Looking back on the past year and forward to the next, our team has a lot to be thankful for, and a lot of work ahead. For Natel, 2021 was a year of validation — bracketed by certifying our Freedom Falls plant as a Low Impact Hydro Installation at the start of the year, and by a suite of successful through-turbine fish passage tests in collaboration with Kleinschmidt Associates and Pacific Northwest National Lab in Q4 2021. Partnerships like these underscore our commitment to prioritizing positive ecological outcomes alongside reliable, renewable energy production.
French renewable energy news site Révolution Énergétique celebrates Natel's FishSafe™ designs as a way to "[avoid] transforming fish into rillettes."
2025 was a year for scaling and we're entering 2026 with serious momentum: large-scale hydro design study, publication with PNNL, upcoming installations in the US and EU.
The RHT was a finalist this year at the MERLIN Innovation Awards, which recognize widely-applicable solutions for restoring the function or enabling the financial benefit of freshwater ecosystems.