From lab to startup, a new kind of power is emerging at Tennessee Tech’s Shipley Farm
Forget copper wire. At Tennessee Tech University’s Shipley Farm, electricity runs straight through the dirt beneath your feet.
The breakthrough belongs to Terra Watts, a startup demonstrating that soil can carry an electrical current. By reducing dependence on copper wiring, the technology could reshape how energy moves in places where traditional infrastructure falls short.
Electrical engineering professor Charles Van Neste had chased the idea through experiments at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Alberta. But it was at Tech where “years of blood, sweat, and tears finally came to fruition,” he said.
“Nikola Tesla actually talked about sending power through the earth,” said Van Neste, whose Advanced Energy Transmission and Harvesting Lab is known as AETHR in a nod to the famed inventor.
Like Van Neste, Terra Watts co-founder Kaitlyn Suarez felt a pull toward the same visionary concepts. While completing her Ph.D. in geology at UMass Amherst, she studied critical minerals like copper, essential to renewable energy wiring. When the pandemic stalled her work in 2020, she turned to Tesla’s writings, which led her to Van Neste’s work on underground power. One shot-in-the-dark email led to two years of virtual collaboration before they ever met in person.
The principle is radical in its simplicity: place a transmitter underground, flip the switch, and create a field where receivers can draw power. At Shipley Farm, part of the University’s agricultural research facility with partial support from the Center for Energy Systems Research, Van Neste and Suarez have expanded the range from just a few feet to more than 200 meters—enough to run sensors and irrigation pumps with nothing but soil in between.
But invention alone doesn’t build a company. For Van Neste, stepping into the entrepreneurial world has revealed how easily academic research can stall at “cool tech” unless it solves real problems. “That was eye-opening for me,” he said.
Suarez reached the same conclusion through NSF’s I-Corps program at UMass during her early collaboration with Van Neste. It pushed her to move beyond the lab and ask who would actually use the technology. “You have to be almost like a detective, listening for pain points,” a skill now as critical as the science itself, she said.
The immediate challenge is scale, proving the system across broader ranges and soil types, and demonstrating its commercial viability in industrial agriculture, mining, and off-grid energy systems. And those are only the first footholds for Terra Watts, which has the potential to redefine how power is delivered.
Both founders see commercialization as the next frontier. “As the tech improves and we push boundaries, it allows us to enter different markets,” said Van Neste, noting how quickly the technology has advanced since its early trials.
Even as the science develops, Suarez said, demand has to be built alongside it. “People
don’t automatically think of wireless power through soil, so you have to connect it
to what they actually need,” she said.
Programs like AgLaunch will help Terra Watts test applications in farming, while state and federal grants are giving room to explore other verticals. Together, that detective work and technical progress are guiding the company toward its first commercial pilots.
The academics’ leap into entrepreneurship has been fueled by both the University and Tennessee’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Tech’s Office of Research & Economic Development and Office of Sponsored Programs filed the first patent in 2021 to protect the novel process of sending non-linear electrical waves through the ground.
The Tennessee Technology Advancement Consortium then helped move the patent forward, supporting efforts to license the technology to Terra Watts.
Through Launch Tennessee’s statewide network, the consortium helped bridge the academic and entrepreneurial worlds—linking Terra Watts to mentors, funding channels, and commercialization expertise. That structure is part of what makes TTAC’s innovation model unique: it keeps research like AETHR’s rooted on campus even as it grows into startups like Terra Watts.
Today, the system is powering equipment straight from the soil, and costs just pennies per day to operate.
“I still get excited when I see the lights flicker on in the field,” said Van Neste.
TTAC and Launch Tennessee continue to position the startup for growth with hands-on guidance, from pitch decks and grant writing to customer discovery. Along the way, Suarez built on that experience through New York’s Activate fellowship (2023–25). Now based in Tennessee, she calls the state’s startup ecosystem “the best in the country.”
While Suarez leads Terra Watts’ development as a company, Van Neste continues his research and teaching. The two work in tandem, keeping the venture closely tied to the University’s labs and test fields as they push the system forward.
What Terra Watts and Tennessee Tech are growing hints at a future where energy flows through the ground itself, realizing Tesla’s century-old vision in ways he never could.