SWORDFISH ENERGY
How it all started.
Dorn Beattie. The Luckiest Guy in the World
"I TOOK A CLOCK APART" According to my mother, the first evidence that I might think a little differently appeared when I was about two years old. “I took a clock apart.” She told that story for years. To her, the remarkable thing was that a two-year-old would look at a clock and apparently decide that knowing the time wasn't nearly as interesting as finding out what was going on inside it. I suppose that was unusual. What I find interesting, though, is that in all the years my mother told that story, there was never any mention of whether I managed to put the clock back together. I suspect I didn't. I'll never know. But perhaps the important part wasn't putting it back together. It was wanting to know what was inside. That part, apparently, never went away. A few years later, my entrepreneurial career began at the 15th tee of Calgary's Shaganappi Golf Course. I had a Kool-Aid stand, an entrepreneurial streak, and absolutely no understanding of cost accounting. Business was good. Apparently, too good. My mother eventually pointed out that the serious amount of sugar disappearing from her kitchen was not, in fact, free inventory. That was my first venture—and my first experience with a supply-chain interruption. From clocks to Kool-Aid, there was already a pattern forming. I just didn't know it yet. I have always been an entrepreneur, but more than that, I have always had an extremely curious mind. I want to know how things work. If something catches my attention, I tend to pull on the thread. Sometimes nothing comes of it. Sometimes it becomes a hobby. Sometimes it becomes a business. And every once in a while, it becomes something much bigger.
"MUSIC CAME EARLY" My mother and father loved to sing, and some of my strongest memories are of family gatherings filled with music. Both of my sisters had beautiful voices. Music was simply part of the household. My father once brought home a used Harmony Sovereign guitar and taught me my first few chords. There weren't many of them. But I took those few chords, combined them with whatever vocal cords I had inherited from the family, and found my way into folk music. Somewhere along the way, I entered the Alberta Music Festival and was fortunate enough to win the prize in the Folk Division. My reward was a $25 gift certificate for music lessons. Hmmmm. Apparently, there was still room for improvement. “Folk eventually became rock and roll, and rock and roll became a very large part of my life.” For roughly fifteen years of my professional career, I worked as the lead singer in a rock and roll band. I had the privilege of working with many wonderful musicians in Calgary, touring with some of the biggest names in the business, recording my own music, and even having hit records. It was a remarkable life. But what stayed with me most was not simply the performing. It was the business. I mean the music BUSINESS. People sometimes look at successful musicians and imagine that success is mostly luck. Somebody gets discovered, somebody writes a hit, somebody becomes famous. That was never how I saw it. The music business is hard work. It is rehearsals, travel, promotion, contracts, negotiations, deadlines, personalities, competition, cash flow, disappointment, reinvention and the requirement to deliver every single night whether you feel like it or not. In my opinion, the music business is one of the best training grounds an entrepreneur could ever have. It teaches you very quickly that talent may get you in the door, but talent alone does not keep you there. You have to work. You have to adapt. You have to perform. And sooner or later, you have to learn the business. It took me years to realize that writing songs also taught me something else. It taught me how to invent. I have written many, many songs in my life. Some became hit records. Some, quite frankly, were probably better left in the drawer. But they all began in more or less the same way. With something small. A line. A melody. A chord progression. A phrase. Sometimes nothing more than the feeling that there was something there worth chasing. Then you begin working on it. You bend a lyric here. You change a chord there. You add something. You take something away. You wake up the next morning and discover that something you thought was brilliant the night before may not have been brilliant at all. You live with it. You sleep on it. You try again. Sometimes a song appears almost completely in a matter of hours. Sometimes it takes days. Sometimes weeks. Sometimes months. But if you keep working at it, that seed of an idea can eventually turn into something complete. Something you can play for another person. Something you can record. Something you can be proud of. Maybe even something you can brag about. Not always. I've written some songs that aren't worth bragging about either. But that's the process. And I eventually realized that virtually every invention I have ever worked on has evolved in exactly the same way. A car. A neon sign. A digital system. A golf putter. A turbine. They rarely arrive fully formed. They begin with that little question: What if? Then you play with the idea. You add something. You remove something. You turn it upside down. You build it. You discover what doesn't work. You talk to people who know things you don't know. You change it. You build it again. Eventually, every once in a while, the little idea becomes something real.
