Imagine Energy Canada

Technology

One generation source. A full matrix built around it.

The IAC is the front end of something larger — the Imagine Power Matrix (IPM), a modular architecture that pairs generation with storage and intelligence on a shared DC bus.

Generation

Imagine Atmospheric Converter (IAC)
Building-integrated & pole-mounted

Solar

Storage

Batteries

Hydrogen & microturbine

Flow Battery

Thermal storage

Intelligence

XLII
Deterministic AI dispatch layer

Delivered as

Building & grid power

Neighbourhood micro-grid

IEC calls this a Dispersible Uninterruptible Power Supply, or DUPS — the inverse of a conventional UPS. Instead of one large backup source serving one load, many small distributed sources serve many distributed loads, so the loss of any single source degrades the system gracefully instead of catastrophically. XLII, IEC's dispatch layer, is deterministic by design: the same sensed inputs always produce the same dispatch decision, and it never changes its own behaviour without a human-reviewed, versioned update.

Not one blade — a wall of small modules

Each Cartridge is about the size of a suitcase — 12″ high, 24″ wide, 3–4' deep — sealed, with no exposed rotor. Roof-edge Frames mount four Cartridges across 8', angled over the parapet, about the same footprint as a row of solar panels. Pole-mounted installations stack roughly twenty of the same Cartridges in two counter-rotating columns. Same part, at every scale, from a single roof edge to a repowered wind farm.

Generators sized to the site, not a spec sheet

Because generation is split across many small Cartridges instead of one large rotor, each Cartridge's generator can be sized independently — for high peak output at higher wind speeds, for output across the much more common low wind speeds, or a hybrid of both. IEC's default leans toward the lower-wind-speed configuration: it costs less to build while capturing nearly the same annual energy as the higher-output alternative, because low-to-moderate wind is far more frequent at most sites than the rare high-wind events a peak-output design is built to chase.

TierMechanismIncrementCumulative

01Home Nano-Grid — IAC + solar + battery, per home~80%80.0%

02Neighbourhood Micro-Grid — pooled homes, shared storage~16%96.0%

03Demand-side control — load shedding & shifting~3.2%99.2%

04Peer micro-grid or utility grid backup~0.8%100.0%

IEC calls this the Imagine Pareto Energy Approach — each layer resolves roughly 80% of the outage risk left by the layer beneath it. Figures are pre-pilot design targets, not measured results, and vary with each site's collection area.

Residential

Individual homes with their own IAC, solar, and storage, pooled into a neighbourhood micro-grid.

Institutional & commercial

Schools, municipal buildings, and retail sites using building-edge and pole-mounted units along streets, parking lots, and walkways.

Utility-scale repowering

Pole-mounted IAC units replacing or augmenting existing wind and solar farms at or near end-of-life, on infrastructure and interconnection that's already in place.

Defense & emergency resilience

Peer-to-peer networks of dispersed, prioritized nodes for field hospitals, command posts, and communications infrastructure.

Intelligence

The third pillar isn’t hardware.

XLII is IEC’s dispatch layer — the same intelligence coordinating generation, storage, and demand as one system, deciding what runs, what waits, and what compensates, in real time.

Extremes are normal operation.

Too much wind, or too little. Extreme heat, or extreme cold. A spike in demand, or a sudden lull. Most systems are built for the calm day in between and treat everything else as an exception. This fleet is built for the whole range — the calm day and both ends of the extreme, handled the same way, every time.

Not the AI you’ve heard about.

It operates on its own within limits a person has already reviewed and approved — coordinating the fleet, shedding prioritized load, curtailing output when there’s nowhere for the power to go. What it won’t do is act outside that programming, or change its own rules, without flagging it to the person responsible first. Same inputs, same response, every time — deterministic by design, not by accident. Built to be audited, not just trusted.

One fleet, not one point of failure.

When one unit underperforms, the loss degrades the system gracefully rather than catastrophically — the rest of the fleet carries more of the load. That’s a coordination decision made across the whole array at once, not unit by unit.

Runs where the power does.

Dispatch decisions are made on-site, not in a data centre somewhere else. For a remote community, a forward operating location, or any site where connectivity can’t be guaranteed, that’s the difference between a control system that works and one that doesn’t — exactly when it’s needed most.

Manages what you use, not just what you make.

Coordinating generation and storage only covers half the system. XLII treats demand as the fourth lever — deciding what runs now and what can shift a few minutes later — because timing the load matters as much as producing or storing the power in the first place.

Same intelligence, any mix.

