Aeromine’s Mark Swanson Wants to Make Wind Capture Viable for Real Estate

When it comes to capturing wind energy to power commercial real estate, proptech startup Aeromine Technologies maintains it’s not just blowing smoke in promoting its innovative tech.

Houston-based Aeromine has created a patented rooftop wind harvesting platform that harnesses wind power in smaller footprints for commercial buildings at what it describes as a competitive cost. The company was founded in 2020 based on research conducted with Texas Tech University’s Office of Research Commercialization and Sandia National Laboratories. In 2022, Time magazine recognized its core technology as particularly inventive. 

Aeromine CEO Mark Swanson is setting the company’s sails to capture what he sees as strong tailwinds that could propel the startup to prominence in renewable wind energy for the built world.

Swanson spoke to PropTech Insider last week about the challenges facing wind capture energy, the unique proprietary technology Aeromine employs, and why the timing is right for solar and wind energy to come together.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

PropTech Insider: How did Aeromine Technologies come about, and what is the company’s place in the market today?

Mark Swanson: Aeromine was founded by Carsten Westergaard, a longtime wind engineer, and aerodynamicist. Carsten worked for Vestas, one of the large wind companies. He spent some time designing and manufacturing blades, and then he ended up at Texas Tech where he taught wind engineering. While he was there, he started doing research in wind-generating solutions for the built environment. He’d spent his whole career up to that point, more or less, in what he calls big wind design and development — developing and deploying large turbines. 

But, while he was at Texas Tech, he started noodling around on how best to capture wind energy in the built environment. There’s a lot of challenges in just placing bladed windmills — that is, horizontal access windmills, what one thinks of as a typical windmill — in the built environment because of noise, vibration, transmissions of the building, bird hazards, ice-throw, etc. So they’re actually difficult to permit, and the industry hasn’t really gone anywhere. It has been basically stagnant, unlike the solar industry, in which I’ve spent most of my energy career. Solar has done great things in the built environment, but for wind it’s been a very tough slog.

Carson set out to develop solutions and technologies that address that challenge for the built environment, and he made quite a bit of progress to the point where he could basically prove the technology works. At that point, about three years ago, he embarked on creating a company.

In starting Aeromine, what technology did you use and how do you deliver it to the built environment?

The core difference is, rather than having a large swept area that generates the energy, defined by the area that the blades sweep through, what Aeromine does is have a very small swept area for the blade. So the diameter of our blade is only 90 centimeters. It’s a small turbine, but the total area of the system is quite large. The way that works is there’s a large venturi system [a short piece of narrow tube between wider sections for measuring flow rate or exerting suction] created by four vertically oriented foils. 

And that venturi creates a low pressure point, where it accelerates the air through the neck of the venturi. Then that low pressure point has a manifold that goes vertically down into the wind turbine. 

And that manifold then is able to move air proportional to the large area, but to funnel it through this small turbine diameter. It’s arrayed horizontally, so when wind energy comes up and is accelerated a bit by the building, it then hits this venturi shape, and, just like putting your thumb on a hose, the venturi accelerates the wind through a smaller neck.

So are these on rooftops or on stand-alone buildings?

They sit along the windward edge of a rooftop. Imagine a distribution center. That’s a large building, maybe 30 or 40 feet tall. We’ll put a large number of these on the edge of it. We haven’t actually built a system this size, but we’re thinking that ultimately we could see systems with some 40 units, each capable of producing about 5 kilowatts.

What real estate sector is Aeromine targeting as customers?

We’re focused on large commercial buildings — distribution centers being an example, data centers being another example. These large buildings have significant power needs, unmet power needs, and the customers are typically large real estate owners that specialize in owning and leasing large portfolios of buildings. 

Large distribution companies have been very interested. We’ve got a number of very exciting, notable, large and well-known distribution companies that are actively engaged with us.

How many customers is Aeromine working with now?

We have about six systems that are in the field right now throughout the United States and Northern Europe.

Are there geographic and climatic limitations to what you do?

Absolutely. This technology generates real value for customers in areas where there’s good wind resource, and good wind resource means that you have a strong, steady ambient wind. It also means that the wind has a fairly narrow standard pattern. Our system doesn’t pivot. It takes advantage of one wall of the building and is mounted on that wall on the roof line.

So what we’re looking for from a wind resource standpoint is steady, consistent wind that comes from a fairly dominant angle — a persistent direction. That’s not true everywhere. We’ve got one system that’s in a location where the wind blows in one direction half of the year and it’s perfect, and then the other half of the year it blows the opposite direction and it doesn’t do anything at all.

Two major challenges with renewable energy technologies like solar and wind are storage and distribution. How do you attack those challenges?

