What is TLALOCORBIS?
TLALOCORBIS is a geospatial intelligence platform that identifies and scores every location in British Columbia where water is dissipating hydraulic energy — energy that could instead be captured as electricity and revenue. It is built and operated by AXL Energy Inc., a Vancouver-based distributed hydropower company.
Described as the Palantir of water pressure, the platform fuses authoritative federal, provincial, and municipal datasets into a single continuously updated map of 15,821 candidate sites across seven categories of hydraulic waste.
Why it exists
British Columbia's vast hydrological network — 25,000+ named watercourses, the second-largest hydropower fleet in Canada, 400,000 km of pressurized water mains, and a Pacific coast of extreme tidal prisms — contains thousands of stranded kilowatts: hydraulic energy that is already flowing, already permitted, and already dissipating as heat, noise, cavitation, and erosion.
Unlike conventional hydropower which requires new dams and decade-long environmental reviews, water energy recovery works with existing infrastructure and existing flows. No new water rights. No new concrete. No new inundation. Deployments measured in months, not decades.
The bottleneck is not technology — proven turbines exist for every flow and head regime from trickle-flow PRVs to 4-metre-per-second tidal narrows. The bottleneck is discovery. Most candidate sites are scattered across federal river gauges, municipal pressure zones, BC dam registries, First Nations territorial waters, provincial waterfall inventories, and industrial discharge permits that nobody cross-references. TLALOCORBIS does the cross-reference.
Seven categories of hydraulic opportunity
- River hydrometric stations — 2,324 Water Survey of Canada HYDAT stations across BC with daily discharge records and hourly real-time telemetry on 447 active gauges. Sites with capturable kinetic energy from channel flow.
- Wastewater outfalls — 5 Metro Vancouver treatment plant effluent pipes (Iona, Annacis, Lions Gate, Lulu, Northwest Langley) with gravity-driven continuous flow. Zero additional infrastructure; turbines install inline.
- Tidal narrows — 6 Canadian Hydrographic Service documented high-current constrictions (Seymour Narrows, Skookumchuck Narrows, and others) with bidirectional tidal velocities exceeding 16 knots at peak.
- Municipal pressure-reducing valves — 108 PRV candidate locations across six Lower Mainland municipalities derived from modeled pressure zones with hydraulic grade line analysis yielding 40–70 PSI operating differentials. Validated 4.82 MW recoverable.
- Dams — 2,467 licensed impoundments from the BC Water Rights Information System. Retrofit candidates for bypass-flow or minimum-release turbines at structures already permitted for storage or flood control.
- Waterfalls — 4,874 named natural drops from the BC Geographic Names database. Environmentally sensitive by default; scored with drop height, catchment area, and protected-area overlay flags.
- Industrial discharges — 6,037 permitted outflows from the National Pollutant Release Inventory (NPRI) and BC Energy Regulator (BCER) records. Continuous, permitted, measurable — mines, pulp mills, cooling towers, produced-water handlers.
Supporting geospatial layers
- 172,013 BC Freshwater Atlas stream segments for Metro Vancouver and Lower Fraser with topology, slope-derived head, and upstream catchment area.
- 108 pressure zones across six municipalities (Vancouver, Burnaby, Richmond, Surrey, North Vancouver, Coquitlam) with HGL-derived operating pressure envelopes.
- 869 OpenStreetMap infrastructure features — water mains, hydrants, WWTPs, outfalls — with 17 pipes carrying modeled per-segment pressure drops up to 187.4 PSI.
- HRDEM high-resolution elevation from Natural Resources Canada for head inference at every point.
Physics methodology
Every site is scored with the standard hydropower equation:
P = ρ · g · Q · H · η
where ρ is water density (1000 kg/m³ fresh, 1025 kg/m³ salt), g is gravitational acceleration (9.81 m/s²), Q is volumetric discharge (m³/s), H is effective head (metres), and η is turbine efficiency (0.70 micro-hydro default). Tidal sites use the kinetic energy form P = ½ · ρ · A · v³ · Cp where A is swept area and Cp is rotor power coefficient. Revenue is computed at BC Hydro net-metering rates of approximately $0.095 per kWh. All methodology is transparent per-node; no black boxes.
Platform capabilities
- Interactive brutalist-styled map with per-node inspector, history timeline, and action log
- Natural-language AI filter ("AIP") translating queries like "show me high-revenue tidal sites" or "dams over 500 kW within 50 km of Vancouver" into filter state
- Five-class turbine catalog covering 50 W to 5 MW with recommendation engine per site
- Six-state action lifecycle: opportunity → surveyed → approved → deploying → generating → decommissioned
- Role-gated workflow: viewer / crew / analyst / admin with magic-link JWT authentication
- Real-time WebSocket broadcasting action events across connected clients
- GeoJSON + JSON export for procurement and project-management integration
- PDF site assessment reports with site photos, flow statistics, turbine spec, payback
- Saved view system — share filtered map states via URL
- Seasonal and 48-hour historical discharge visualization per gauge
Who it is for
- Independent power producers building distributed generation portfolios
- Municipal water and energy utilities evaluating in-conduit recovery
- First Nations and Indigenous governments managing energy sovereignty on traditional territory
- Civil and mechanical engineering consultancies scoping micro-hydro projects
- Infrastructure investors and climate funds seeking pre-vetted opportunity pipelines
- Academic researchers in hydrology, energy transition, and distributed generation
- Policymakers at BC Hydro, the BC Ministry of Energy and Climate Solutions, and Natural Resources Canada
API access
All data is available via public JSON and GeoJSON endpoints:
Etymology
TLALOC — Aztec and Nahuatl god of rain, water, lightning, and storms. ORBIS — Latin for sphere, world, realm. Tlalocorbis: the realm of Tlaloc. The full sphere of water-energy opportunity under a single map.
Contact & attribution
AXL Energy Inc. · Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Platform: tlalocorbis.ca
Data license: CC BY 4.0 on derivatives; upstream government datasets retain their original licences.
Cite as: AXL Energy Inc. (2026). TLALOCORBIS: Water Energy Recovery Intelligence for British Columbia. https://tlalocorbis.ca/