How Fish Passage Innovation Can Power America’s AI Future
— Without Building a Single New Dam
“What if I told you there are hundreds of megawatts of clean energy locked behind fish ladders across America
— power that could be generated today, without building a single new dam,
without a single new environmental permit for generation, and without a single additional drop of water?”
That’s not a hypothetical. It’s math. After we built the product we built a calculator to prove it.
The Calculator: Making the Invisible Visible
Today, Whooshh Innovations is releasing an interactive Hidden Hydropower Value Calculator — a free, browser-based tool that allows any dam owner, utility, regulator, or investor to input their facility’s specifications and instantly see how much additional power generation and revenue they’re leaving on the table by running conventional fish ladders.
The tool is grounded in the independent economic analysis conducted by OVG Consulting in March 2018, which examined eight federally-owned hydropower dams on the Columbia and Snake Rivers. The core physics are straightforward: fish ladders divert enormous volumes of water away from power-generating turbines. The Whooshh Passage Portal™ is a nearly waterless fish passage system. Replace the ladder with a Whooshh system, and that water goes back through the turbines.
The calculator uses the standard hydropower equation — P = F × ρ × g × H × Ef — to compute the additional megawatts recovered, then multiplies by wholesale electricity prices (updated to 2025–2026 market data from EIA, BPA, and IEA) to estimate annual revenue. Users can toggle between CFS and cubic meters per second, select from three regional power market hubs (Mid-C, NP-15, SP-15), and print a PDF report for their specific dam.
The Numbers: What the OVG Study Found
The OVG study’s findings were striking. Across just eight dams on the Columbia and Snake Rivers, replacing fish ladders with Whooshh systems could unlock approximately 127.7 MW of additional generation capacity — ranging from 1.6% to 10.6% additional capacity per dam.
127.7 MW of additional clean energy from just eight existing dams — with zero new construction, zero additional water, and zero new environmental footprint.
In dollar terms, at 2016–2017 wholesale prices, this represented $12 million to $25 million in unrealized annual revenue across those eight dams alone, depending on which regional hub the electricity was sold into. Updated to 2026 estimated pricing — where California’s SP-15 hub now commands approximately $65/MWh, more than double the NP-15 price during the original study period — the revenue potential for the same eight dams now approaches $20 million to $34 million annually.
And remember: these are just eight dams. The United States has more than 2,500 hydropower dams, and hundreds of those have fish passage facilities that divert water from generation. The national implications are enormous.
More Power Without More Dams
America is facing an unprecedented electricity supply crisis. The U.S. Department of Energy projects that data center electricity demand alone will double or triple by 2028, consuming between 6.7% and 12% of all U.S. electricity. S&P Global forecasts data center grid-power demand rising 22% in 2025 to 61.8 GW and nearly tripling to 134.4 GW by 2030. The IEA reported that global data center electricity use surged 17% in 2025, with capital expenditure from the five largest tech companies exceeding $400 billion — set to increase a further 75% in 2026.
At the same time, building new generation capacity is agonizingly slow. Grid interconnection queues stretch five to ten years. Nuclear restarts cost billions and take years to permit. New dam construction is essentially a non-starter environmentally and politically.
What if we could unlock new clean energy from existing dams — today?
That’s exactly what Whooshh technology enables. By recovering the water currently stranded in fish ladders and returning it to generation turbines, we create new megawatts from existing infrastructure. No new dams. No new water. No new environmental footprint. In fact, the environmental outcome is better — fish passage through the Whooshh system has been demonstrated to be faster, less stressful, and more selective than conventional ladders, which are plagued by delay, predation, temperature stress, and fallback.
A Pragmatic Path Forward: Redundancy First, Then Transition
We understand that agencies, dam operators, and regulators have spent decades designing, building, maintaining, and improving fish ladders. We are not asking anyone to rip them out overnight. Our proposal is far more pragmatic — and far more likely to succeed.
Phase 1 — Redundancy and Off-Season Generation: Install Whooshh systems alongside existing fish ladders. During periods when ESA-listed species are not actively migrating, shut down the ladders and redirect that water to turbines. The Whooshh system provides backup fish passage capability during these windows, and the dam generates additional clean power. This approach requires no change to existing biological opinions and minimal regulatory friction. It simply adds a tool to the toolbox.
