIT with Engineering and Economics degrees, I spent more than 20 years working in energy and energy finance. I started at Accenture in their utility practice, then got the opportunity to work at one of my clients, Constellation Energy. After Constellation, I had a unique opportunity to be part of a small team that set up the energy and carbon emissions trading desk at Credit Suisse. In 2009, my brother, Abe and I co-founded Natel
Above: Gia Schneider and Abe Schneider, Natel’s co-founders
Energy, a hydropower company that designs high- performance FishSafe turbines to promote biodiversity and decarbonise the grid where I now serve as Chief Commercial Officer. I am also honoured to serve on the boards of the International Hydropower Association (IHA), Upstream Tech and the Fresh Water Trust, and remain a long-time representative on the National Councils of World Wildlife Fund and American Rivers.
Why did you establish Natel Energy? My brother, Abe and I grew up in Texas, inspired
Below: Gia Schneider, Natel co-founder and CCO; Bill Malus, Natel CEO and Abe Schneider, Natel co-founder and CTO
at a young age by our father, an inventor of novel renewable energies. He encouraged us to understand the critical value of both renewable energy and natural resources, especially water. It was in our teenage years that we discovered the positive ecological benefit beaver dams can have on river health. Fast forward several decades after Abe and I both studied engineering at MIT, we cut our teeth working in the energy and engineering industries respectively and
then came back together to help advance what we knew to be one of the most powerful forms of renewable energy – hydropower. For us, it was clear that hydropower would continue
to play a critical role in decarbonising the grid and help meet net-zero goals as the world’s biggest source of renewable energy. We also knew that hydropower had room for modernisation, namely as it relates to its impact on the environment, specifically aquatic biodiversity. With a little bit of re-engineering, we believed hydropower had the ability to help vs harm the environment where it operates. Leaning into our backgrounds, we designed a novel turbine runner with blades that are thick and have a slanted leading edge. This allows the runner to rotate at high speeds – maintaining conventional turbine performance metrics like high power density, high efficiency, compact form factor, and low cavitation – while passing fish safely directly through the turbine. We’ve tested our FishSafe turbine design with a wide range of critical migratory fish commonly found in river habitats around the world including sturgeon, eel, salmon, catfish, alewife and our testing – both in the field and in our closed hydraulic loop facility at our headquarters in Alameda, California – have demonstrated >98% survival across those varied species. This high performance across many types of fish has
laid the foundation for our FishSafe designs to provide an advantaged alternative to the plant shutdowns and costly, inefficient and ineffective fine fish screens that today serve as the industry standard for fish protection. We know that today, one of hydropower’s greatest challenges, particularly in mature grids in North America and Europe, is age, which necessitates the need to replace old turbines; combined with relicensing which can present new environmental requirements, particularly for fish passage. Over half of the existing North American and European hydro fleets are more than fifty years old. A total of 37GW across both continents will require upgrades for fish passage and efficiency within the next decade. We’re aware this initially presents as a potentially
expensive challenge: how to cost-effectively modernise and update existing, aged hydropower while also meeting new fish passage requirements imposed in relicensing? Status quo solutions like shutdowns, fish screening or bypasses reduce generation, increase CAPEX (to install screens/ bypasses) and increase OPEX (to clean screens since finer screens often trap more debris). In contrast, Natel’s FishSafe turbine designs enable
a plant owner to spend the CAPEX already planned to replace old turbines with no other changes required – fish pass safely directly through the
30 | September 2024 |
www.waterpowermagazine.com
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