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Powering a Sustainable Future With Hardware
When the lights go out, you scramble for a flashlight—and are met with a dead battery. When smoke billows on the horizon, you crave data to know if your home is safe—not waiting days for a satellite update. When fields lie fallow under a herbicidal drift, you dream of a safer, less-toxic solution.
These aren’t hypothetical scenarios—they’re everyday crises that need solving. Increasingly, the answers are coming not only from software, but novel hardware technologies—and this is the reason MistyWest launched the HardTech Awards in 2022.
In part one of our multi-part series, we’re sharing five winners of the 2025 HardTech Awards—innovators who are building not just devices, but planetary resilience as they tackle climate challenges headâon.
We’re not talking about flashy tech, but tangible tools that are helping advance the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals—because software alone won’t solve climate change.
The portable wind turbine from Aurea Technologies. Source: Instagram
Cat Adalayâs ShineâŻTurbine: Wind in Your Backpack
Backcountry camping is booming across Canada, with over 5.5 million Canadians heading outdoors in 2022 alone. With record demand for provincial and national parks, there’s nothing more Canadian than this scenario: you’re on a remote backcountry trip, food supplies are looking good, but your phone is dead.
That exact situation helped spark the creation of the Shine Turbine. While co-founder Rachel Carr, an adventurer with a passion for backcountry expeditions, searched for a lightweight solution to keep her devices charged off-grid, CEO and founder Cat Adalay, an avid sailor and innovator, envisioned how wind, not sun, had untapped potential to become a powerful portable renewable energy source of the future.
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The autonomous, zero-emission, high-altitude Swift imaging platform. Source: Near Space Labs
RemaâŻMatevosyanâs Stratospheric Scouts: RealâTime Disaster Eyes
Imagine firefighters hurrying into raging wildfiresâbut with pixelated satellite maps that are two days old. Rema Matevosyan says, âThatâs not fast enough.â
As CEO of NearâŻSpaceâŻLabs, she sends stratospheric Swift robotic balloons to 20âŻkm above Earth, capturing 7cm resolution imagery in hours, not days. Insurers use those crisp images to settle claims quickly, and cities track wildfire perimeters in near realâtime. Each Swift flight covers up to 1,000âŻkmÂČ, with frequent revisits to hotspots.
Remaâs vision? A global web of stratospheric scouts that keep the planetâs pulse at your fingertips. Considering the escalating frequency and intensity of global wildfiresâââ2023 marking one of the most destructive years on recordâfleets of high-flying Swifts might not just be plausible. They might be inevitable.
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The autonomous Aigen Element rover eliminates herbicide-resistant weeds. Source: Aigen
Richard Wurdenâs Solar Weeders: Farming Without the Chemical Hangover
Every spring, farmers brace for the chemical fog of herbicidesâa long-standing ritual in industrial agriculture that sees millions of acres sprayed with glyphosate and other weed-killers. Once considered a necessary evil, the toll on soil health and the long-term risks to farmers and nearby communities have turned this practice into a symbol of agricultureâs need for transformation.
Enter Richard Wurden, his solar-powered Aigen Element rovers have rolled onto the scene to help solve this problem. Drawing on a decade of EV engineering experienceâincluding time at TeslaâWurden co-founded Aigen to offer a cleaner, smarter alternative. The rovers tackle weeds plant by plant, using AI-powered precision to hoe instead of spray, while logging valuable crop data along the way.
“Herbicides like Roundup have been over used for years, and weeds are becoming immune to the chemicals,” says Wurden. “We’re working on a solution that keeps herbicides out of our food and reduces the need for tilling soil.”
By combining AI with nothing but solar energy, Aigen is cultivating not just cleaner crops, but a more regenerative food system.
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Flash Forest’s technology is a scalable solution for tackling reforestation. Source: Flash Forest
Quinn Daigleâs Drone Forests: Seeding Millions from the Sky
With the aforementioned wildfires increasing in severity each year, and tree planters getting harder to source, supply cannot keep up with demand when it comes to reforestation.
But dronesâequipped not with missiles, but seed podsâare now flying over scorched landscapes to automate reforestation at scale. Thatâs the daily reality at FlashâŻForest, where senior engineer Quinn Daigle designed the payload system and pod-assembly line behind the drones replanting vast areas of land.
As part of Canadaâs 2 Billion Trees program, Flash Forestâs output has soared from 3,000 to 2 million seed pods per day. Each pod is designed to biodegrade naturally, delivering nutrients to the soil as seedlings take root and begin to regenerate the landscape.
Their custom heavy-lift drones have a payload of 70kg, and are able to fire seed pods at a rate of 30+ pods per second. One of the most important aspects of their drone technologies is that they can actually embed pods in the soil, rather than just dropping them from the sky, which has reliably shown a near doubling in establishment rates.
For Quinn, itâs simple: merge robotics and ecology to heal forests faster than they burn. By planting at five times the speed and a third of the cost of manual crews, Flash Forest is bringing new life to our land at a rapid-fire pace. The next-generation tech is helping governments, forestry operators, and carbon developers across North America get to the root of large-scale ecosystem restoration.
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Pila Energy is empowering its customers with energy independence. Source: Pila Energy
Cole Ashmanâs Pila: Saving Food with Smart Fridges
After the devastation of Hurricane Katrina on his hometown of New Orleans in 2005, Cole Ashman saw rows of thousands of fridges dumped on curbs, with vital food and medicine left to spoil. That visceral image jumpstarted his obsession to build a more resilient energy system that provides independence to everyone.
As founder of PilaâŻEnergy, Cole created a plugâandâplay battery module that turns any fridge into a smart, IoTâmonitored lifesaver. Clip on a Pila unit, and you get 1.6âŻkWh of backup, live temperature alerts, and mesh networking across multiple appliances.Â
âWeâre at a tipping point that demands better solutions,â Cole says. Built by exâTesla Powerwall and SPAN engineers, Pila doesnât just store energy, it plugs into virtual power plants, balancing grids while protecting homes.Â
There were over 27 U.S. billion-dollar weather and climate disaster events in the year 2024 alone. As Americaâs aging grid struggles to keep up, empowering individuals with a simple system for backup power should be considered essentialânot an extra.
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Real tech for a real planet
Saving the world takes more than just software. From backpack turbines to stratospheric sensors, solar rovers to restoring forests and decentralizing power in disaster-prone regions, these five individuals prove that commercialized hardware can bridge the gap between environmental harm and practical solutions.
The winners of the HardTech Awards are setting the standard in excellence for hardware development powering a sustainable futureâand this is only part one in our series! Stay tuned for more profiles and interviews with the new leaders in novel technologies.