Tyrol-based REPS has connected its first “road power station” to the port of Hamburg. The next test is whether the economy survives the interaction with anywhere else.
Tyrol’s REPS has raised $23.6m to test a technology with an unusually realistic idea: put a slab on the road, let trucks drive over it, and harvest energy that would otherwise be wasted in friction and heat.
The Austrian startup, founded in 2023 by Alfons Huber, said on Friday the equity round will fund the rollout of its patented system for Road Energy Production in ports, transport hubs and cities. It declined to name the lead investor.
The pitch is within a category called energy harvesting, which has spent two decades fascinating in theory and disappointing in practice. The converters were inefficient and the life span was short, so the economics didn’t work.
Huber says that REPS spent six years redesigning the mechanical converter itself, and that the result is 254 times more efficient than the next best system on the market. That number is the company’s own, and there is no independent benchmark yet.
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Loyalty, meanwhile, comes from one site. Since November 2025, a 12-meter REPS unit has been operating at Hamburger Container Service in the port of Hamburg, on the road where empty trucks break into the depot.
REPS says more than 115,000 trucks have driven it since it was installed, generating more than 6,700 kWh of electricity. Those numbers come from the company, not a third-party meter.
“The installation in our area shows the power of REPS: where cars have to brake, clean energy is available and can be used exactly where we need it,” s.aid Justin Karnbach, chief executive officer of HCS, in a statement. “Without traffic jams and without extra space.”
That last clause is a commercial argument in one sentence. The sun needs the earth. Spirit needs spirit. The road is already there, the traffic is already moving, and the power to slow down is lost in the brake pads.
Where the volume is predictable and focused, the case is, on paper, convincing. REPS says it is now in talks with operators at more than 90 ports across Europe, the Middle East, Asia and North America.
Long distance claims require more caution. REPS estimates that the total output of about 230 units on the Port of Hamburg’s public roads could generate about 10 GWh per year, enough to power about 2,800 homes, with a payment within four years.
On a city scale, it puts 64,000 units in an area the size of Dubai comprising 10.8 percent of total electricity consumption.
The company also cites a theoretical global ceiling of 5 percent of global electricity demand due to road vehicles alone. These are model numbers, not scaled, and assume the installation stays in the exact same category as heavy-braked, heavy-duty racers where the physics are more flattering.
Austria’s Energy Secretary, Elisabeth Zehetner, made the round a test of whether the country can keep deeptech work ashore.
“The road becomes a place to generate electricity, the existing infrastructure becomes a building for a sustainable future,” he said, calling REPS an example of what Austrian startups are doing when scaling capital is available.
The subtext is common to all European headlines watching their leading climate-hardware companies gravitate to US and Asian buyers during the testing phase of the necessary growth.
REPS currently employs twelve people and expects to reach fifty by the end of the year. Huber said the roads are only the first plan, and that the underground transformer could eventually be used anywhere large crowds travel repeatedly in the same places.
For now, the point of proof is a single slab of asphalt near a container depot in Hamburg, and a spreadsheet showing what happens when the slab works elsewhere.
