Ottawa entrepreneur's micro-hydro turbine promises electricity for 10 cents per kilowatt-hour

An Ottawa-founded company is moving a micro-hydroelectric turbine from prototype to commercialization, targeting off-grid power markets across the globe.

AquaGen, operating under founder Mac Brown's vision, builds lightweight generators that harvest electricity from slow-moving rivers. The company's latest product, the Barracuda, is engineered as a portable turbine capable of generating 4.2 kilowatts of continuous power, or 100 kilowatt-hours daily.

The appeal lies in cost and practicality. In many off-grid locations, diesel-generated electricity costs approximately $1 per kilowatt-hour or more. "AquaGen projects that our system can produce electricity for around 10 cents per kWh, offering the potential for significant cost savings while reducing emissions and dependence on diesel fuel," Brown told the Ottawa Business Journal.

The engineering team achieved a 66 per cent weight reduction from the first model to the Barracuda. The carbon-fibre frame weighs only 50 kg, solving what Brown identifies as the key failure of most hydrokinetic devices: deployment logistics. "The problem was always ease of deployment," he said. "Most run-of-river systems have higher power output, they are very heavy and need a crane or heavy equipment to deploy. AquaGen decided to design portable, rapid deployment low-cost systems that can be deployed by one or two people in a matter of hours."

Brown brings decades of experience in Ottawa's tech sector. He founded and served as CEO of Rebel.com and Hardware Canada Computer, which built systems for Sun Microsystems and Nortel. He previously led Magenn Power, a high-altitude wind turbine venture.

He partnered with serial entrepreneur Chris Napior, who brings three decades of experience in real estate and government consulting, plus work with NASA, Tesla, Siemens, and the U.S. Department of Defense.

AquaGen was founded in Ottawa in 2022 and brought together experts and engineers from as far as the U.K. Experts from the Canadian Hydro Kinetic Turbine Testing Centre in Manitoba also contributed to development.

Brown argues that run-of-river hydrokinetic technology has the potential to become a primary renewable power source because it generates predictable energy day and night without requiring dams or flooded valleys — solving what he describes as the dark-side energy gap: "If you look at the world at night from space and you see everything lit up, that is not our market. Everything in the dark is our market."