"WHILE MUSIC OCCUPIED ONE PART OF MY LIFE, CARS OCCUPIED ANOTHER" From about the age of fifteen, I had a strong interest in automobiles. I believe I inherited that from my grandfather. As a teenage boy, guitars and cars seemed like a pretty perfect combination. “Invention, for me, has always been a form of songwriting.” Throughout the years I spent travelling with music, I always maintained my hobby of cars, particularly English sports cars. I loved old MGAs and MGBs. I enjoyed working on them, restoring them, learning what made them work and figuring out how to make them better. Eventually, the hobby became serious enough that the cars I rebuilt began winning trophies. And, as seems to happen quite often in my life, the hobby became a business. I eventually owned a car manufacturing company reproducing the 1952 MG TD. Those cars won awards too. For a time, things went very well. Then 1986 arrived. The economy went sideways, and producing reproduction sports cars was no longer financially viable. Period. So, I moved on. I was bored. That may sound like a minor detail, but … “Boredom has probably been responsible for several of the biggest changes in my life.” When I become bored, I start looking around. And when I start looking around, I usually find something interesting.
"THE NEXT THING I FOUND WAS NEON" I became fascinated by it. I travelled to Oregon and took a course in neon art, learning how to heat and bend glass, work with gases, and turn a drawing into something that could illuminate the side of a building. There was something wonderfully physical about it. You began with an idea and ended with something glowing in the night. I returned to Canada and opened my own neon shop. Some of the signs I made all those years ago are still prominently displayed on major streets in Vancouver today. I'm quite proud of that. There is something satisfying about making something with your hands and discovering decades later that it is still there. Eventually, I sold the neon business and moved on. The company I sold it to, Newline, became one of the few remaining neon companies in the business.
"DIGITAL SIGNAGE" My next venture took me in a completely different direction. I developed a dual-screen monitor system that allowed live television to play in one quadrant while remotely managed digital advertising and information appeared elsewhere on the screen. Today, that sort of thing sounds ordinary. At the time, it wasn't. The system went very well. I sold the Canadian franchise to one businessman and the U.S. franchise to a California group. For a while, it looked as though it had a very strong future. Then COVID arrived. Restaurants closed. Advertising disappeared. Much of the system had been designed around restaurant environments, and both businesses were unable to survive what happened to the hospitality industry. It was unfortunate. It was a great system. I still own the technology. But some ideas belong to a particular moment in time. You have to know when to move on.
“GOLF PROVIDED ANOTHER CHAPTER" I developed something called the Harmonics Live Head putter. It remains one of my favourite inventions. It is a very unusual putter in several ways, and I also developed a training aid app that went with it. I believed strongly enough in the concept that I took it to England and presented it to people connected with the Royal and Ancient game. While I was there, I had the opportunity to meet some of the great putting and golf instructors in the world, including Pete Cowen. The putter and the training aid are inventions I may resurrect one day. I still believe in them. But by then, another idea was beginning to take hold. And this one was going to be different.
