Founder · CEO · InPipe Energy
Gregg Semler
There is electricity hiding in the pipe under your street. He built a company to let it out — clean, predictable, and running while you sleep.
// The man who listens to plumbing
There is electricity hiding in the pipe under your street. He built a company to let it out — clean, predictable, and running while you sleep.
Water never takes a day off. It does not wait for the sun to rise or the wind to pick up. It just moves — through millions of miles of pressurized pipe, under pressure that utilities have spent a century burning off with valves. Gregg Semler looked at that wasted pressure and saw a power plant nobody had built yet.
Today he is the founder and CEO of InPipe Energy, a Portland, Oregon company whose flagship system, the HydroXS, drops into existing water pipelines and harvests the kinetic energy of the flow. The output is electricity at roughly four to five cents per kilowatt-hour, generated around the clock, with no dam, no reservoir, and no weather forecast attached.
His pitch is deliberately awkward for a clean-energy crowd in love with panels: "Why are we covering the planet with solar panels and batteries, when pipelines exist that can produce energy on a much more predictable, consistent, reliable baseload basis?" It is the kind of question that makes a room go quiet, then start doing math.
The math is the seductive part. Solar stops at dusk. Wind keeps its own schedule. A water main does neither. The flow is metered, scheduled, and relentless, which is exactly the quality a grid operator craves and almost never gets from renewables. Semler's whole thesis is that the most valuable thing about in-pipe hydro is not that it is green, but that it is boring. Boring is bankable.
What he is selling, then, is less a gadget than a reframe. Water utilities have always treated their own pipelines as a cost center: pumps to run, pressure to manage, leaks to chase. Semler asks them to see the same infrastructure as a generating asset that happens to already be in the ground, already permitted, already moving. No new right-of-way. No environmental review for a reservoir that does not exist. Just a turbine where a pressure-reducing valve used to waste the push.
I'm driven to make a difference in the world.— Gregg Semler
Producing and moving clean water takes an enormous amount of carbon-based energy. Semler likes to point out that the water sector contributes about as much carbon to the atmosphere as the aviation industry. His fix does not add anything to the pipe. It collects what the pipe was throwing away. The idea arrived the way good ideas usually do, sideways: six or seven years before he started telling it as a founding story, he was simply turning over the thought that it takes a mountain of fossil energy to deliver clean water, and wondering whether that same water could quietly hand some of the energy back.
Water utilities deliberately reduce pipeline pressure at thousands of points. That energy is normally destroyed by a valve.
A patented, modular, turnkey turbine system installs into the existing pipe in under three weeks. No reservoir, no new dam.
The flow spins the turbine and produces clean baseload electricity day and night, offsetting fossil power and adding resilience.
There is a tidy irony at the center of all this. The water sector is one of the largest and least-discussed energy consumers on the planet. Treating water, pressurizing it, and pushing it uphill to a city takes staggering amounts of electricity, much of it still drawn from coal and natural gas. Semler frames it bluntly: the industry that delivers our cleanest necessity is, by his accounting, contributing roughly as much carbon as commercial aviation. His machine asks that industry to start paying itself back, kilowatt by kilowatt, from the very flow it has already paid to create.
That is also why the HydroXS is built to be unglamorous to adopt. It is patented and modular, designed to be configured to a range of pipe sizes and dropped in as a turnkey unit rather than a custom engineering project. The promise of installation in under three weeks is not a marketing flourish so much as the entire business model: a utility cannot take its water offline for a season, so the technology that wins is the technology that interrupts the least. Combine that with federal incentives that can reimburse up to half a project's cost and paybacks that compress to two or three years, and the conversation shifts from "is this clever?" to "why don't we have one already?"
Before pipes, there were fuel cells. Long before InPipe, Semler was trying to make exotic clean technology behave like a product you could actually buy. The pattern repeats: find a technology everyone agrees is promising and nobody has shipped, then ship it.
He has been doing this since 2000, which means he has watched cleantech go in and out of fashion several times and kept building through every dip. The fuel-cell years taught him the hard discipline of commercialization: a working demo is not a working business, and a technology that has "been around for a long time" can still be one nobody has ever truly seen work. The investing years at Pivotal taught him the other half of the puzzle, what makes a sustainable company fundable rather than merely admirable. By the time he reached water pipelines, he had stood on both sides of the table, as the operator raising the money and the investor deciding whether to write the check.
Lucid Energy was the rehearsal. There, after being recruited to run the company, he commercialized in-pipe turbine technology and put it to work in high-profile installations in Oregon and Riverside, California, proving that water mains could host generation in the real world and not just a slide deck. InPipe is the encore, built around a system designed from the start to be cheaper, faster, and easier to deploy than anything that came before it.
President and CEO of PolyFuel. His team ran the first commercial demonstration of a fuel cell powering a consumer device — a Nokia phone. The company later went public.
President and CEO of ClearEdge Power, another bet on fuel-cell technology reaching the market.
Managing Director at Pivotal Investments, a venture firm backing early-stage companies in the sustainable economy. He learned to see cleantech from the investor's side of the table.
Founder, President and CEO of Lucid Energy, commercializing in-pipe turbine technology with marquee projects in Oregon and Riverside, California.
Founds InPipe Energy to build a turnkey energy-recovery system for water pipeline networks — the idea he had been circling for years.
Closes a $6.5M Series A to scale the HydroXS platform.
A future where clean energy is as abundant as clean water.— The InPipe Energy mission, in Semler's words
For someone whose product is steel and water pressure, Semler talks more about people than parts. His operating philosophy is almost stubbornly social: "We're cooking this planet, so the only way we're going to solve climate change is if we collaborate." It is not a slogan he keeps at arm's length. He keeps standing relationships with board members, advisors, and industry contacts scattered across Australia, Jamaica, Thailand, and Brazil, treating a global address book as a working tool rather than a trophy shelf.
Ask him who he would most like to meet and the answer is revealing for what it is not. Not a head of state, not a fellow founder, not a billionaire who could write a term sheet. He picks Trevor Noah, because "he seems to know so much about the world, and I love to laugh." A man who has spent twenty-five years on the unglamorous frontier of energy commercialization, and the thing he reaches for is curiosity and a good laugh. It tracks with the work: the patience to keep going matters more than the swagger to start.
The throughline of his career is a single, repeated bet, made first on fuel cells and now on water: that the right technology, made boring and buyable, can quietly bend the carbon curve more than any moonshot ever announced from a stage. "I'm driven to make a difference in the world," he says, and the proof he offers is not a manifesto. It is a turbine, in a pipe, under a street, spinning right now while you read this.
Preparing to export InPipe's first HydroXS system internationally, with Thailand on the near horizon.
Inflation Reduction Act incentives can reimburse up to half a project's cost, cutting customer paybacks to two or three years.
Profiled by Authority Magazine on sustainability and climate justice; a frequent voice on water-as-energy at industry events.