Peter Thiel, famous for co-founding PayPal and being an early investor in Facebook, has put a small grant of $300,000 into a Canadian inventor who has spent years working on the idea of harnessing man-made tornadoes to produce power. The funding was made through Thiel’s Breakout Labs, which is part of the Thiel Foundation and which gives small rounds of funding for cutting-edge, early-stage science and technology research ideas.
The entrepreneur behind tornado power is Louis Michaud, who is a Canadian engineer that has spent years “trying to be taken seriously,” as Toronto Star reporter Tyler Hamilton describes him (he profiled Michaud in his book Mad Like Tesla). Michaud’s startup is called AVEtec and his technology is called the Atmospheric Vortex Engine (AVE). Breakout Labs describes the technology as:
To read the original article: Peter Thiel funds tornado power: seriously — Cleantech News and Analysis