“SWORDFISH MAY BE THE MOST COMPLICATED SONG I HAVE EVER WRITTEN. And it's not finished yet.” In 2018, I was enjoying a sunny day on my boat in Indian Arm, part of Burrard Inlet near Vancouver, British Columbia. If you've never been there, it is difficult to describe properly. On a beautiful day, with steep mountains coming almost directly out of the water, I believe Indian Arm is one of the most beautiful places in the world. My boat, however, was not exactly an environmental statement. It was a large boat—a small yacht, I suppose you could call it—with two very large and very thirsty gasoline engines. I had been tinkering with an idea. What if I could tow a small turbine behind the boat? The movement of the boat through the water would turn the turbine. The turbine could generate electricity. Perhaps that electricity could reduce the load on the engine alternators. In theory, that might give me ten or fifteen percent more usable horsepower. And perhaps I could save some fuel. That was the idea. Nothing more. There was no company. There was no name. There was certainly no Swordfish. It was simply another one of those little seeds. Then, while sitting on the boat that day, I picked up a local magazine. The article was titled: “BC's Dirty Little Secret.” The title immediately caught my attention. The story did much more than that. It described the extraordinary dependence on diesel fuel in remote Indigenous communities in northern British Columbia, including Haida Gwaii. What struck me was the sheer scale of it. Millions upon millions of litres of diesel fuel were being burned simply to produce electricity. And that fuel had to get there somehow. It had to be transported long distances, including along the British Columbia coast, often by barge. There had been major spills. The environmental consequences were obvious. But there was another part of the story that bothered me even more. For many remote and off-grid communities, diesel generators are not backup power. They are the power. They run day and night. They keep the lights on. They keep schools operating. They keep homes warm. And they keep freezers running. In many northern communities, those freezers contain fish, meat and wild game that are an essential part of the local food supply. Electricity is not a luxury. It is survival. The more I learned, the uglier the picture became. There was the cost of the diesel itself. There was the cost and risk of transporting it. There were the emissions. There were the environmental consequences. And there were serious concerns about long-term exposure to diesel exhaust and particulate matter in communities where generators may operate continuously. The particulates don't simply disappear. They are in the air. They settle on land. They settle on water. They can enter ecosystems and food chains. It bothered me. A lot. And I remember thinking about that little turbine I had been imagining behind my boat. Perhaps I was thinking too small. Instead of moving the turbine through the water, what if I let the water move through the turbine? Tides move every day. Rivers move every day. Ocean currents move every day. The energy is already there. Why not use it? That was the moment the idea changed. What had begun as a gadget to save some gasoline on my boat became something much larger. A hydrokinetic turbine. A machine that could sit in moving water and convert that movement into electricity. That was the beginning of Swordfish. Like a song, it did not arrive finished. It started with a few notes. Then I began working on it. I spoke to engineers. Then I spoke to more engineers. I joined business accelerators. I entered competitions. As the idea developed, Swordfish began to win awards. At around the same time, I was also speaking with a friend in the United Kingdom who had connections to people on the Isle of Man. I learned that waste incineration was part of their energy system. That added more fuel to the idea that had been percolating in my mind. Different places had different energy problems, but the underlying issue was the same. Communities needed reliable electricity. And too often, the available choices were expensive, polluting, difficult or all three. Because of those UK conversations, I formed a British company in 2019. That company still exists today. But something else became clear to me early on. The problem was not just Haida Gwaii. There were hundreds of remote and off-grid communities across Canada relying, in whole or in part, on diesel generation. Engines running twenty-four hours a day. Every day. Because there was no practical alternative. That realization changed Swordfish again. It was no longer simply an interesting engineering project. It had a purpose. Over the next several years, I worked with universities, professors, engineers and technical specialists to refine the concept. I worked with Professor Keith Ridgway in Scotland. I worked with people connected to the University of Birmingham. I worked with Dr. Eric Bibeau at the University of Manitoba. And I continued speaking with engineering people who could challenge the assumptions, improve the design and help turn the original idea into a serious machine. This is one of the things people sometimes misunderstand about invention. The original idea matters. But the original idea is only the beginning. Then come the calculations. The modelling. The flow characteristics. The generators. The bearings. The materials. The structural loads. The manufacturing issues. The installation questions. The maintenance