Portrait 01: Ted Christopher
Ted Christopher is an inventor, entrepreneur, musician, and a fan of perseverance.
A passion for social responsibility and renewable energy inspired Ted Christopher to create a device called Volturnus that could make a real difference in the world. Volturnus is a simple and elegant device that, when submerged in moving water, generates zero emission, baseload electricity.
Since 2010, Ted has shepherded Volturnus' development from the construction of small scale models to full system architecture prototypes, patents, strategic partnerships and collaborations, to building a world class team to solve the global need for distributed, renewable energy.
Josh:
Well, hello, Ted. Thanks for joining me today. I'm really happy that you can be here so that we can learn a little bit more about Verterra Energy.
Ted Christopher:
Great to be here. Thanks for having me, Josh.
Josh:
So I think first to get started, tell me just a little bit about Ted Christopher, the inventor, because you know, we don't know you probably at all. Tell us a little bit about why you're an entrepreneur, how did you get started, what made you decide to be an inventor?
Ted Christopher:
Well, a lot of it was circumstance as I was in a band at the time, this was way back in 2007 or 2008. One of our guitars got a European tour deal for a year, and I just, you know, I wasn't just gonna sit around and wait for him. I was seeing a lot about renewable energy, and I'm not an engineer, and I wasn't an environmentalist by any stretch. But I grew up on the river, and we were always seeing all this about wind and solar power, so I just thought, “Well, why isn't anybody trying to harness the power in flowing water?” I grew up on the Mississippi, and, you know, if you've ever been knee deep in the Mississippi, you know how powerful it is.
So I called up a second cousin that I'd met, I don't know, three times in my life prior, and just said, “Hey, I got this idea. Can you make it for me?” He had this high tech machine shop, because he was a government contractor. So he said, “Well, I'll make you a better deal. You come out in the shop, the guys will teach you everything you need to know, and you can make it yourself.” And I thought, “Oh, boy, this is great.” So, at this time it was February in Minnesota, so San Diego sounded really good. So I, you know, couldn't have been more cliche - I packed up my little Mazda wagon and drove West! I did encounter a flat tire and had to unpack the entire back of the car on the way out there, but I made it.
I learned how to sweep the floor on the first day - literally. And the guys in the shop were just… it was just great. They taught me how to weld. I learned CNC programming and operation in AutoCAD, and we got to work on some some pretty amazing projects. Because it was San Diego, a lot of the projects were government and military contracts - it was really about five apprenticeships in one.
Eventually I built a little test tank and just started experimenting. So it was, you know, entrepreneur on purpose, and by accident as well. I just wanted to make something that could generate electricity from flowing water, and specifically electricity. So it truly was the inspiration of growing up by the river and understanding the power of that force.
Josh:
There's probably a million things you could have looked at if you thought about inventing something that makes electricity. Was it truly just that experience of growing up by the river?
Ted Christopher:
You know, it probably was, you know, nobody's ever really asked that specifically before. I think it was just knowing how powerful that was just from growing up on it… and in being in water - just knowing that that's going all the time versus the wind, which, you know, is pretty unpredictable. In most places. There's, of course, great places that have been targeted now with modern analytics, but just as a general principle, you're generating the electricity very close to where it's needed. And so those two advantages are huge. And I just didn't understand why people weren't trying to harness that.
Josh:
So how far down the road then did you decide beyond just this is interesting, and I'm having a fun time in this machine shop learning about this trade, to getting to the point where you decided “I'm gonna make a company”?
Ted Christopher:
When was that? Yeah, I think for a lot of people there, they either go into it with that mindset, or it kind of evolves organically. And I think for me, it was a little bit of a combination of the two, but definitely more of the latter rather than the former. It really was organic. I just wanted to make a good device - something that was new and different, and was specifically for rivers, because so many of these other designs are underwater windmills where they are taking wind designs and just putting them in water. There are some some big challenges to that. We always kind of focused on a purposeful design.
