Ayrton Energy: Breaking the Limits of Traditional Hydrogen Storage
We're pleased to introduce Ayrton Energy as a Fund II portfolio company. Meet Co-Founders Natasha Kostenuk and Brandy Kinkead, hear their founding story, and learn about their proprietary hydrogen storage technology.
Hydrogen's high energy density, lack of harmful emissions, versatility, and abundance makes it a promising energy source that could be key in transitioning to a more sustainable energy system. But despite the many benefits, the high cost of extracting, producing, and distributing hydrogen fuel, the need for careful handling and storage to ensure safety, and limited existing infrastructure make it challenging to use mainstream.
Inspired to overcome the barriers of using hydrogen as an energy carrier, Natasha Kostenuk and Brandy Kinkead created Ayrton Energy to provide affordable, off-grid energy security via clean, safe, and scalable storage technology.
“This vision was: let's use hydrogen for distributed energy. But the problem is, how do you get the hydrogen there?”
After hearing how someone couldn't charge their Tesla while simultaneously running their home air conditioner, Natasha looked into what they could be doing wrong. Instead, she uncovered the validity of the issue: there’s a distribution and transmission bottleneck when it comes to getting the amount and mixture of energy into your home or business.
Fast forward to a mutual connection introducing Natasha and Brandy, the pair started working to augment that need with the shared goal of using hydrogen to enable energy generation. With Natasha's professional engineering background and experience in the energy service industry combined with Brandy's academic background developing nanomaterials for hydrogen fuel cells, it was a seamless collaboration and partnership.
Exploring every available energy storage option, they quickly discovered there wasn't existing technology that could do what they wanted. Natasha and Brandy set out to make it themselves and founded Ayrton Energy to bring the value of hydrogen storage to the market and open up the hydrogen economy.
“What we've developed is a storage medium where we can store hydrogen and transport it no differently than gasoline or diesel, which is what's really crucial and what's really different.”
Canada and the US are among 120+ countries committed to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. In this plan, regulatory policies like zero-emission vehicles by 2035 and other actions have put further pressure on an electrical system already under severe strain.
Hydrogen powered off-grid energy generation can be used to alleviate the increased electricity demand and avoid the billions of dollars and decades required for infrastructure upgrades to the transmission and distribution systems. But to enable this, a solution is needed to safely and effectively store and transport hydrogen. Conventionally, hydrogen storage and delivery is through high pressure or liquefied cryogenic methods—both dangerous and requiring specialized equipment to handle.
Ayrton has created novel technology to take hydrogen gas and chemically bind it to a liquid organic hydrogen carrier (LOHC) fluid. Once hydrogen chemically bonds to that LOHC, it's comparable to gasoline or diesel at room temperature and pressure.
Dubbed by the team as a kind of “jerry can solution,” existing pipelines, infrastructure, tanks, trucks, and more can use it with no modifications. Once ready to use the hydrogen again, the process can be chemically reversed: the hydrogen is extracted from the carrier fluid, and then that fluid can be reused. The pulling of pure hydrogen is crucial since fuel cells need 99.99% hydrogen to run—coming full circle with Ayrton’s vision of distributed energy.
“Early in your career, people give you the advice that you can't have kids and go for it, and I just like to give an example of that—you can. You can be a kick-ass mom and a kick-ass businesswoman.”
With only 1 in 10 CleanTech founders being a woman, Natasha and Brandy are both proud to balance mom life, innovating in this space, and leading their team of seven—most of whom are engineers, which is still a heavily male-dominated field.
Already in the early stages, Ayrton has successfully proven their technology at the benchtop and is scaling up with pilot tests on the horizon. The team will be able to demonstrate it in a lab at the end of 2023 and expect to be field testing in early 2024. For their upcoming growth plans, Ayrton will be directing their achieved grants and funding on further developing their technology, which includes growing the team, acquiring materials, and more.
Natasha and Brandy are focused on building strong partnerships and relationships with others in the industry as they continue growing Ayrton. They have received in-kind support from chemical and utility companies and have engaged with several innovation ecosystems, including Alberta Innovates, NRC IRAP, MaRS Women in Cleantech, Foresight Cleantech Accelerator, The51, Movement51 Founder’s Lab, Invest Ottawa’s SheBoot program, CETAC-West, and SDTC.
Following the origin of their name, this women-led company is paving the way for innovation in STEM. For them, that’s breaking the limits of traditional hydrogen storage.
“Ayrton is named after Hertha Ayrton. She was a UK scientist in the early 1900s that studied electricity as a pioneer in the field.”
Learn more about Ayrton Energy at https://ayrtonenergy.com.