
Paul Hinks is the founder, chairman and chief executive officer of MyHydro, a U.S.-based company that provides a highly scalable power solution combining proven engineering with environmentally superior and fish-safe hydropower technology. He also is chairman and CEO of Symbion Energy, an Africa-focused energy investment company based in the U.S.
MyHydro will use Natel Energy’s low-head turbine technology to provide clean, green, zero-emissions energy to millions of customers. Hinks said use of this technology allows many more waterways to be used to generate sustainable and renewable hydroelectricity than could be with conventional high-head turbines.
The company aims to provide a solution to energy poverty across the continent using “fish-safe” technology. MyHydro anticipates that its distributed hydropower will enable developing countries to meet ever-increasing energy demand and at the same time displace diesel and heavy fuel oil, as well as biomass, gas and coal-fired energy sources.
In this exclusive interview, Hinks discusses the company’s focus, structure and longer-term goals for the deployment of small hydropower technology on a large scale in Africa and eventually worldwide.
Q: Please give our readers a general overview of MyHydro.
Hinks: MyHydro is a concept that was developed by Symbion Power, an energy investor based in New York, and Natel Energy, a next-generation turbine technology firm located in San Francisco. Natel Energy is as the exclusive suppliertoMyHydro of all turbines, as well as providing engineering support.
MyHydro uses a new type of hydroelectric turbine called the Restoration Hydro Turbine (RHT), which combines high performance with safe, through-turbine fish passage. The RHT is optimized for hydraulic heads in the range of only 2 m to 20 m at capacities up to 3 MW per turbine with the right conditions. The compact, modular RHT turbine has demonstrated hydraulic efficiency greater than 90% and fish passage survival greater than 99%.
Q: When did you establish MyHydro and why? What need did you see in the hydro market?
Hinks: The company was established in 2019, but its rollout was put on hold when COVID-19 hit us in the U.S. in early 2020.
Fundamentally, MyHydro was developed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to deliver off-grid electricity at a lower cost than solar hybrid installations and mini-grids that incorporate batteries and/or diesel generators. It was also established because hydropower is still the lowest-cost power that operates continuously for 24 hours per day, 7 days per week.
Q: What do you see as the potential for this type of installation in the U.S.?
Hinks: The potential for low-head distributed hydropower in the U.S. is enormous and we are investing in it. We are currently evaluating sites in the Hudson Valley in New York State, where there are around 1,400 existing small dams, many of which restrict the ability of fish to spawn.
The RHT turbines are 99% fish safe, meaning that 99% of fish and eel survive a journey through the turbine. It might take two to three years to complete development work and obtain all the required permits for multiple sites, but we’re happy to make that investment.
RHT stands for Restoration Hydro Turbine because restoring the surrounding environment of the waterways is a large part of what both Natel Energy and MyHydro do. We aim to make MyHydro a significant contributor in the transition to renewable energies that is happening right now in the U.S. and globally.
Q: How will these installations be structured?
Hinks: In Africa, there are three levels in the structure:
- The U.S. parent registered in Delaware.
- A local development company for all MyHydro developments in each country.
- Local operating companies for each power plant or cluster of power plants.
Eventually, as MyHydro grows, there will be new equity investors at all three levels and this will include the participation of credible local investors who are interested in focusing on specific areas within the host country.
Our plan is to raise new equity from other like-minded investors and the debt that is needed to fund the very large scaling across the African continent.
Because the economics are attractive to both investors and customers, MyHydro will become an important market operator that delivers power at significantly lower cost than solar when it is off grid.
Unfortunately, this is going to be the case until storage costs are reduced dramatically and diesel generators are no longer the go-to for backup support when solar output is low or entirely off.
While we acknowledge that MyHydro can only be installed where a river or a reservoir exists, it should be the default option when these resources are available. Cost alone should determine that.
Q: What are the hurdles you face with regard to these installations?
Hinks: The main hurdle is the fact that we are selling power to the public and to captive commercial and industrial customers, and some financial institutions prefer to see us selling power to governments or to state-owned national power utilities. More often than not, the lenders want these arrangements and the associated power purchase agreements to be backed by government guarantees.
This notwithstanding, I am afraid that Symbion and many of our peers have suffered terribly at the hands of clients who fail to pay. We are adamant that a model incorporating risk-mitigated direct-to-consumer electricity sales is best for everyone concerned in many African countries.
Having a singular state-owned customer that defaults on paymentis a much more serious problem for a company like ours than having a number of smaller customers who are late paying or do not pay at all. The former leaves us with no money to operate.
As time goes by, we are seeing acceptance of these facts and the recognition of our rationale that selling cellular airtime and money transfer services to customers in Africa has proven successful for mobile phone operators and that the same can work for electricity too, providing customers can afford the tariffs.
They can afford MyHydro, but they cannot afford the much higher costs that are prevalent for solar hybrid off-grid systems. There is nothing at all wrong with solar and battery technologies these days, but there is everything wrong with the cost when the customers are people with very limited disposable income.
Q: Do you have any active installations at this time?
Hinks: Not yet. The first sites will be ready in 2023/2024. They will be in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and two other countries in Africa. But large-scale Africa-wide deployment really will begin in 2024, and we want to start constructing sites in the U.S. in 2025. In the U.S., we will be delivering to transmission operators and to utilities and not to captive power consumers. The credit risk is obviously a very different proposition.
Q: What are your future plans for installing this technology at specific sites?
Hinks: In the short term (the next two to three years), we expect to install several plants in DRC, three in Kasai Province, two in Bukavu and one in Butembo, as well as others in Malawi and possibly South Africa, where we believe that MyHydro can help alleviate the terrible load shedding problems that exist there at the moment. We are already surveying new opportunities at other sites in DRC, Malawi, South Africa, Guinea and Sierra Leone, and we are about to begin investigations in Zambia and Uganda.
The growth of MyHydro will depend only on how much new investment and debt we raise. It is simple technology that is well within our capacity and far easier to deploy than many of the larger, more difficult projects we have undertaken at Symbion in the past, including very challenging work in Iraq and Afghanistan.