With regard to the company, it kind of grew out of that - it was really a process of developing and still is to this day - developing the technology along the way. It just made sense to start forming. We formed a company back in 2010 so we could file patents. It really was the next logical step. And I have to say as much fun as developing Volturnus and developing the actual device is, the company is is just as much fun because it's the process of meeting people and really developing not just your technology, but growing an entity as well. That obviously has its own challenges, but in a lot of ways it can be more rewarding because you're actually interacting with a lot more people and getting a lot more input.
Josh:
So tell me a little bit more about that: You started the company in 2010… I assume just you? Or did you have others that were interested in it? How has that changed over time? What is what's the difference between Verterra Energy in 2010 versus Verterra Energy today?
Volturnus
Ted Christopher:
There have been people and consultants that have come and gone throughout the process, which is, you know, really normal, and especially one that takes as long as really developing a startup from the ground up while you're also developing technology. What we've focused on now is putting together an advisory panel, just because it is a startup, and you're trying to save costs, you really don't need, you know, five people working full time. What you need is a little bit of advice here and a little bit of expertise there. So we really, really have pared down, and we've, you know, we've had some hits and misses, it's just part of the process of growing a company. But honestly, that's been probably the most fun part so far is, is just being able to have an idea and then have other people not only give input on it, but be willing to put a little bit of their energy and effort into to.
Josh:
So tell me about your advisory panel. Who's who, and what kind of people are on it today?
Ted Christopher:
It really has taken off over the past year - we did our kind of second generation prototype that we built in 2014, and learned an awful lot from that. We got into our second half of our seed round investment from our investor in early ‘15, and then fully optimized and tested the actual alternative prototype that everybody's looking at right now. Now we’re able to finally kind of lift the veil of secrecy, because we really haven't been able to show people we're doing and so it's just lately, I'd say, over the last year here now that we've really started to expand.
We've got people from Winrock International, which works with the USAID. We've got actual business development folks that have been general managers and presidents and project managers of civil engineering firms and other technology companies advising us now. We're getting into a lot more specific areas. We also have the former deputy director of strategic programs at the DOE, Sarah Jane Lynch, who's been helping us out in advising for the past year and a half now. So it's a process, you know, we have all these amazingly experienced people that we were not working with seven years ago. It's slowly building your credibility, it's talking and going out and presenting. It's just networking - you meet somebody, and they're kind of into what you're doing, and they say, “Oh, you know, I know, Jim over here, and he's, he's a real expert in this area, maybe you should talk to him.” Then, Jim introduces you to some folks too and it kind of keeps going like that. It's just it's a real simple process, but it's obviously one that is earned. People don't, willy nilly introduce you to other people, because they, you know, they want to look good, too.
Josh:
Yeah, certainly, that makes a lot of sense. Well, tell me about your design, because hydroelectric power is not a new concept, and when people think of hydroelectric power, they think of this really popular Francis-style turbine, right, you think of the Hoover Dam or something like that. These sort of large scale hydroelectric electric installations.
How does that compare to Volturnus? Is the technology the same? Or what are you doing differently?
Ted Christopher:
Yeah, it's, it's very different. It's a very different approach. There's a big distinction between hydro power, which everybody's familiar with, like the Hoover Dam, and devices that are deployed directly into streams and into oceans, where you aren't building anything. You aren't altering the natural environment. And there's a lot of different terms floating around out there with this but Verterra has really kind of keyed in on the on The term Natural Hydro Power, or NHP. As best as we can kind of qualify or quantify, it's devices that are:
• Deployed in in water depths less than three meters deep
• Don't require altering the environment anyway making diversionary channels that don't have inlets or runners and are just deployed directly into the stream
That’s how we're different than a lot of other devices. Because there are certainly competitors in the space, there are people trying to harness the power in these man made canals and rivers. How Verterra is different is that we're purpose designed. Really, our strength goes to that deployability because we've got a vertical axis, so the turbine spins up instead of spinning vertically, because of that the diameter of the turbine isn't necessarily limited by the depth of the water. That means we can go into a lot more places. Why is that important? Well, it's important because the vast majority of manmade canals both in the US, and especially in developing countries are way less than three meters deep. So if you have a, you know, for instance, a three meter diameter windmill, you need clearance below the blades and you need clearance above the blades, so you really don't fit in these man made canals, or at least most of them. That really limits your scalability, how you can actually expand out into the places you can go.