Generation, storage, distribution, and demand rarely split the same way twice, site to site or hour to hour. One coordinating layer runs across all four regardless of the mix — that’s what handles extreme swings on both the supply and demand side, not a fixed balance between them.

Radical Differences

Engineered to not need most of what a turbine needs.

Splitting generation across many small, sheltered Cartridges instead of one large exposed rotor removes entire categories of cost, failure, and community objection — not by tolerating them better, but by not having them in the first place.

No tower. No nacelle. No gearbox.

The components most responsible for a HAWT's cost and failure modes simply aren't in this architecture. Generation is direct-drive, mounted inside the rotor core itself — no gearbox, a HAWT's single largest failure point. The rotor and blades sit inside the module, sheltered from weather, UV, and debris, and the whole Cartridge and Frame assembly needs a fraction of the foundation mass a HAWT tower requires.

Never cuts out.

Every IAC configuration handles high wind by design, not by shutting down — staying productive and protected across the full range of conditions a site sees, including wind extremes that would force a HAWT to stop generating outright.

Built to be a good neighbour.

Enclosed blades largely eliminate bird and bat strike risk, remove blade throw as a failure mode, and produce no blade-driven shadow flicker or strobing — three things a HAWT can't offer a community living near it. The exterior skin can also be finished to match a building's or municipality's aesthetic requirements.

Ships and builds like commercial hardware.

Every Cartridge is identical — real potential for automotive-style, high-volume local production — and small enough that a single unit needs no oversized-haulage permit, no route modifications, and no escort vehicles. A HAWT blade needs police-escorted, road-closing transport just to arrive on site.

Sees wear before it becomes a failure.

Every Cartridge reports its own condition against its own baseline, so a unit drifting out of spec gets flagged and scheduled for a swap on our terms — not discovered the way a HAWT's single point of failure usually is, as an outage.

Serviced at eye level, not from a crane.

Each Cartridge is light enough for one person to carry. A local crew swaps it by hand and sends it to a depot for refurbishment — no specialized crew, no heavy-lift equipment, no tower to climb forty feet in the air to make a repair.

Markets

Same Cartridges, six very different jobs.

The IAC doesn't change shape from one site to the next — the same Cartridge, Frame, and XLII dispatch layer gets deployed differently depending on what the site actually needs.

Off-Grid & Remote Communities

Energy sovereignty

For a site beyond easy grid reach, the IAC pairs with storage and dispatch to form one local system — generation, storage, and control together — rather than a diesel generator or a transmission line that has to be built first. The fleet scales with the community instead of requiring one large plant sized in advance.

Arctic & Northern Operations

Extreme-climate engineering

Built for a single site's full range, from summer highs to deep winter cold: Cartridges that warm each other on start-up, active height adjustment ahead of a forecast storm, and a foundation that sits above the permafrost instead of fighting its seasonal heave.

Agriculture & Rural Operations

Farm-scale deployment

Pole-mounted Hex-Cell arrays sized to what a property actually uses, with interconnection costs spread across many units on one site rather than carried by a single connection — economics that make farms one of the IAC's strongest early fits.

Institutional & Commercial

Building-edge retrofit

Schools, municipal buildings, and retail sites capture the wind already moving across their own rooftops and parking lots. Roof-edge and pole-mounted Frames add to a site's existing footprint rather than requiring a new one.

Utility-Scale Repowering

End-of-life repowering

Wind and solar farms nearing end-of-life get replacement generation on interconnection and infrastructure that's already permitted and in place — the same Cartridge, at a scale of dozens to hundreds of units per site.

Data Centres & Variable Load

Load-following generation

AI training doesn't just grow how much power a data centre needs — it changes the shape of the load, with synchronized swings across thousands of GPUs happening faster than new grid capacity can be built. Paired with storage and XLII's dispatch layer, the IAC fleet buffers that volatility the same way it buffers wind's own natural variability. The site isn't locked into one fixed-size bet either — the same fleet can grow or shrink incrementally as load changes, grid-tied or fully off-grid.

Validation & Research

Independently tested, not just internally modelled.

Two things distinguish IEC's technology from most early-stage hardware: the core acceleration principle has a patent presently under review, and it has been independently built and tested by a university research team.

Peer-reviewed

Independent efficiency study, Toronto Metropolitan University

A TMU Civil Engineering research team built and CFD-tested an airfoil enclosure around a Savonius-type rotor — shielding the returning blade and accelerating incoming airflow, the same underlying principle behind IEC's patent application — and measured a substantial efficiency gain over an unshielded benchmark rotor.

