More than 30 percent of all electric power is said to be lost before it ever gets to its destination, but Spokane Valley-based Flyback Energy Inc. has developed a method, called flyback switch technology, to capture and convert that lost power back into usable energy.

The company claims the technology can improve the efficiency of electrical devices, motors, and systems significantly by using that otherwise wasted electrical energy, often lost in the form of heat, to help create stronger, more controllable electromagnetic fields with less energy consumption.

After 10 years in product development, the company plans to hire a national sales director and begin marketing its technology this year, says John Overby, who left Sirti, Spokane's economic and technology development agency, late last year to become president and CEO of Flyback Energy.

"Because there are so many applications (of the technology), our main focus this year is going to be lighting," Overby says. "There is so much retrofitting going on, but not so much new construction, so that is an obvious place to start."

Potential applications involve electric cars, consumer products, wireless communications, and the aerospace industry, among others.

Phillip Smith, who founded Flyback with brothers Paul and David Babcock, says the company initially will focus on marketing its switch to contractors that install lighting systems and companies with facilities that use what are called high-intensity discharge lights, which are commonly used in industrial facilities as well as warehouse-style, big-box retail stores. The technology also can be applied to fluorescent lighting in commercial settings, he says.

The company's switching technology will enable a user to capture lost power and to fully control the level of lighting they need, from 100 percent to below 50 percent of the bulb's full luminosity, he says. It will be sold in a box-style design that's approximately 12 inches long, 8 inches wide, and 8 inches high.

Specifically, Flyback's switch will allow lighting to be dimmed continuously, similar to the dimmer switches that often are installed in homes. Smith says some of the current technologies in high-intensity lighting systems only allow the lights to go from full power to about 50 percent of intensity, and most older lighting-circuit technologies don't allow the lights to dim at all.

Overby says a big-box store with rows and rows of lights might turn off one or two of the circuits when there is enough natural light during the day. The Flyback switch uses a photo sensor that can sense the amount of natural light in a building, and automatically will dim all of the lights gradually at the same time as the natural light increases.

"In a store, that's important," he says. "If (natural) light is coming in through the windows, the lights might dim quickly and that can be distracting."

Stores and manufacturing facilities that would use the switch would save on energy costs, starting between 2 percent and 8 percent with the lights on at full-capacity, because of the switch's ability to capture energy, Overby says. Those savings would increase when the switch was used to dim the lights to compensate for the presence of natural light.

Smith adds that the same technology can be applied to fluorescent lighting and LED lighting.

In addition to lighting users, Flyback plans to begin marketing its switch before the end of this year to wireless-communications companies, specifically focusing on the electrical energy used to power the signal that transmitting towers use for cellular communications, he says.

Smith says that cell phone towers convert alternating-current (AC) power, or power that comes from the electrical grid, to direct current (DC) power, which is what electronic components are designed to run on, to transmit communication signals.

He says Flyback's switch has the ability to make that conversion from AC power to DC power between 8 percent and 10 percent more efficient than the current conversion method.

Says Overby, "There are some companies looking to change the electrical architecture of cell phone towers, and they are very interested in Flyback's technology."

Other practical and more efficient uses of energy through the application of Flyback's switch technology are electric motors, including those being used in electric cars, as well as diesel electric motors, the company says. Consumer products, such as household appliances, could also benefit from the technology, as well as a variety of industries, including manufacturing, aerospace, and electric utilities.

"Our long-term goals are to enter all of those different markets," Overby says. "What we don't do this year, we'll do next year."

During the research-and-development phase, which took place over more than 10 years, Smith says he and the Babcocks worked full-time out of Paul Babcock's Spokane Valley garage, financing the project on their own.

In late 2010, Flyback received $1.2 million in investor financing from Genesis Financial Inc., of Spokane, adding to the $800,000 it had received in an earlier round of financing that year, Overby says.

The company now employs a staff of 15, made up mostly of engineers and a senior management team. It operates out of a 6,500-square-foot, three-story building, located at 7721 E. Trent, which houses management offices and labs for product research and development.

The company plans to contract with local manufacturers to make its products, and has so far considered Servatron Inc. and Tate Technology Inc.

Flyback has spent the last 10 years developing its technology into a useable application, Smith says. The result is a switch that's able to capture and use the electromagnetic energy that is normally lost in inductive electrical processes. That energy is released and lost during the collapse of an electromagnetic field surrounding a conductive mass, and commonly is referred to as "flyback energy," he says.

"Our technology enables us to control and utilize that flyback energy where usually it's burned off or wasted," he says. "In inductive devices, it's 8 to 10 percent of the energy that's lost through flyback, so we control the power from that collapsing magnetic field."

The company received the first patent for its switch technology in October of 2009, Smith says, adding that it expects to receive two more patents this month, and also has four provisional patents still pending.

Flyback became a Sirti client about four years ago and remains a Sirti client to this day.

Overby says he became interested in the company after he watched it grow and develop its technologies over the last several years.

"I've never seen a Sirti client that's so marketable and applicable," he says.

Smith contends that the method he and the other two co-founders devised for capturing and using flyback energy is something that that others long ago had given up trying to do.

"We had an engineer visit us and was interested in what we were doing," Smith says. "That engineer went to the international light show in Las Vegas (Lightfair International) looking for someone who could dim magnetic lights, but the people there said they'd given up on it years ago. We've had our fair share of naysayers that say it's impossible."