Engineer licenses technology
By licensing his wind turbine technology to a company in Halifax, Glen Lux hopes to raise cash to prove the concept he has spent the best part of a decade developing.
“I tried to get funding on my own and it’s almost impossible,” Lux said. “I tried for four or five years and really didn’t have any success and I realized that I’m not a business person, per se. I’m an engineer. I like designing things, building things — that’s how I got interested in this in the first place.”
Lux, who grew up on a farm near Humboldt, spent years running an earthmoving company, devoting his spare time to improving existing products and inventing new ones. In the 1980s, while studying engineering at the University of Saskatchewan, he became enamoured with vertical-axis wind turbines.
The concept, which in practice looks like a giant inverted egg beater, was developed in the 1920s by a French aeronautical engineer. After dozens of experiments, Lux came up with a design that swapped multiple narrow blades for the original’s two wide ones and removed the turbine’s central column entirely.
Lux said his design is cheaper to build and maintain than traditional propeller-type turbines, making it a more economically viable alternative to conventional power sources. Studies have shown that his vertical turbine could produce power “almost indefinitely” using much lower wind speeds, he said.
“We expect it to be about half the cost of the existing turbines … It’s inherently less expensive to build.”
Last year, after failing “miserably” to fund the project’s development himself, Lux licensed his technology to Lux Wind Turbines Inc. The company’s president and CEO said that while the ultimate objective is to manufacture turbines in Nova Scotia, Lux Wind Turbines must first raise at least $500,000 and “ideally” $800,000 to prove the concept’s viability.
“That’ll pay for building the initial test machine,” said Terry Norman, who has been in the renewable power industry for about six years. “Glen’s built a number of prototypes, but we’d like to take (ours) to the Wind Energy Institute of Canada in North Cape, P.E.I., and get it fully tested and certified.”
Lux Wind Turbines is using a variety of strategies to raise money for the project, including an equity crowdfunding website called FrontFundr. While there are challenges, including securities regulations that limit investment in some provinces, Norman said he hopes to have the money in place within three months and the test turbine built a “few months” after that.
The benefits of vertical-axis turbines could be “dramatic,” Norman said, noting that the turbines’ low centre of gravity makes them ideal for use on offshore floating platforms. At the same time, Lux’s model could slash traditionally high capital costs — about $2 million per megawatt for turbines — by 40 or 50 per cent, he added.
“It’s always difficult when you’re breaking new ground and coming out with something that’s very different, (but) we’re just taking one step at a time.”