The other part that we've really focused on is ruggedness and reliability. You have to have a self clearing design, as there is just an unbelievable amount of debris in rivers and even manmade canals - you know, whole trees are falling into the river. So there's branches, there's logs, there's parts of fishing boats, there's, you know, frisbees, just garbage in the river. So if you've got anything, any place where there's a scissor action, or where something can kind of get clogged and jammed or caught up, it will. We really saw that with our test rig that we had when we were deploying and testing the four foot long Volturnus prototype because the frame that we use to test it at different depths was just a bar and that would almost immediately start snagging branches, leaves, grass, and just anything that had fallen in the river. So we really have proved out that self clearing and that resistance to any sort of clogging or jamming at the rampart - the base of the turbine sits in - is responsible for the vast majority of that. So Volturnus is deflecting debris initially, but then it also allows for that turbine itself clear over that ridge and over that shelf that that surrounds the perimeter of the turbine. Anything that does manage to fall into the turbine, like a branch, will generally get shoved off as it rotates around back through across that increasing radius.
A view of the unique rampart and vertical-axis design of Volturnus.
Josh:
It does make a lot of sense. It sounds like to you, the way you see this world is that being rugged, reliable self cleaning - it sounds like that stacks towards the top of the things that you needed to get right. If you were going to have something that differentiated itself.
Ted Christopher:
Yeah, that's exactly it. It's one thing to have very high efficiency and very good performance in a laboratory setting or in a controlled environment. We did all our testing out in real rivers, real manmade canals, and the experience that you get from that is that water is pretty chaotic - you don't get very even flows, and you do get debris. So it was just a good way for us to really understand and know that because just visually, when you're looking at a lot of these other designs, they're highly susceptible to clogging and jamming, and there's been quite a bit of work done to try and avoid that. So people are building screens and deflection parts to put in front of these things, and even then it's still just a huge problem.
Josh:
So then how does efficiency compare? Because you've got you have a unique approach to you know, this kind of self clearing design - you focused on making it rugged, the actual operation of the unit sounds like it's, you know, significantly different than a lot of other types. How does that affect efficiency? Are you in the same game? How does that play out?
Ted Christopher:
Yeah, there are a lot of claims with regard to efficiency out there when you go on different websites. There's something called the Betz Limit, which is the theoretical maximum energy that can be extracted from kind of a cross sectional area of a river. Volturnus is above 30% in some conditions - significantly above 30% efficiency. So other devices, they have similar efficiency, but they don't have the low profile so they can't deploy in the same areas we can, and even if they could, they really would have trouble operating reliably because of how susceptible they are to clogging and jamming. So the real name of the game has been the deployability and the ruggedness and the reliability.
Josh:
So then quantify for me in you know, layman's terms, if you place of alternatives in a river, down the road, what does that power? What can a group of people get out of one or two or three of these in, you know, the little culvert or river around their village or whatever it might be in their city?
Ted Christopher:
Yep, we're deploying in VPODS. So there's five individual Volturnuses, and they're all tied into one onshore system, so all of your electronics are onshore. So that that system, those five Volturnuses will be between 25 and 50 kilowatt nameplate capacity. So it depends obviously, on the site conditions and the velocity. But just to put that in context, that's about 25 to 40, average US households where the power and this whole system, keep in mind, this whole system is under four feet tall. So we can go in so many places and make a big difference. That really goes to another really big thing that we focused on; which is the scale up, or the commercialization, which comes from the number of devices, not the size of the individual device. So many other competitors are trying to make these large, you know, 25 to 50 kilowatt individual units, and that's huge! That'll be like a four or five meter diameter underwater windmill to get that power. Obviously, as you know, it's not going to fit in most rivers and manmade canals. So it's really solving that fundamental problem of, “Well, how do we get power?” Think of it more like a solar panel, we'vee developed a really good solar cell called Volturnus, and we deploy them in arrays. An individual solar cell isn't all that powerful. But when you start putting them together and linking them and arraying them together along the rivers, you can start generating some real power.