Phase 2 — Shared Operations During Migration: As agencies gain confidence in the Whooshh system’s biological performance — which is already supported by extensive peer-reviewed research and field data from deployments worldwide — begin operating both systems in parallel during active migration periods. Fish can be selectively routed through the Whooshh system while ladders handle overflow or serve as a backup. During this phase, some water savings are already realized, and dam operators begin to see revenue uplift.
Phase 3 — Primary Passage Transition: Over time, as the data accumulates and regulatory comfort grows, transition the Whooshh system to the primary passage method, with the existing fish ladder retained as a redundant backup — exactly the kind of belt-and-suspenders approach that agencies prefer. At this stage, full water recovery is achieved, and the dam operates at maximum generation potential during fish migration season — precisely when water is scarcest and electricity prices are highest.
This phased approach de-risks adoption for every stakeholder. Agencies maintain their compliance posture. Dam operators gain immediate revenue. Fish get better passage outcomes. And America gets more clean energy.
The ROI That Changes the Conversation
Let’s talk about return on investment. A Whooshh Passage Portal installation at a major dam typically costs a fraction of what a single fish ladder modification costs — and those modifications happen constantly, as the OVG study documented across all eight study dams.
Consider a dam like John Day on the Columbia River. The OVG study calculated 25.5 MW of recoverable generation. At 2026 SP-15 pricing ($65/MWh) and 4,000 peak operating hours, that’s over $6.6 million in additional annual revenue — from a single dam. A Whooshh system installation at that scale would pay for itself in a remarkably short period, potentially within one to three years depending on configuration.
$6.6 million in additional annual revenue from a single dam — with a potential payback period of less than two years.
Compare that to the tens of millions spent on fish ladder repairs, pump replacements, lamprey passage retrofits, sea lion exclusion devices, and water temperature mitigation systems — all documented in the OVG study — that generate zero additional revenue and often fail to meet biological objectives.
The math is not close. And it only gets more compelling as electricity prices rise.
A New Partnership Model: Data Centers Funding Fish Passage
Here is where the story gets truly exciting.
The technology industry is desperate for clean power. The five largest tech companies spent over $400 billion in capital expenditure in 2025 alone, with that figure set to increase 75% in 2026 according to the IEA. The pipeline of conditional power agreements between data center operators and small modular reactor (SMR) nuclear projects has grown from 25 GW at the end of 2024 to 45 GW today. Companies are signing multi-gigawatt deals for solar, wind, and nuclear — anything to feed the insatiable energy demands of artificial intelligence.
Yet power availability remains the single greatest constraint on data center growth. AEP Ohio has paused all new data center interconnections due to insufficient infrastructure. Communities from Oregon to Georgia are pushing back against facilities that strain local grids and raise utility bills for ratepayers.
Imagine a data center company funding fish passage upgrades in exchange for long-term access to the clean hydropower those upgrades unlock. Everyone wins: the dam, the fish, the grid, and the community.
Now imagine a different model: a data center company funds the installation of Whooshh fish passage systems at hydropower dams in exchange for a long-term power purchase agreement (PPA) for the additional electricity generated. The dam operator gets a free or subsidized fish passage upgrade. The data center gets new, clean, baseload hydropower — the most reliable form of renewable energy — without building anything new. The fish get better passage. The ratepayers see no cost increase. The regulators see improved ESA compliance.
This is not speculative. The structure mirrors exactly what Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are already doing with nuclear, solar, and wind — signing 15- to 20-year PPAs that provide revenue certainty to justify infrastructure investment. The difference is that fish passage-unlocked hydropower can come online faster, cheaper, and with far less regulatory complexity than a nuclear restart or a new solar farm with transmission interconnection.
At 127.7 MW from just eight Columbia and Snake River dams, the opportunity is significant. Scale that across the hundreds of hydropower facilities with fish passage requirements nationwide, and we’re talking about potentially hundreds of megawatts of new clean energy — enough to power multiple major data center campuses — unlocked by a technology that simultaneously improves outcomes for endangered species.
An Invitation
We built the Whooshh Hydropower Value Calculator because we believe transparency drives progress. We want every dam owner, every utility executive, every regulator, every tribal leader, and every technology company to see the numbers for themselves.
Download the calculator. Plug in your dam. See what’s possible.
Then let’s talk about how to make it happen.
The fish are waiting. The turbines are waiting. The grid is waiting. The only thing missing is your decision to act.
Click to “Change the Current”
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Vincent Bryan III
CEO & Founder
Whooshh Innovations Inc.
info@whooshh.com
www.whooshh.com
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