requirements. The failures. The refinements. The endless small decisions that separate something that looks good on a napkin from something that can actually work in the real world. Curiously, throughout all of that development, the exterior design of Swordfish changed remarkably little. The real evolution happened inside. Which, when I think about it, brings me back to the clock. At two years old, apparently I wanted to know what was inside. All these years later, the most important part of Swordfish is still what is going on inside the machine. Maybe some things don't change. From 2023 through 2025, I continued developing the commercial product and bringing it to the point where it was ready for serious testing. It has taken far longer than I expected. The original idea began in 2018. The UK company was formed in 2019. And now, in 2026, Swordfish is finally moving into commercialization. Seven or eight years can sound like a long time. It is. But energy technology is not a neon sign. It is not a putter. It is not even a sports car. If you are going to place machinery into powerful moving water and ask people to depend on the electricity it produces, you need to get it right. Today, the core machine is called the Swordfish Compeller. I believe Swordfish has the potential to become one of the most efficient and environmentally responsible forms of renewable generation available for the right locations. The principle is simple. There is an enormous amount of energy already moving through the world's tides, rivers and currents. We don't have to create the movement. Nature is already doing that. Our job is simply to capture some of it intelligently. Of course, the numbers matter. Efficiency matters. Reliability matters. Cost per megawatt matters. Maintenance matters. Environmental impact matters. But none of those numbers are the reason Swordfish began. For me, it still goes back to that sunny day in Indian Arm. A fuel-hungry boat. A small turbine that was supposed to save me a little gasoline. A magazine article. And the realization that communities were burning extraordinary quantities of diesel simply because they had no practical alternative. I think about that often. And when I look back over my life, I can see how strangely logical the whole journey has been. A Kool-Aid stand taught me that inputs cost money. Music taught me discipline, performance and business. Songwriting taught me how an idea evolves. Cars taught me mechanics and manufacturing. Neon taught me how to turn a drawing into something physical. Digital signage taught me technology, licensing and scalability. Golf taught me that even a centuries-old object can still be reinvented if you are willing to question its assumptions. And Swordfish brought all of those lessons together. Looking back, my life probably doesn't resemble a carefully designed career plan. That's because it wasn't one. I followed things that interested me. I built things. Some worked. Some didn't. Some made money. Some lost money. Some I sold. Some disappeared because the world changed. Some are still sitting there waiting for me to come back to them. And every single one taught me something. People sometimes ask how a rock and roll singer ends up developing hydrokinetic turbines. I don't have a simple answer. It took a two-year-old with a clock. A Kool-Aid stand. A guitar. A few chords. A lot of songs. A rock and roll band. Some hit records. A collection of English sports cars. A 1952 MG TD. A neon torch. A digital screen. A golf putter. A boat. A magazine article. And a lifetime of being unable to leave an interesting idea alone. Maybe that's entrepreneurship. Maybe it's creativity. Maybe it's curiosity. Maybe it's stubbornness. I suspect it's a little of all four. And somewhere along the way, I began to realize something else. A life does not always make sense while you're living it. The pieces can seem completely unrelated. Music has nothing to do with cars. Cars have nothing to do with neon. Neon has nothing to do with golf. Golf has nothing to do with hydrokinetic energy. Except that, somehow, they did. Each one taught me how to build the next thing. Each introduced me to people I otherwise would never have met. Each taught me how to survive the moment when an idea doesn't work the first time. And perhaps most importantly, each taught me to remain curious. To keep asking: What if? What if we changed this? What if we turned it around? What if everybody has been looking at the problem the wrong way? What if there is another way? That's really all an invention is in the beginning. A question. A song begins the same way. A few words. A few notes. A vague idea that perhaps something is there. Swordfish was the same. Except, “…Swordfish may be the most complicated song I have ever written. And it's not finished yet.” When I think about the people I've met, the businesses I've started, the places music took me, the machines I've built, the failures I've survived, the inventions I've been allowed to chase, and the extraordinary people who have helped me along the way, I find it difficult to feel anything other than grateful. It hasn't all been easy. It certainly hasn't all gone according to plan. But it has never been boring. And if being lucky means having the freedom to remain curious, to keep creating, to keep meeting interesting people, to keep getting knocked down and then discovering another reason to get back up and build something else— then I suppose the title is accurate after all. I really may be ... The Luckiest Guy in the World.