Tyrol-based REPS has plugged its first “road power plant” into the Port of Hamburg. The next test is whether the economics survive contact with anywhere else.
Tyrol-based REPS has raised $23.6m to scale a technology with an unusually literal premise: install a slab into a road, let trucks drive over it, harvest the energy they would otherwise waste 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 Road Energy Production System to ports, logistics hubs, and cities. It declined to name the lead investor.
The pitch sits inside a category called energy harvesting, which has spent two decades being interesting in theory and disappointing in practice. The converters were inefficient and the lifespans were short, so the economics never worked.
Huber says 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 figure is the company’s own, and there is no independent benchmark yet.
The credibility, for now, comes from one site. Since November 2025, a 12-metre REPS unit has been operating at Hamburger Container Service in the Port of Hamburg, at a stretch of road where empty-container trucks brake to enter the depot.
REPS says more than 115,000 trucks have crossed it since installation, generating over 6,700 kWh of electricity. Those numbers come from the company, not a third-party meter.
“The installation at our facility demonstrates the potential of REPS: where vehicles have to brake anyway, clean energy is recovered and can be used directly where we need it,” said Justin Karnbach, chief executive of HCS, in a statement. “Without any interference with traffic and without additional space.”
That last clause is the commercial argument in one sentence. Solar needs land. Wind needs wind. A road already exists, the traffic already moves, and the deceleration energy is otherwise lost to brake pads.
Where the volume is predictable and concentrated, the case is, on paper, persuasive. REPS says it is now in talks with more than 90 port operators across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and North America.
The longer-range claims demand more caution. REPS estimates that a full rollout of about 230 units across the Port of Hamburg’s public roads could generate roughly 10 GWh a year, enough to power about 2,800 households, with payback inside four years.
At city scale, it pitches 64,000 units in a place the size of Dubai covering 10.8 per cent of total electricity consumption.
The company also cites a global theoretical ceiling of 5 per cent of world electricity demand from road traffic alone. These are modelled figures, not measured ones, and they assume installations land in exactly the kind of brake-heavy, high-mass corridors where the physics is most flattering.
Austria’s state secretary for energy, Elisabeth Zehetner, framed the round as a test of whether the country can keep deeptech work onshore.
“A road becomes a power plant, and existing infrastructure becomes a building block for a sustainable future,” she said, calling REPS an example of what Austrian startups can do when scaling capital is available.
The subtext is familiar across European capitals watching their best climate-hardware companies get pulled toward US and Asian buyers the moment growth-stage cheques are needed.
REPS currently employs twelve people and expects to reach fifty by the end of the year. Huber has said roads are only the first application, and that the underlying converter could eventually be deployed anywhere large masses move repeatedly over the same points.
For now, the proof point is a single slab of asphalt near a container depot in Hamburg, and a spreadsheet projecting what happens if the slab works everywhere else.
