SAN ANTONIO – When you think of wind turbines, you probably think of the big ones that you see in wind farms in West Texas.

But did you know there is a huge market around the world for smaller ones that can power things like homes and water pumps.

And an inventor here in San Antonio says he has found a way to revolutionize the energy industry.

His name is Dan Marsh, and he lives by one rule: There are no rules.

“If you want to innovate and do something great, you can’t have rules,” Marsh said. “You got to break them.”

The phrase “No Fricken Rules” is a literal right of passage in his home.

“I can’t look at what’s been normal for 100 years,” he said. “In order to change you got to take, take bold steps.”

For Marsh, those bold steps meant rethinking personal wind turbines — not the giant ones in farms, but small units that power homes.

“A lot of it was I didn’t like paying my electric bill,” Marsh laughed. “So, you know it’s funny because I think that to that time, my electricity bill went down to about $20-$25 a month.”

He’s CPS Energy’s worst nightmare – and some of you can probably relate.

When he retired four years ago from a long career in commercial controls and air conditioning, he turned his passion for renewable energy into action.

“When [turbines] spin too fast, they make too many volts, and too many volts can burn up controllers. It can melt devices. It can catch fire itself.”

So, Dan had his Shark Tank moment.

“There’s got to be a better way!” he thought.

Now his product and his company Pirate Wind Turbines, there just might be.

“We’re able to control the volts, no matter the speed, no matter how high the wind blows,” Marsh said.

To test it, Dan took some unconventional approaches.

From beach trials and backyard experiments, to strapping a propeller on his truck and hitting the highway.

“A lot of the technology is decades old, and I decided to be the one to jump out off a ledge and see if I can change it. And it looks like we did,” he said.

His StableVolt technology keeps turbines from overloading.

And others in the industry see promise.

In an email, Be-Wind CEO and co-founder Michael Berdan told SBG San Antonio’s Matt Roy, “it could make significant improvements to horizontal and some vertical designs.”

Marsh also received guidance from industry leaders like CEO and Co-Founder of Uprise Energy Jonathan Knight.

“Hopefully he can learn from that and take advantage of some of the good stuff that we’ve done and learn from some of the mistakes that we’ve made along the way,” Knight said.

Marsh also won an innovation contest at Texas State University, which netted him some cash — and a mentor in Hauke Roeschmann.

“He and I have very different personalities,” Roeschmann said. “I’m more project milestones, data driven, and he’s more ‘let’s go!’ Which is which I really embrace.”

Roeschmann helped him refined his research and strategy — and believes in the work.

“The technology has merit,” he said. “I do think that if he finds the right partner and the right investor, this can be really, interesting.”

And that is the next step: finding an investor that can help dan get to his end goals.

“I don’t have any desire to start a factory to hire 100 employees and all that,” Marsh said. “I would rather just license technology to someone that has larger manufacturing capabilities than I could ever dream of and sit on the beach in Italy for a couple years.”

Until then – he will be in the backyard tinkering no rules in sight.