Josh:
Interesting. So tell me a little bit about the the low hanging fruit for volturno. What where do you see the most practical applications for this? I know you've said, man made canals, smaller rivers, where do those exist? Where are you going to go first?
Ted Christopher:
Well, there's there are thousands and thousands of miles in places like India, China, Southeast Asia, South America, that have above 1.5 meter per second velocity - and our operating range is in that 1.5 to 3 meter per second flow rates. And even with 15% site viability, I mean, there's thousands and thousands of places where we can install these VPODS. Specifically, it's deployed to displace things like diesel generators. At $4 per gallon, a 10 kilowatt diesel generator burns through about $30,000 a year. But we all know, it's a lot more than $4 a gallon when you factor in shipping and logistics and other other fees. So that's really where we can go have a big impact right away as in a lot of these Caribbean islands and coastal areas. Then obviously places where there's a lot of irrigation, where there's a lot of farmers, where we already have these manmade canals in place and Volturnus has kind of a rectangular profile head on. It just fits perfectly in these canals. That's really our first market - it's places that currently are relying on diesel generators, or that have some renewable already that have some solar, some wind, but then they've also got to have a lot of battery backup, because obviously, the you know, the wind doesn't always blow on the sun doesn't always shine. So we can come in and provide a real cost savings and in a real benefit to those customers. That's the lowest hanging fruit initially, places that already have a little bit of development that have some grid or that have some facilities or buildings that we can literally just deploy the VPODS and plug right in.
Josh:
Got it. Tell me a little bit about production. How is it that you produce Volturnus? And then also tell me a about the materials you're looking at and some of the long term materials testing that you've been doing?
Ted Christopher:
Well, I'd be happy to tell you about that, Josh.
Josh:
**Laughing** All right!
Ted Christopher:
We got on a cheesy infomercial there for a second.
So for production, this is where the scaling thing is really important. With regard to a commercial product and commercial viability, you have to have mass production ability, you have to be able to Henry Ford it you know, you've got to have an assembly line. It can't be large devices that need a lot of manual labor and a lot of parts and a lot of time to put together. Each Volturnus is below four feet tall. Think of it like a small fishing boat. It's about 20 feet long, about 10 feet wide and less than four feet tall, and the material specifically will be a composite.
We actually did quite a bit of testing with regard to durability, and quite accidentally, when we were testing the 2014 prototype. That prototype was built out of a core mat composite material, which they use a lot in small airplane wings, so it's really lightweight, it's just super tough. This isn't kind of a random material or anything like that. It's very, very tough stuff. So tough, in fact, that once, the second generation prototype got wedged underneath our pontoon platform during testing and survived. We were in shallow enough water that the pontoon was essentially karate chopping the prototype. Keep in mind that this was eight months of my life building this thing. So everybody's just freaking out, we're trying to scramble, trying to pull it out. It’s on a six foot long anchor off a 20 foot boat, so it's not easy to get out. We eventually get it out - and keep in mind, we’ve got test equipment inside that we're leasing - and it's just very, very expensive test equipment. I'm thinking this is the worst ever, and all that we discovered after we pulled out is that we chipped the paint. There's quite a bit of material out there that you can make essentially like a jello mold, where you are just laying up this material inside and then baking it. It's incredibly strong and incredibly lightweight. So we'll probably utilize something along those lines along a core mat composite line for the commercial production.
The rest of the parts, though, are really off the shelf. That's the beauty of alternatives is we don't have to reinvent the wheel again. We're just going to be pulling parts from an existing generator manufacturer. We're really focused on system integration now, really trying to find the best components and make the best system we can. Because, you know, the rest of it is just parts that are bolted together on site. So it's something that we can certainly ship, easily disassemble, and ship anywhere in the world. That's also a really important component being able to to scale up and grow the company.
