fresh funding
Kanin Energy raises up to $100M for waste-heat-to-power projects
Kanin Energy, a member of the Greentown Labs climatech and energy incubator in Houston, recently raised as much as $100 million in capital to grow its energy-as-a-service platform.
S2G Investments led a round of up to $50 million, and the Canada Growth Fund chipped in an additional $50 million. The money will primarily support Kanin’s development and operation of waste-heat-to-power projects.
Kanin—founded in 2020 in Calgary, Alberta, Canada—builds and runs onsite power assets for large-scale energy users. The startup says its energy-as-a-service offering lowers power costs, boosts power reliability and decreases emissions.
The company operates a waste-heat-to-power project at Ohio’s University of Dayton. The project supplies zero-emission electricity.
Kanin has a pipeline of projects totaling about 50 megawatts of capacity. This includes a waste-heat-to-power plant at the Phillips 66 Mewbourn gas-processing plant near Greeley, Colorado.
“Kanin was built on the belief that industrial facilities already hold the solution to their own energy challenges, they just need the right partner to execute,” Janice Tran, CEO of Kanin, who is based in Houston, said in a release. “At a time when power costs continue to rise, [our] solutions are an important tool for our industrial customers to manage their costs, operations, and emissions.”
Marisa Sweeney, principal at S2G, says waste heat is a largely underused resource for lowering power costs, alleviating grid congestion and improving power reliability.
The waste-heat-to-power process captures thermal energy from industrial activities and converts it to electricity. This happens without using extra fuel or generating more emissions.
Kanin says up to 58 percent of energy consumed by industrial processes is lost as waste heat. This heat winds up in the atmosphere at thousands of facilities in North America, including oil-and-gas operations, cement plants, and steel mills, the startup says.
Kanin was founded in 2020 in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. It opened offices at Greentown Labs Houston in July 2022.