Sector: Technology
Principals: Dorn Beattie, Patrick Marshall
Year launched: 2023
Unique selling proposition: Clean energy that harnesses the power of tides and rivers.
Strategy: Delivering clean, safe and secure energy solutions for coastal economies at 30 per cent less than the levelized cost of other methods.
Website: swordfish-energy.ca
Oceans and rivers aren’t new sustainable energy sources. But in the rush to deliver clean energy, cheaply, there are new ways to harness a limitless supply of electricity.
The latest is Swordfish Energy’s underwater turbine — a technology known as a compeller that is neither propeller nor impeller. Simply, it produces electricity, is environmentally sound and is even kind to marine life.
Cofounder Patrick Marshall, the company’s CEO, refers to other underwater turbines as “sushi makers” because they kill anything that swims into them. Swordfish’s solution rolls with the flow of the water and fish move right through.
Swordfish launched in 2023 after cofounder Dorn Beattie came up with the idea of towing a spinning generator behind his boat to create energy that would bypass the vessel’s twin gas engines, theoretically saving 10 per cent of his fuel costs. He realized the commercial potential on the Isle of Mann, where garbage is burnt for energy. And anywhere else, of course, where energy is fossil fuels, like Haida Gwaii, where millions of litres of diesel get burned every year just to keep the lights on. And it’s with B.C.’s First Nations that Swordfish is partnering first.
Swordfish is scalable, decentralized, renewable blue energy from hydrokinetic power — clean, safe, secure and efficient — that can be built inexpensively on a 3D printer.
Marshall, a former economic developer who is stickhandling Swordfish through myriad regulatory jurisdictions, has been building the business case while Beattie, a former chart-topping musician and serial inventor, builds the technology.
“We’re not a conventional business,” says Marshall. “We’re interested in energy as a service… You can rent it, you can buy it, you can own it, we can run it for you, we can put a group together. We’re actually just a device provider.”
Swordfish is hoping to set up 65 transmission corporations that would be owned by First Nations who could then partner with local governments to provide services like sewage and water treatment.
“Getting the 300 or so coastal communities just here in B.C. off diesel would be a great honour for me,” adds Beattie.
