From Lab to Startup, a New Kind of Power is Emerging at Tennessee Tech’s Shipley Farm

By Charlie Reed

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.