Janice Tran Found a Power Plant Hiding in Plain Sight

At an industrial site, waste heat rarely announces itself as an opportunity. It leaves through exhaust stacks and hot equipment, a shimmer above the machinery and a cost already absorbed. The plant carries on. The heat disappears. Janice Tran looks at the same scene and sees a small power station waiting for a contract.

That distinction matters. The equipment for converting heat into electricity has existed for decades. An organic Rankine cycle works on the old logic of a steam engine: capture heat, circulate a working fluid, turn a turbine, make power. The mechanical trick is respectable but familiar. The commercial trick is where Tran has spent her attention.

As CEO and co-founder of Kanin Energy, she leads a company that develops, finances, builds and operates waste-heat-to-power projects. Rather than selling an industrial operator another piece of equipment and wishing them luck, Kanin assembles the whole transaction. It finds the heat, chooses the technology, arranges patient capital, manages construction and sells the electricity. The host facility can avoid an upfront capital bill and earn value from something it previously sent into the air.

The spreadsheet before the turbine

Tran arrived at this model through finance. She is a Canadian Chartered Professional Accountant whose education forms an unusually useful braid: accounting and philosophy at the University of Calgary, a master’s in accounting at the University of Saskatchewan, then sustainability management at Columbia University. Her Columbia capstone studied how pension funds could build the capabilities to invest in a low-carbon economy. It is hard to imagine cleaner preparation for a career spent matching very large pools of money with very physical assets.

At NRG, she helped implement a renewable microgrids business line. Later, as an early employee and director at Generate Capital, she worked across deal execution, origination, market development and asset management. She also built a major North American portfolio of anaerobic-digestion investments. Those jobs gave her a close view of where climate projects go to live, and where they go to die.

The lesson was blunt. An industrial company may like lower emissions and cheaper energy, but its capital budget often wants a payback in roughly two years. Infrastructure thinks in longer sentences. A technically sound heat-recovery project could fail because the money assigned to buy it was impatient. Tran eventually decided to move to the other side of the table and create what she called the development company she had always wanted to fund.

The model changes the category in which the project competes. Waste-heat recovery stops looking like an optional efficiency purchase and starts looking like clean-energy infrastructure. That invites a different kind of capital, a longer timetable and a developer willing to carry the risks between an interesting site and an operating asset. The machinery does useful work. So does the paperwork.

A leap of faith, twice

Tran had practiced institution-building long before Kanin. In 2008, while an accounting student in Calgary, she helped organize an international summit so students could take part in energy debates usually reserved for officials and executives. The response exceeded the organizers’ expectations. That gathering became Student Energy, co-founded by Tran, Kali Taylor and Sean Collins.

The organization grew into a global network engaging young people in more than 120 countries. Looking back at its origin, Tran described it as “just a leap of faith.” The phrase is revealing because it does not erase the work that followed. A leap creates a beginning. Budgets, governance, partnerships and repetition turn it into an institution.

Kanin began with a second leap. Dan Fipke, a university friend Tran had known for years, pitched the idea and drew her back from Silicon Valley to Calgary. Fipke understood electricity and environmental markets. Co-founder Jake Bainbridge brought engineering and project-execution experience. Tran brought capital and numbers. The three skills fit together with almost suspicious neatness.

They founded the company in 2020, just as the pandemic emptied offices. For the first 18 months, the whole team did not work together in Kanin’s Calgary space. Industrial projects were already slow courtships, often requiring two years of conversations and diligence. Now the new company had to earn trust at a distance. Tran later noted that returning to shared office time brought stronger relationships, cross-team learning and the kind of accidental creativity that video calls ration poorly.

The first electron

The clearest answer to any infrastructure pitch is operating machinery. In May 2026, Kanin’s Washington Court House Power Project in Ohio reached that point. Developed with Tallgrass Energy, the system captures heat from a compressor station on the Rockies Express pipeline and feeds it through an organic Rankine cycle turbine. The generator adds no fuel combustion. It simply makes use of heat produced by the station’s existing operation.

The electricity travels through the Ohio grid to the University of Dayton. Kanin says the annual output matches 100 percent of the university’s electricity use and can cut its total carbon emissions by about 70 percent. The plant is expected to avoid 55,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. More important for Tran’s wider argument, it supplies power around the clock.

Solar and wind have transformed power markets, but their output follows weather and daylight. Industrial waste heat often follows a facility’s operating schedule, which can mean steady production. Tran calls that reliability the next frontier: affordable, 24/7 carbon-free electricity hiding alongside equipment that is already running.

Kanin is also developing a seven-megawatt project at a Phillips 66 natural-gas processing facility in Colorado. There, the power is intended for use on site, displacing electricity otherwise generated by burning additional gas. The two projects show the flexibility of the same idea. Electricity can travel to a buyer elsewhere, or it can serve the industrial host behind the meter.

Deployment is a personality

Tran’s public argument has remained consistent across student organizing, investing and company building: invention alone does not deliver an energy transition. Technology matters, but so do policy, capital markets, public support and people trained to put equipment to work. She has warned against treating technology as a silver bullet when proven tools already sit idle for want of deployment.

That view makes her an interesting kind of climate founder. The company is technology-agnostic. Its identity does not rest on a secret material or a miraculous machine. It rests on the ability to evaluate a site, select proven equipment, understand carbon and power markets, finance a long-lived asset, negotiate with large organizations and keep everyone attached to the same schedule.

There is also an old Alberta practicality in the choice of customer. Tran grew up in Calgary, in an economy shaped by oil, gas and heavy industry. Kanin opened a Houston office in 2022 because, as she put it, it was important to be where the industrial emissions were. The company does not ask whether a cement kiln, refinery, steel mill or compressor station makes an elegant backdrop. It asks whether the heat is steady, valuable and recoverable.

In 2023, Hart Energy included Tran in its Oil and Gas Investor Forty Under 40, a recognition that captures the productive tension in her work. She is using infrastructure attached to the fossil-fuel economy to produce electricity without extra combustion. It is incremental change with measurable output, built inside systems too large to replace by Tuesday.

A better support system

Tran once observed that good ideas and talent exist everywhere; what differs is the support system that lets them grow. Kanin is, in its own way, a support system for stranded ideas. A heat stream, a turbine vendor, an industrial host, a university buyer and an infrastructure lender may each be willing. None automatically becomes a power plant. The developer is the connective tissue.

That tissue requires money at the least glamorous moment. In August 2025, Kanin secured a committed credit facility from PaceZero Capital Partners to advance projects across North America. Tran emphasized that development capital is often the hardest to access, even though it moves projects from concept toward reality. The financing did not arrive with a ribbon-cutting photograph. It made future ribbon cuttings more likely.

The Ohio project now offers a neat physical metaphor for Tran’s career. Energy was present but dispersed. Value appeared only after someone designed the route, assembled the parts and stayed through commissioning. The same is true of people, capital and institutions. Potential is abundant. Coordination is scarce.

Tran’s wager is that heavy industry can become a power source without pretending it will become light, simple or fashionable. The pipes remain. The compressors keep running. Somewhere above them, however, less useful heat is vanishing into the sky. The accountant in the hard hat has begun to close the books on it.