All these renewable energy products have a diurnal cycle. Solar has a peak in the midday. In wind, the peak is typically a little later in the day because of thermal winds. But they all have kind of a high period and a low period, so all of them need to be paired with storage in order to get the most value possible. 

That’s particularly true in electricity — what we call tariff markets, or electricity rate markets, where you’ve got a time-of-use electricity tariff. If you have a time of use, for example, oftentimes now with solar, the peak pricing is in the late afternoon. And that peak pricing happens to coincide in many locations — not in all, but in many locations — with the high-producing time for the wind system. So the wind system can naturally dump a lot of energy into the grid at these peak prices during that time and help you avoid those peak costs. 

But then the wind system runs all night and all day long, with whatever the ambient wind is. And, so, you want to, especially at night, capture that energy and then use that energy in the day when the demand is greater. The electrical side of our system integrates with storage beautifully. It’s actually a very easy and straightforward design and build.

Right now, how does Aeromine stack up competitively against fossil fuel costs?

That’s a great question. The answer right now is it’s a bit premature, because we’re still in the concluding rounds of an R&D phase of the company, so we don’t have volume production. But I’ve spent my lifetime in manufacturing and product development, and take estimating our future costs very seriously. 

So I’ve developed an estimate of what I think our high-volume manufacturing and distribution costs will be. We’ve modeled what our energy production is. The term that’s used in the industry is the levelized cost of energy. That’s basically a way of saying we’re taking energy expenses — for example, the high upfront capital costs in producing wind energy — but with low or zero operating costs, as opposed to natural gas, which has moderate capital costs up front, but then an ongoing cost of the fuel. We’re currently contemplating a levelized cost of energy that is competitive with rooftop solar.

Is there a big difference in deploying your wind capture technology in rural versus urban areas?

If we’re trying to compete in an area where there’s lots of wind shading and turbulence caused by other tall buildings in the immediate vicinity, it’s frightfully difficult to get the system in that context to perform well. But I wouldn’t say we need to be in a rural environment. We have plenty of applications that are in what anyone would call an urban context, but the specific location is such that we don’t have any wind shading. 

For example, we have a system in the Detroit area that’s mounted right along the Detroit River, so it doesn’t have any shading. It’s a very urban environment, but we’ve got plenty of access to clean wind. Same thing with what we’re just designing now in Denmark. It’s going to be adjacent to an airport. It’s very congested, but, by virtue of the fact that it’s adjacent to an airport, we have very clean wind and it works beautifully. 

Your background is in engineering. How did you come to be CEO at Aeromine?

I come from the solar industry, where I had been since 2013 up until quite recently. I had roles that were in product manufacturing design and development, but then I also spent a good portion of my time in the solar industry in roles related to construction and project development, specifically construction on rooftop applications. 

So, with this background in product development, R&D, getting stuff into production in manufacturing, plus the background of designing, developing and deploying systems for commercial rooftops, those experiences gave me just fantastic preparation for the specific needs that Aeromine has right now.

It seems like Aeromine is relatively alone in wind capture technology for the built world. Why is that, and how do you view the competitive landscape?

It’s been a difficult, challenging industry sector that has not taken off. There’s been quite a few efforts. Quite a few people have taken a run at this, and, quite honestly, that is significant. The total addressable market (TAM) is really big for a niche like this. I’ve seen estimates between $200 billion and $600 billion in TAM. So there’s a big opportunity out there. 

We certainly don’t find a ton of developing, successful competitors. Yet we think that when we get the technology to work, and we’ve got the cost down where we need it to be, this market will grow very fast.

One of the key messages that I’ve been trying to communicate is where this market is going to be next year. We’re going to start selling in volume. Our current plan is that probably about Q2 2026 we’ll start shipping our first production units in limited volume. I think what will happen then is the existing infrastructure that serves the rooftop solar market is going to be ready for this technology. It installs beautifully with solar, and the economics work really well with solar. The sales, financing and construction functions are identical in this business and in solar. 

What we’re going to see — as soon as our technology is recognized as being a viable commercially attractive technology — is a massive worldwide workforce industry that’s going to be a fantastic channel for the product.

Given that outlook, how is Aeromine being funded right now?

We’re funded exclusively by venture capital, and continually raising money. We’re looking forward to a significant B round, probably around the end of this year. I think what will happen to us is the same that happened in the solar industry. I’m quite confident we’ll get through the B round and we’ll start to get some traction. 

Then, we will probably need some venture equity and debt. But the main thing that’s going to happen when we start moving these products in volume is we’re going to need project financing. The way that works is if you’re an owner of a large portfolio of buildings you want to finance the solar system yourself. So those solar systems traditionally have been third-party financed. 

We’re looking forward to being able to deploy hundreds of millions of dollars through project financing in order to really scale up this business.

Philip Russo can be reached at prusso@commercialobserver.com.