, with several more in the pipeline; the company is planning to install two more projects this year, one in Virginia and another in Austria.
Natel co-founder and CEO, Gia Schneider, admires an American eel in the recirculating aquaculture system Natel maintains to enable unique through-turbine fish passage testing at the company's headquarters in Alameda, Calif., in 2021.The Schneider siblings both earned engineering degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology around the turn of the 21st century.
Unlike large hydropower plants, which can have a damaging environmental footprint, Natel wanted to make turbines that would enable rivers to maintain their natural flow as much as possible to protect a healthy ecosystem. The company’s “” design philosophy, which incorporates the concept of biomimicry—learning from and emulating nature to create more sustainable designs—couples a fish-safe turbine with low-impact structures in strategic sites that use and mimic the natural landscape.
The impossible dream