Iteration over time has informed the design of Volturnus over the last decade.
Josh:
What's the projected lifespan? Like if I install one of these, how long is that going to last?
Ted Christopher":
The real driver of of wear is going to be the bearings. Because we're not spinning at a higher RPM, we're very fish friendly. In some of the videos the prototypes are spinning, you know, over 100 RPMs. But that's because as small as it at scale, it'll be between 30 and 60 RPMs. So the wear is going to be very minimal. I mean, we won't really know for sure until we get in and build this first commercial scale and let it run for six months. But just in terms of projections, it should last easily for 10 years plus.
Josh:
So tell me what is the total impact on the natural system? Because I think when I think of hydroelectric or or even you know what you are calling what was the acronym again? Natural… natural…
Ted Christopher:
NHP. Natural Hydro Power.
Josh:
Got it. What is the total impact on the environmental system? I know a lot of people think of landscapes, they think of erosion, they think of natural wildlife like fish, and you know, migration patterns, nesting, all that kind of thing. Tell me about that.
Ted Christopher:
The very first step that I made after coming back from San Diego was to call an official at the Minnesota DNR, and we've been working with them ever since - so that's 2009 to 2016 now. As far as impact goes, and this is their assessment, not mine, it really is going to be like an underwater boulder. Fish by and large will avoid it and they may actually kind of, it's almost like a mini artificial reef, because it'll be off the bottom a little bit. And so fish will be able to kind of hang out underneath and behind it where the water velocity is slower. So we do have to be careful how we array them though. If we space it too closely, you can start getting into fish migration patterns there. So there are important considerations, but by and large, we’ve been told that it's environmentally sound. You know, the last thing you want to do as a renewable energy company is you know, take emissions out of the air, but then kill all the fish anyway. It kind of defeats a lot of the points there. You know, you had some positives and then now you get dead fish down the river. So it has really been something that we focused on throughout the entire process and really engaged with the DNR on every step of the way. We want to make sure that we’re thinking about the right things and designing things the right way to be as minimally invasive as possible.
It's also completely submerged - not a sight - so you don't have anything sticking out of the water. Everything's underwater. So visually, which is important if you're an outdoors type, or you do any camping, you go into nature to be in a nature not to see electronic devices or to see technology. The one little caveat there is that it definitely does something to the surface of the water. So you're going to know that there's a VPOD. There's basically kind of a… it looks like gravity malfunctioned a little bit. So there's kind of a… there's big humps in the water, or mini waterfalls, which are called a free surface collapse, that go down into the turbine component. But yeah, otherwise, unless you get pretty close, you probably won't see them.
Josh:
So then how does how does this stack - up all these things? It sounds like you've considered environmental impact, you've considered sustainability and long term life, strong material, and self cleaning components. How does your installation stack up in cost to other renewable options? There's this common knowledge that the sun doesn't shine every day and the wind doesn't blow every day. But how do those systems compare and cost to install and maintain over the lifespan? What is the comparable cost?
Ted Christopher:
It's fairly close. Again, this is something we'll know in more detail as we get into this commercial scale. But I would just reference that it costs half a million to a million dollars per mile to run transmission line in remote areas, so you're really competing against a lot of those cases. You're competing against the alternative. What we've tried to do in our development is make sure that we can do a float and forget deployment so that we can literally drag these in. There will be a pilot, or there'll be some sort of anchor that Volturnus tethers to. You'll have to have a diver in some cases, and you'll have to have the the power line running up on the shore. Those are costs for sure, but compared to your alternatives, compared to what you'd have to do in terms of running those transmission lines for miles and miles, it's very minimal. It really is focusing on that cost per kilowatt, that nameplate capacity, and making sure that we're competitive without any subsidies, so that you're going into places that are are paying over 25 cents a kilowatt hour, and you can hopefully cut their bills in half. I mean, I think that's a really good goal.
