Fish Freeway: How This Company Hopes To Solve Clean Energy's Dirty Secret

Photo by Tejj on Unsplash

The following post was written and/or published as a collaboration between Benzinga’s in-house sponsored content team and a financial partner of Benzinga.

A monumental shift toward clean energy sources is underway. Investment in alternatives to fossil fuel burning methods is at an all-time high. People increasingly demand that governments and energy providers work together to limit CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions from entering the atmosphere.

However, the alternatives are often cited to be by no means perfect. Wind and solar suffer from a lack of dependency. They are beholden to the weather and therefore cannot be relied upon 100% of the time. Companies like General Electric Co. GE, NextEra Energy Inc. NEE, and Tesla Inc. TSLA are developing battery solutions to solve these reliance issues, but batteries have their own environmental costs.

Hydroelectric dams have proven themselves a reliable and powerful source of clean energy for over a century, and today they are the world’s largest source of renewable energy. They do not suffer from the same reliance issues of wind and solar. As long as the river flows, they will be capable of providing energy. Unfortunately, they do have one major ecological flaw: fish.

Fish are an incredibly important resource. They are the biggest single source of global protein. And hydroelectric dams — any dam for that matter — can interrupt their natural life and ecosystems. They may block fish from completing essential migrations and interfere with their spawning cycles. 

To remedy this, various solutions have been employed to varying levels of success, but most are either very expensive or not particularly effective. Too often, no solution is adopted, and the dam continues to harm the local fish populations.

Whooshh Innovations is one example of a company trying to solve this problem. Whooshh (which is currently crowdfunding investments on StartEngine) develops and deploys what it says are innovative fish passage solutions. These systems allow fish to navigate over dams of all sizes. This allows the fish populations to continue to thrive and play a critical role in the global ecosystem and food chain.

Fish swim into the Whooshh Passage Portal™ on their own where 18 high definition photos are taken to determine among other things their size, species, hatchery or wild. Those that are deemed able to pass, will then be transported quickly and safely in a pneumatic tube over the dam, and can swim on its merry way.

The sorting program serves a dual purpose. It can identify and keep out invasive species, only transporting native species that are healthy for the local ecosystem.

The U.S. has more than 85,000 dams already constructed and over 1 million exist worldwide. This could mean a very large market exists for Whooshh — one that is largely untapped.

If you’d like to know more about Whooshh and its systems, check out its website here.

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