Hydro Green Energy, LLC (HGE), a Houston-based hydrokinetic river power and tidal energy technology integrator and project developer, recently announced that it has closed its $2.6 million Series-A funding round led by the Quercus Trust.
Hydro Green Energy intends to build and operate hydrokinetic power projects that generate electricity exclusively from moving water (river currents, tidal currents and ocean currents) without having to first construct dams, impoundments, conduits or other infrastructure. Its technology is also deployable downstream from existing hydropower facilities, which allows for new incremental, environmentally-friendly, renewable power generation within the existing project footprint.
Hydro Green Energy holds 13 Preliminary Permits from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) for projects in Alaska and Mississippi. The company, which said it is in various stages of development in several other states, expects to be generating electricity at its first project in Minnesota on the Mississippi River in late August. That project will be the first commercially operational, FERC-licensed hydrokinetic power project in the United States.
Hydro Green Energy owns U.S. and International Patents on the technology designed by Mr. Krouse. The company has pending numerous additional U.S. Patents, as well as International Patents. The company claims its turbine design is the most efficient and highest power producing hydrokinetic turbine unit in the hydrokinetic industry resulting in lower capital costs and higher capacity factors than any other river, tidal or ocean energy system.
A 2007 study by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) found that the U.S. could develop at a minimum 23,000 megawatts of river and ocean-based hydrokinetic energy by 2025, enough annual power for roughly 12 million homes.(1) Earlier estimates by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) showed even greater potential and suggested that the U.S. might be able to double its existing water energy output (presently eight percent of the nation's energy) with the development of new technologies.