The Halifax Startup Putting Wind Power In Your Pocket
HALIFAX — New technology from a Halifax startup will soon put renewable energy in the pockets of adventurers, outdoor enthusiasts, and anyone else who wants to harness the power of the wind.
Aurea Technologies is moving renewable energy technology forward with its Shine Turbine: a small-scale, portable wind turbine capable of charging personal devices.
Shine operates on the same principle as the large wind turbines you see dotting rural landscapes, just scaled down for personal use.
As Aurea’s Rachel Carr explains, Shine is small enough to stow in a camper, car trunk, or even to carry with you on a hike.
The turbine folds up to about the size of a 1,000 ml water bottle and weighs about as much as a small toaster. Set it in the wind and it charges an internal battery that can then be used to charge phones, tablets, or electric stoves.
“Wind is the second-largest producer of clean energy in the world, yet most people don’t have direct access to it. As a team of outdoor enthusiasts with backgrounds in science and engineering, we set out to create a wind power product that gives users the freedom to produce their own clean energy day or night, rain, cloud, or shine,” Carr says.
Aurea’s founder and CEO, Cat Adalay, says the product is the result of years of work, and also of her and her team’s passion for clean energy.
When Adalay was in high school, her class watched Al Gore’s climate documentary An Inconvenient Truth. She says the movie opened her eyes “to the biggest problem that we’re going to encounter in our lifetime.”
She wasn’t particularly interested in engineering but she eventually found herself entering the field so she could help fight climate change.
“[When I was younger] I thought, oh well, scientists and engineers are smart people, they’re going to figure this out. But years later they still hadn’t figured it out. So I decided that’s what I wanted to look at doing myself,” she says.
Fast forward to 2017 and Adalay began work on what she thought would be a residential wind energy technology.
Carr joined the team a short time later and they quickly realized there was a missing piece to the renewable energy puzzle: the smaller-scale, portable market.
So they switched their focus and began developing Shine. Adalay built a rough proof-of-concept with 3D-printed parts and the company later partnered with NSCC, which helped finish the technical development while Adalay and Carr “did the startup thing.”
Shine is small and lightweight, but it’s more complex than many people realize. So Adalay says nailing down the design wasn’t easy.
“This is a highly engineered turbine; people don’t quite understand just how much thought and design went into this,” she says. “When you’re making something that’s viable in terms of producing usable power, still durable enough to use as an outdoor product, and then also being lightweight and compact, there are so many variables that are contradicting with each other and so there’s a lot of different considerations and revisions and alterations that had to be done,” she says.
Designing a turbine blade that’s efficient enough to generate lots of power but also folds down into the turbine’s body, for example, was a real challenge.
Adalay still recalls the day she finally realized Aurea had created a decent, working product. They were up against a tight deadline to film a marketing video and all they had was a minimum viable product they weren’t even sure would spin.
“It was actually our first time testing it and we thought, what the hay let’s give it a go,” Carr recalls.
Not only did it work, but it also worked better than they expected.
“Rachel and I were jumping up and down with happiness and everyone else there didn’t quite understand what was happening,” Adalay says.
“They’re all thinking this should be spinning. Why are you surprised?” Carr explains with a laugh.
“When you put that much effort into something and having it overcome some technical obstacle and work is just like, oh my goodness,” Adalay says.
Today, they’ve refined Shine even further and the product is essentially ready to hit the market. On June 8, Aurea will launch a Kickstarter campaign where customers can place an early order ($240US for early birds).
Vanessa Ferguson, Aurea’s head of business development, says it’s incredibly exciting knowing something the team worked so hard on will soon be widely available.
“It’s super exciting to just be like that much closer to like putting wind power in people’s hands,” she says. “We often see large-scale wind turbines but day-to-day, so many people are used to solar but not many are as accustomed to wind power. So it’s really cool being able to do that.”
Adalay says she’s also excited about Shine, but that the portable turbine is only the beginning for Aurea. The company plans to use the Kickstarter campaign to grow to 18 team members by the end of the year.
“Our Kickstarter backers are going to be supporting us to be able to continue this good work and develop more products and services that enable their energy independence from the electrical grid,” she says. “People should expect to see more from us.”