Growing up in Colombia, Moriel Arango spent nearly every weekend on his father’s sustainable farm, about an hour from their home in the city of Cali. There, in the rural, western region of the country, prolonged power outages were common and reliable electricity could be scarce. Once, a lightning strike blew out a transformer in the middle of the night. This shut off the power to an aerator that supplied oxygen to thousands of red tilapia and cachama he was raising in lakes on the property.

“In these rural areas, you lose power and it’s going to be 48 hours or more,” Arango says. “All his fish are going to die.”

So Arango’s father had to make the hour-long drive during the night to bring a can of diesel to start up the backup generator and get the aerator running again. It’s experiences like these that eventually led Arango to BladeRunner Energy, a renewable energy company based in Bend, Oregon.

“It’s always been a big motivator for me—” he says, “looking at renewable energy, and the idea of getting it into the hands of folks that need it.”

The current moment, for all its upheaval and uncertainty, presents a unique opportunity for making big, systemic change when it comes to energy. BladeRunner, along with InPipe Energy, another Oregon-based startup, think the time is ripe for investing in hyper-local hydropower. Both are VertueLab-supported companies. InPipe captures excess energy flowing through municipal drinking water pipes, while BladeRunner replaces the environmental risk of hydroelectric dams with small, tethered turbines to harvest the energy of flowing water.

These types of small-scale, dispersed energy sources could help put much-needed power into the hands of communities — literally and figuratively.

“Electric utilities are inundated with innovation. Water departments, not as much,” says Gregg Semler, InPipe’s president and CEO. He’s working to change that.

As a city’s water makes its downhill journey from a water tower to the tap, pressure within a pipeline often becomes too high. Pressure-reducing valves situated along the pipeline help maintain a critical balance: Extra force from over-pressurized water can cause costly leaks or major water main breaks.

Read the full article about hydro energy at Grist.