Cleantech integration company LightSail Canada will soon apply to the Atlantic Innovation Fund to help with financing for a $4.6 million pilot facility to store energy produced at a wind farm near New Glasgow, N.S. LightSail Canada is a development company for Berkeley, California-based cleantech company LightSail Energy.

Greg Fong, the Director of Business Development for LightSail Canada, said in an interview yesterday the wind developers and LightSail together plan to put about $2 million into the project, which it hopes will be operational in 2014. The company will likely learn whether its AIF application is successful next spring.

“We’re putting together a proposal for the Atlantic Innovation Fund to set up a storage facility and integrate it with a wind farm near New Glasgow,” said Fong.

LightSail Energy’s Chief Scientist is Danielle Fong -- a Dartmouth, N.S., native, Dalhousie University alumna and Greg’s daughter – who left her PhD at Princeton to help found the company. She also served as a judge at Innovacorp’s CleanTech Open competition earlier this year, which nurtured connections that are helping to develop LightSail projects in Atlantic Canada.

LightSail is pioneering a revolutionary system that greatly improves the efficiency of compressing air in order to store electricity – a system that is especially useful for  wind or solar power applications. It solves a classic problem in renewable energy: Wind power works only when the wind is blowing, solar only when the sun shines. That means there is no correlation between periods of strong energy generation and peak electricity demand. By storing electricity, energy-providers can moderate the output and rely less on backups from more reliable energy sources, like burning fossil fuels.

Many storage systems rely on compressed air, which can be released during down-times to produce electricity; however, the compression process creates heat, a form of energy that is mostly lost. LightSail recaptures that heat and converts it into electricity.

A key component of the LightSail process is a fine mist, comprising just air and water, sprayed into the storage chamber. Greg Fong explained that it is difficult to use the air-water mixture in cold environments, and that has brought the company to Atlantic Canada. It is setting up projects in the region to establish that the technology can work in cold climates. As well as the New Glasgow project, it is also working on a facility in Labrador.

LightSail is establishing collaborations with Dalhousie University, Memorial University and University of New Brunswick, which would be providing in-kind services to the company for this initial project.

LightSail Energy has said previously it has received backing from California-based groups Khosla Ventures, Triple Point Capital and Silicon Valley Bank.

Danielle Fong has had an incredible journey to entrepreneurship, which has been chronicled in such publications as The Atlantic. She dropped out of the Nova Scotia public school system at age 12 to enter Dalhousie. That led to Danielle entering a PhD program at Princeton University at 17 to study nuclear fusion. But she left that and ended up co-founding LightSail Energy.