2.3×Efficiency vs. benchmark

0.30Measured C_p

Gemayel, D., Verros, A., Abdelwahab, M., & Aboshosha, H. — "Enhancement of the Efficiency of Savonius Vertical Axis Wind Turbine with Airfoil Enclosure System." Department of Civil Engineering, Toronto Metropolitan University. Supported in part by IEC founder Brian Densham (via FM Engineering Inc.), alongside TMU's Faculty of Engineering and Architectural Science Dean's Research Fund, NSERC, Mitacs Accelerate, and OGS.

Under Review

Patent Application — Airfoil-Enclosure Acceleration

Filed December 28, 2020, and presently under review, the patent covers the airfoil-enclosure acceleration principle independently validated in the TMU study above.

IEC's own computational fluid dynamics work is developed in-house; an independent CFD validation of the IAC unit itself, run through TMU, is the planned next step in that program.

Imagine Energy Canada is affiliated with the Centre for Urban Energy's Clean Energy Zone at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Delivery Model

You don't buy a turbine. You buy the power.

IEC designs, deploys, and services every IAC installation itself, and sells the electricity it produces rather than the equipment — removing the customer's capital outlay and obsolescence risk entirely.

Manufacture

Identical Cartridges, built by IEC

Deploy

Installed on the customer's roof, poles, or site

Own & operate

IEC retains the asset and keeps it running

Delivered as

Power under a PPA / energy-as-a-service agreement

Because IEC owns and services the fleet rather than selling it, a site owner gets electricity without buying, financing, or maintaining hardware — and IEC keeps every Cartridge refurbished and running near peak effectiveness for the life of the agreement, rather than walking away after installation the way a conventional equipment sale would.

Team

Built by engineers who design for systems that aren't allowed to fail.

Brian Densham

Founder & Inventor

Industrial Engineering Technologist (Durham College, 1986), with 25 years in critical infrastructure — predominantly data centres — designing, equipping, and servicing the critical physical environment of a facility under his own Eight Disciplines© methodology, spanning architectural, mechanical, and electrical design through fire systems, physical security, environmental monitoring, and network infrastructure, for institutions across telecommunications, defense, healthcare, and financial services where downtime was never an option, followed by 10+ years in renewable energy across solar, energy storage, and microgrid design. Considers interoperability — understanding a complex, modular system down to how its components work together, and making that system run effectively and efficiently — one of his core strengths. Since 2006, has created, invented, or improved more than 36 products and processes across data centres and renewable energy, several taken through to commercialization. Invented PowerPod for Toronto Hydro and designed Alectra (formerly PowerStream)'s first demonstration microgrid. Sole inventor of the Imagine Atmospheric Converter and applicant on its patent, presently under review.

bdensham@imagineenergy.ca

Justin Rangasawmy

Partner & Business Development Lead

Industrial Engineer (BEng, Honours, Dean's Honour Roll, Toronto Metropolitan University) and Lean Six Sigma Green Belt. Leads IEC's business development, partner outreach, and go-to-market strategy, including its relationship with TMU and registration with the Centre for Urban Energy's Clean Energy Zone. Brings a process-improvement and data-analytics background — workflow automation, statistical analysis, and operations research — from prior roles in industry and from leading a 20-person student organization at TMU, applied here to operational planning and technology deployment strategy for the IAC.

jrangasawmy@imagineenergy.ca

The IAC

The IAC is a product of over 30 years of experience in energy and innovation. It is the result of watching and helping that industry to change and to improve. It is about meeting change, including our increasing awareness of the changes energy makes to our environment and to how we operate the grid. It is also about efficiency, of replacing the planned obsolescence of today's energy generation equipment with regenerative equipment — working with Nature, instead of trying to outsmart it. And it is about adaptability: building power that fits the site and the load in front of it, rather than asking the site to fit the equipment.

The IAC has a patent presently under review, is still in active development, and is the sole invention of Brian Densham. If any of this speaks to a problem you're working on, I'd like to hear from you — bdensham@imagineenergy.ca.

Students & VentureMatch

Real engineering problems, open to TMU students.

IEC is engaging TMU's VentureMatch program with real IAC and IPM engineering questions for students to take on as capstone and research projects — industry-grounded problems for students, additional research capacity for IEC.

11 Project proposals submitted to TMU VentureMatch, pending acceptance

Areas of active interest span aerodynamics and CFD, structural and materials engineering, power electronics, and embedded control systems for XLII, IEC's dispatch layer. Students interested in distributed energy engineering can reach IEC through TMU's VentureMatch program.

Urban wind never had the right machine.
We designed one that finally works.