Turning Wasted Heat into Reliable Power with Kanin Energy CEO Janice Tran

Kanin Energy is tapping an often-overlooked energy resource: heat already being produced by industrial facilities. The company is using it to generate carbon-free electricity, lower energy costs and help meet growing power demand.

As the U.S. searches for ways to meet rapidly growing electricity demand, much of the attention is focused on building new generation.

Janice Tran sees another opportunity: capture some of the enormous amount of energy that’s already being produced and wasted.

Tran, co-founder and CEO of Kanin Energy, joined Path to Zero to discuss how the company is converting waste heat from industrial facilities into reliable electricity and why she believes industrial efficiency represents a significant, largely untapped energy resource.

“Over half of the energy that goes into an industrial process is usually wasted in the form of waste heat,” Tran said.

Rather than inventing a new generation technology, Kanin focuses on developing, financing and operating projects that put existing technologies to work at industrial sites. The goal is to remove the financial and operational barriers that have prevented more companies from capturing energy that would otherwise disappear into the atmosphere.

From a Natural Gas Compressor to a University Campus

One of Kanin’s newest projects provides a striking example of what’s possible.

Working with Tallgrass Energy, Kanin is capturing waste heat from a natural gas pipeline compressor station. Compressor stations help move natural gas through pipelines, producing heat in the process that would ordinarily be released into the atmosphere.

At the facility, a heat exchanger captures energy from the exhaust and uses it to drive an organic Rankine cycle system that generates electricity. That electricity is then delivered through the Ohio grid to the University of Dayton.

The result is enough electricity to power the university’s entire 11,000-student campus while reducing its emissions by about 71%, according to Tran. Unlike intermittent sources of generation, the project also provides baseload power.

For Tran, the project demonstrates that waste heat isn’t simply an efficiency measure. It can be a meaningful source of power.

“It’s a source of baseload clean power and quite affordable as well.”

How Can Natural Gas Produce Carbon-Free Electricity?

The description of the University of Dayton project as “carbon-free” raises an obvious question: How can electricity associated with natural gas infrastructure be carbon-free?

Tran explained that Kanin isn’t burning additional natural gas to generate electricity. The heat is already being produced as part of the facility’s normal operation and would otherwise be wasted.

“It’s carbon free in the sense that there’s no fuel combustion associated with it,” Tran explained.

In other words, adding the waste-heat generation system doesn’t increase the facility’s underlying fuel consumption or emissions. Instead, it captures energy that would otherwise escape and converts it into useful electricity.

Kanin’s focus, she said, is efficiency: “using what’s already wasted and doing something better with it.”

The Opportunity Goes Far Beyond Pipelines

Kanin is pursuing the same concept across a wide range of industries.

The company is developing a seven-megawatt project at a Phillips 66 natural gas processing facility in Colorado. Unlike the University of Dayton project, that electricity will be used at the industrial facility itself, displacing power Phillips 66 currently generates by combusting natural gas. Tran said the project is expected to reduce greenhouse gases and air pollutants while also delivering meaningful cost savings.

Potential applications extend to refineries, steel mills, cement plants and other facilities that use boilers, kilns and furnaces. Kanin estimates more than 10,000 U.S. industrial plants have waste heat that could potentially be converted to electricity.

The scale is significant.

Tran estimates waste heat represents approximately 15 gigawatts of potential electricity generation across North America.

And that power doesn’t require an additional fuel source. The “fuel” is energy that’s already being lost.

It’s Not Just About Carbon

While emissions reductions are an important part of Kanin’s pitch, Tran said the economics of energy have become an increasingly powerful driver.

Industrial facilities often operate on thin margins, making rapidly rising electricity prices a significant business concern.

“At the end of the day, right now, that’s really what matters,” Tran said, noting that some customers have seen power prices double or triple in recent years.

The University of Dayton project provided a recent example. During a summer heat wave in Ohio, Tran said the project helped shield the university from dramatically higher grid prices because its electricity costs weren’t exposed to the same fluctuations in fuel and wholesale power markets.

That combination of affordability, reliability and emissions reductions could make waste heat increasingly attractive as companies look for ways to control energy costs.

The Problem Isn’t Necessarily Technology

One of the more surprising aspects of Kanin’s business model is what the company doesn’t do.

It doesn’t depend on proprietary generation technology.

Tran said Kanin intentionally works with existing technologies because she doesn’t believe technology is the primary obstacle preventing industrial companies from pursuing these projects.

“We don’t think that the problem is technology in our field. We think the problem is actually implementation.”

Industrial companies are focused on producing steel, processing natural gas or manufacturing other products, not necessarily navigating power markets, tax credits, project financing and energy development.

Kanin essentially serves as the developer that brings those pieces together, providing financing, development and operations depending on what each customer needs.

It’s a model Tran knows well. Before co-founding Kanin, she worked at Generate Capital investing in sustainable infrastructure, including renewable natural gas and biogas projects. She saw firsthand how business-model and financing innovations could help an emerging energy sector move into the mainstream.

From Waste Heat to Data Center Power

Kanin is expanding beyond waste heat.

The company is developing combined heat and power projects and working with data center developers and energy buyers to identify industrial sites that could support new data center capacity.

That can include looking for underutilized industrial land, available grid connections and opportunities to pair new computing loads with onsite energy resources.

It’s another example of Kanin’s broader philosophy: instead of committing to one technology, identify the customer’s power problem and assemble the technologies and financing needed to solve it.