Josh:
So then, what's the downside? I mean, I hear less cost, easier to install, and easier to maintain. Is there a technology you're still waiting on that could make Volturnus even better? What's the impracticality? What do you get hung up on?
Ted Christopher:
The impracticality has always been clogging and jamming. That's been what has plagued run of the river devices. I think we've addressed the problem the best, and obviously I'm not not impartial on that. But that has been the big hurdle. It's challenging to operate underwater. It's actually harder to make something stay submerged in shallow water than in deep water, because you don't have any pressure, and the deeper you get, the pressure is what kind of seals and holds everything together. If there's a fundamental engineering challenge, it's going to be that, but we've we've got some ideas to mitigate some of those issues. Being able to operate in very shallow water is is challenging for those reasons, but you’d think it'd be easier, right? Because you're not deep, you don't have to deploy way down, you don't have to get a device way down. Instead, it can be more challenging because of the lack of pressure. All of your connections, all of your seals have to be that much better and stand on their own and not rely on the external water pressure, so that that can be challenging. Often, you see a lot of devices that just have a have a rotor or a blade in the water, and then they have their generator even above water. But that just presents all sorts of clogging and jamming and debris buildup, concerns to say nothing of the visual impact of having devices just hanging out in the middle of the river there. That's just not very aesthetically pleasing.
Josh:
Yeah, that makes sense. So then, you've got you have a prototype, this is prototype number three, you said right? What does the runway look like from here? What are your major milestones? Where do you hope to be in a year and when when do you, you know, launch for the first time?
Ted Christopher:
Once we’ve built the first Volturnus that you can install and measure then there's a pretty clear runway. I mean, we've been really fortunate in we've had so many project developers from around the world reaching out to say, “When can we get one of these?” So we're very fortunate in that respect. As far as our timeline goes, we're currently raising our Series A funding, which is kind of your first big, multi million dollar money raise. That's going to allow us to hire a lot of the folks that we've been either working with kind of on the side or that are on our advisory panel. The focus there is to completely fabricate and design this commercial scale Volturnus at a three meter diameter scale, and then be able to go test and deploy that. So we hope within about a year that we're able to do that, because you really want to do some some initial tests on this commercial scale, and you want to let it run for a while just to see what you don't know, or what you haven't anticipated… what you haven't thought of.
From there, hopefully within two or three years, we're doing the initial pilot projects with these interested parties and these interested places. Then, what you do with those is you set up this initial thing - which hopefully there's some subsidization of, or maybe Verterra has to shoulder some of the burden there - but you're able to go in and deploy a VPOD and let everybody check it out. Then, you have the hopes of getting a longer term contract, say, you know, letting a VPOD run for six months. If we're performing well and if we're proving to be reliable at supplying electricity an dependably, then we'll come back and start installing, you know, five VPODs per, per month for the next three years. So that's that's kind of the the step by step of what we're looking at going forward.
Josh:
The proof is in the pudding. Right? So a good runway… seeking Series A funding. Five years from now where do you hope to be with Verterra energy?
Ted Christopher:
Well, the potential is pretty big for even just run of the river, and especially along the coasts, along the tidal flows, there's 1,420 terawatt hours of untapped potential according to the Department of Energy, just in the US - 38% of which, by the way, is up in Alaska. So hopefully, we're able to start chipping away at that by having a small device that's able to be deployed in arrays. You know, if we can get anywhere near that, that's a third of our energy needs for this country. So I think in terms of long term goals, five years now, you know, we'd really like to be making a significant difference in terms of just the carbon footprint of human beings. I think that's an achievable goal.
Josh:
What's really exciting, I really appreciate you taking some time to share your story with us today. We will of course be watching you very closely. But I do want to thank you very earnestly for your time, and hopefully, we'll hear from you again in about a year or so when we can learn more.
Ted Christopher:
Yeah, well, Thanks, Josh. It's been fun.
Josh:
Thanks, Ted.
Read more about Verterra Energy here: https://www.verterraenergy.com/
