Founded on a Walk Along a PEI River

Before Aslan Renewables was a company, it was a question that kept returning on long walks in Prince Edward Island.

During the pandemic, Andrew Murray began spending time outdoors with his father, walking through different parts of the Island and noticing something most people would pass without a second look: abandoned water mills, old dam sites, forgotten infrastructure that sat quietly amidst nature. On one trail, a dormant dam caught his attention. The water was still flowing, and the concrete still stood. His father told him that it once powered a local mill but had been since forgotten.

Andrew wondered: If this one was here, how many others were there?

There were 170 more across PEI alone. As Andrew dug into public records, satellite data, and watershed maps, the picture became clear and surprising: tens of thousands of small dams and water-control structures sitting idle across the country. Many had powered communities for generations as water mills, textile mills, grist mills, and timber operations. Some were converted into small hydro stations after the Second World War and then shut down in the 1960s as centralized grids took over. Others were unused entirely, but maintained over the decades through taxpayer money.

The infrastructure remained. And so did local memory. Families still knew the sites. Farmers still lived beside them. Watershed groups still cared for the rivers around them.

Andrew did not come to this moment through a conventional career in the energy industry. His background was in neuroscience and then tech entrepreneurship: he built and scaled software companies. He spent his life noticing patterns, observing overlooked systems that could work differently at scale.

He spent three years building his first working hydropower system, the way he’d built software: lean, iterative, and close to the ground. Instead of hiring senior engineers, he partnered with maritime universities, getting students involved in modeling and testing. More importantly, the early years were spent listening. Aslan worked alongside the Mi’kmaq Confederacy and Abegweit First Nations, watershed organizations, fisheries partners, local farmers, and private landowners to understand the history of these waterways and the communities around them. Those conversations came before engineering, before permits, before any turbine went into the water. In many cases, they uncovered sites that weren’t in any database — old mill locations that only local families remembered.

The technology that emerged was deliberately small. The turbines were roughly the size of a beer keg. A full system fits in the back of a car and could be installed in a few days. The units were designed to be fish-safe, require no major civil works, and be removed as easily as they go in.

This is the thesis at the centre of Aslan: the future of hydro is not megaprojects. It is modular, distributed, and rooted in what already exists. Canada doesn’t need to build new dams. It needs to see the ones it already has differently.

What started on a single trail in PEI now reaches across provinces and beyond Canada’s borders to communities in Japan and Indonesia, where small-scale hydro is one of the few viable paths to reliable, clean power. Aslan was incorporated in 2021, but the company is building toward something that outlasts any single milestone: a multi-generational energy business, grounded in stewardship, built to last as long as the dams themselves.

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