The Startup That Turns Factory Exhaust Into a Power Plant - and Bills Nobody For It

Every heavy industrial plant on Earth runs a quiet, expensive habit: it takes in enormous amounts of energy, uses part of it, and pours the rest into the sky as heat. Cement kilns do it. Steel furnaces do it. So do the compressors that push natural gas across a continent. By Kanin Energy's reckoning, up to 58% of the energy that enters an industrial process leaves it again as waste heat - a power plant's worth of usable energy, evaporating over the fence line, every hour of every day.

Kanin Energy is a clean-energy developer built around a single, almost stubborn observation: that heat is worth money. The Calgary-founded company captures the warmth streaming off industrial equipment and converts it into carbon-free baseload electricity. The technology to do this has existed for roughly a century - it is, as CEO Janice Tran likes to put it, "a very similar concept to a steam engine." What Kanin actually reinvented was not the turbine. It was the checkbook.

01The heat everyone agreed to ignore

The physics is not controversial. Feed coal, gas or electricity into a furnace and a large share of it never becomes product - it becomes hot exhaust, hot flue gas, hot metal, hot air. For decades, engineers knew that heat could in principle be recaptured and run through a turbine to make electricity. The trouble was never the machine. It was that industrial companies are in the business of making cement, or steel, or moving gas - not building and financing power plants on the side.

So the heat kept escaping, and everyone agreed to ignore it. Kanin's insight was to treat that exhaust the way an oil company treats an untapped field: as a resource sitting in plain sight, waiting for someone willing to do the unglamorous work of developing it.

02What Kanin actually does

Kanin is a technology-agnostic developer, which is a precise way of saying it does not sell you a box. It shows up at an industrial site, studies the heat profile, and picks the right conversion system for the job - an Organic Rankine Cycle unit for lower-grade heat, a Steam Rankine Cycle or a supercritical CO2 system where the temperatures run higher. Then it designs, finances, builds, operates and maintains the whole project. The host facility keeps making cement.

The core product is called Waste Heat to Power. Around it, Kanin has added Combined Heat & Power - on-site cogeneration that produces firm power and process heat at once - and, more recently, on-site power solutions aimed squarely at the data center building boom, where demand for reliable baseload electricity has outrun the grid's ability to supply it.

The waste-heat-to-power loop, simplified. No new fuel is burned - the electricity comes entirely from heat the facility was already releasing.

03The trick is the money, not the machine

Here is the part worth stealing. Kanin's model is energy-as-a-service. It raises third-party capital, owns the asset, and carries the development and construction risk itself. The factory pays nothing upfront. Kanin then pays the facility for the waste heat it supplies - turning a byproduct into a revenue line - and sells the resulting electricity, either back to the plant or into the grid, sharing that revenue with the host.

Read that again from the plant manager's chair: a stranger offers to install equipment for free, pay you for something you were throwing away, cut your emissions, and hand you a slice of the power revenue. That reframing - decarbonization as a check rather than a capital expense - is why projects that stalled for decades on spreadsheets suddenly move.

04A pipeline, a university, and 71%

The clearest picture of the model in the wild sits in Fayette County, Ohio. There, a natural gas compressor station on the Rockies Express Pipeline throws off heat as it does its work. Kanin's system harvests it to produce 9.2 megawatts of electricity. Tallgrass Energy builds, owns and operates the facility; the utility AES Ohio buys the power; and it flows, on paper, to the University of Dayton, whose campus carbon footprint is expected to fall by 71%.

No new fuel is burned to make that power. It is, functionally, a mid-sized clean power plant conjured out of heat that was already leaving the pipeline. Kanin estimates its deployment with Tallgrass offsets roughly 250,000 short tons of CO2-equivalent a year - comparable to decarbonizing the electricity for about 38,000 U.S. households - and that a typical project cuts a host facility's emissions by an annual average of around 35,000 metric tonnes.

05Who it's for, and who it's not

Kanin's addressable market is, bluntly, the dirtiest and hottest parts of the economy: natural gas, cement, iron and steel, refineries, chemicals, biomass, glass, pulp and paper, and the fast-growing data center sector. These are the processes that leak the most heat, which makes them the best candidates - the worse the thermal habit, the better the resource.

It is worth being honest about the limits. Waste-heat-to-power needs a large, steady, high-grade heat stream to justify the capital; a small or intermittent source will not pencil out. The economics also lean on being able to sell the power at a decent price and on stable long-term offtake - which is exactly why Kanin's structure, with utilities and institutions as buyers, matters as much as the hardware.

06How it's different from the equipment crowd

Plenty of firms will sell an industrial site a turbine - Ormat, Turboden, Climeon and others make fine machines. The difference is where the risk lives. Those are, largely, hardware transactions: the plant buys the box and takes on the financing, permitting, construction and operating headaches. Kanin swallows all of that. It is not competing to sell a better turbine; it is competing to be the party willing to own the entire, messy, capital-heavy project so the customer never has to think about it.

That developer-first posture is a direct inheritance from Tran's own resume. Before Kanin, she was an early employee at Generate Capital, where she built North America's largest portfolio of anaerobic digestion assets, and earlier worked on NRG Energy's microgrids team. She had also co-founded the nonprofit Student Energy. She did not come out of a lab with a gadget; she came out of project finance, having learned that in energy, the scarcest resource is usually the money that gets a project off the page.

07A lotus, and a credit facility

Kanin was founded in May 2020 in Calgary, mid-pandemic, by Tran, Dan Fipke and Jake Bainbridge - roughly the worst imaginable moment to start a capital-intensive energy company. Tran's framing is characteristically unsentimental: "We started like a lotus. A lotus grows in mud - you start in the worst conditions and everything is better." In 2022 the company opened an office at the Greentown Labs incubator in Houston, following its customers into the heart of the North American energy business. Today it runs a team of roughly 23 people across the two cities.

The most telling recent milestone is not a gadget but a balance-sheet one. In August 2025, Kanin secured a committed credit facility from PaceZero Capital Partners, a Toronto sustainability-focused private debt firm, to fund project development across North America. Development capital - the early, risky money that moves a project from concept to shovel - is notoriously the hardest to raise. "Development capital is traditionally the hardest to access," Tran noted, "yet it is absolutely critical in moving projects from concept to reality." For a company whose entire thesis is that the financing is the innovation, locking up that layer of capital is the whole game.

The company has drawn attention from Forbes and Harvard Business Review, and Tran was nominated for the 2023 Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award and has spoken at CERAWeek. But the more durable achievement may be quieter: it has made a century-old idea finally pencil out, one heat stream at a time.

In an energy transition dominated by talk of solar arrays and hydrogen and nuclear, Kanin is a reminder that some of the cheapest clean power isn't waiting to be invented. It's already rising off a smokestack, and mostly nobody was bothering to sell it.