Throughout high school I learned about how the climate crisis proves to be an acute threat to my generation. Though not mandatory for New York City public school teachers, one of my favourite teachers, Mr Holmes, insisted his students deeply understood the role their everyday lives played in exacerbating climate change. After graduating I felt compelled to understand how I could make a contribution to climate action.
I began to analyse the different ways I used energy in my life. Growing up in New York City, skyscrapers were not an uncommon sight. Though I always saw them I never understood how the water got from the water mains under the street and up to the sinks, toilets, and showers on the tallest floors of buildings with enough pressure to use them.
I went on a Googling spree, watching videos and reading articles about the water systems of our skyscrapers. I quickly learned that for water to be distributed to every unit of a building with adequate flow, the water is initially pressurised to extremely high rates using pumps in the basement so that the top floors can receive water at a decent pressure.
However, if this water was just siphoned off to any of the units below the top floor, it would burst through faucets and break toilets in half. For this reason, devices are installed to decrease the pressure to safe rates. This depressurisation is achieved through the dissipation of excess energy into heat, which creates a net loss of energy, having a detrimental impact on our climate, as well as the wallets of building owners. And I was shocked and frustrated to find out that it was wasted.
My goal was to explore the idea of replacing pressure-reducing valves in this antiquated system of energy inefficient depressurisation with a product that building owners would actually respond to positively. So I set out on a mission to talk to 150 building owners.
Micro hydro: an efficient solutions
From our market study of over 150 NYC and Washington DC building owners and managers, we found that roughly 80% of them are currently scrambling for energy efficiency solutions or currently are settling for unprofitable ones. Many
of these building managers are still trying to recover from the enormous revenue loss caused by the unprecedented number of vacancies during Covid.
This acute need provides us with a unique opportunity to target these multi-tenant commercial buildings who are currently scrambling to find alternative revenue streams.
Through these conversations, I quickly realised there was a need for a product to capture this energy, but I questioned why I was the first one to think about it. I turned to pen and paper with colleagues in the PhD programme at George Washington University’s engineering school and realised our solution. Micro-hydro generators could effectively replace the existing pressure reducing valves.
This is where we come in. Electromaim installs and maintains micro hydro-generators to be used instead of pressure reducing valves. Our solution, awaiting final US patent allowance, allows buildings to mitigate energy costs and profit on excess energy produced by sending it back to the grid or repurposing it within the building. Last year we proved our solution’s theoretical feasibility and profitability, for which we received a Department of Energy Grant to verify these proofs in a lab. This past winter and spring we initiated testing to verify our results.
While pressure reducing valves address excess pressure by dissipating it in the form of heat, hydro-generators utilise the high-water pressure and convert the excess into electricity while still allowing for adequate pressure on any given floor
of a building.
Our products can be sold to fit into the natural replacement schedule of PRVs to minimise costs, and our proprietary technology constantly monitors the pressure and electricity production of the device to ensure efficiency and prevent malfunctions.
For the technological and business discovery, we received a DOE and NREL grant to turn out theoretical proofs into a tested reality, which we
did last year.
Since then, we’ve participated in CleanTech Open, one of the world’s largest cleantech accelerators. We graduated by winning their Xylem Water Prize and therefore gaining industry expertise, onboarding expert advisors, and building our backend-business.
We just initiated our first private partnership with SEE Institute in Dubai to finish the final stages of our product development and to deploy our first pilot project. We hope to launch sales within the next year and are actively preparing and fundraising to do so.
Ultimately, we understand that the clean power this solution could generate would in no way solve our climate crisis, but it will provide a vital effort in doing so.
