The Imagine Atmospheric Converter is a patent-pending, modular system that converts the airflow already moving across rooftops and poles into electricity — from city towers and suburban business parks to farms, solar fields, and remote Northern sites. It is engineered for a multi-decade service life through swappable, refurbishable Cartridges rather than replacement.
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.
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. Conclave, 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.
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.
The same Cartridge works in every setting. Only the Frame and how it is mounted change, so one product line, one parts supply, and one service model cover the whole map.
Roof-edge Frames sit over the parapet and capture the pressure that builds against a building's face before the roof edge, turning wind the building already blocks into power used right where it is made.
Low, wide buildings and open lots give long runs of roof edge and room for poles. Frames join end to end with no gaps, so a long warehouse edge becomes one continuous generating line.
Open land allows pole-mounted units to climb into stronger wind and windbreak walls to run along field edges. Hex-Cell clusters grow by adding poles to one connected structure, from a few units to a full wind farm.
Diesel-dependent communities, research stations, and defence sites need power shipped in once and kept running by the people on site. This is where the design has to work hardest.
Everywhere, the IAC is judged on lifetime energy rather than peak output: Cartridges are swapped and refurbished instead of the whole machine being replaced, so output stays near its best for decades.
Canada's remote and Arctic sites need power that is shipped in once, put up by hand, and kept running by the people who live and work there. The IAC was designed around those conditions: small, light Cartridges, no cranes, no tower climbing, and spares inexpensive enough to keep on the shelf.
The goal is not the highest output on a good day. It is dependable energy over decades, with upkeep that stays flat instead of falling off an end-of-life cliff, and less fuel that has to be hauled in to keep the lights on.
Frames, Skin, and most parts fold or stack flat for a standard 20-ft sea container, and assemble on site without special tools or heavy-lift equipment.
A Cartridge swap is unplug, unpin, remove; insert, pin, plug in. Most work is at eye level or from a ladder, the fabric Skin can be patched locally, and worn Cartridges go back to a depot for refurbishment.
Units already turning can drive a cold-soaked neighbour's generator as a motor — warming it, freeing stiff bearings, and shaking off ice — without separate heat-trace wiring. Generator heat in the hub sits right beside the blades.
Pole-mounted units lower themselves ahead of forecast high winds and ice, by gravity with a controlled brake. If power or control is lost, they lower to the ground on their own.
Pole and windbreak units stand on above-ground, reusable footings — concrete or stone-filled cages — avoiding frost-heave and thaw-settlement problems of buried foundations, and letting the whole installation be moved.
An optional hardened configuration encloses each generator in a grounded metal case and uses wired, not wireless, links — designed toward the MIL-STD-461G electromagnetic standard.
Each unit keeps running on its last validated settings if it loses contact with the wider fleet, and safety shutoffs are hard-wired and independent of any software layer.
Parts are designed to be 3D printed or cut from flat stock, so a community or base could make many of its own replacements rather than wait for the next delivery.
Where this stands: these are design features of a system at an early stage of development (TRL 2–3). Testing and field validation in Northern conditions are part of IEC's development plan, and ownership models are open to communities and defence partners holding title to their own installations.
Two things distinguish IEC's technology from most early-stage hardware: the core acceleration principle is patented, and it has been independently built and tested by a university research team.
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 — and measured a substantial efficiency gain over an unshielded benchmark rotor.
Filed December 28, 2020, and pending examination in Canada, 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. Independent wind-tunnel testing of a two-thirds-scale IAC model 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.
25 years in critical infrastructure — predominantly data centres — designing, equipping, and servicing power and uninterruptible-power systems for institutions across telecommunications, defence, healthcare, and financial services where downtime was never an option, followed by 10+ years in renewable energy across solar, storage, and microgrids. Invented PowerPod for Toronto Hydro and designed Alectra (formerly PowerStream)'s first demonstration microgrid. Sole inventor of the Imagine Atmospheric Converter and holder of its pending patent.
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.
IEC partners with TMU's VentureMatch program to place real IAC and IPM engineering questions with students as capstone and research projects — giving students industry-grounded problems, and giving IEC additional research capacity.
Areas of active interest span aerodynamics and CFD, structural and materials engineering, power electronics, and embedded control systems for Conclave, IEC's dispatch layer. Students interested in distributed energy engineering can reach IEC through TMU's VentureMatch program.
Research collaboration, utility partnership, Northern or defence deployment, or investment — reach out and we'll find the right conversation.