Clean Break

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I received an e-mail today from a guy in Waterloo, Ontario, who is on a hunger strike until the opposition federal Liberals or Conservative government publicly commit to passing Bill C-311, the Climate Change Accountability Act, which would commit Canada by law to meeting its international climate-change obligations. Dante Ryel says he has been fasting since March 3, and it may still be a few weeks before legislators vote on the private-member’s bill, which was introduced by NDPer Bruce Hyer.

Ryel told me he’s had trouble getting the media to pay attention to his hunger strike. So I’m posting this here to help him spread the word. He’s got a Facebook page where he’s trying to build up members — so far he’s at 855. He’s calling his activist group Starving for Change. You can see some of the YouTube videos he has posted here.

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Check out this story of mine in MIT Technology Review about Sundrop Fuels, a Colorado startup that’s trying to commercialize a process that uses the sun to gasify biomass, instead of burning a portion of the biomass itself to drive the gasification process. The technology is based on research carried out at the University of Colorado, Boulder, with help from NREL. The company believes the syngas from its process can be produced affordably in high enough quanity and quality that it could be refined into gasoline for less than $2 a gallon. One obvious hitch is the fact that the best place to harness and concentrate solar heat is in the U.S. Southwest — not exactly the place you’d go to look for surplus biomass resources. BTW: Sundrop is operating largely in stealth mode, and counts Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as one of its venture backers.

On the topic of solar, Ontario’s feed-in-tariff program is gaining momentum. On Wednesday the province’s power authority announced the latest batch of projects to be approved under the program — these ones in the 10 kw to 500 kw range. A few surprises: Loblaw Group of Companies, the grocery giant, has applied to have 136 of its stores across Ontario rigged with solar PV systems. If all go ahead, it would amount to 21 megawatts just for this one grocery chain. Loblaw is starting with four pilot projects and will move forward from there depending on the results. Surprisingly, Northland Power Income Fund will be doing the installations. I say “surprising” because I typically associate this company with natural gas and CHP plants.

There also appears to be quite a few schools putting solar on their rooftops, most of the projects being handled by Ameresco. The other big player in this initial round is OZZ International Inc., which has been approved to move forward on several dozen projects across the province.

All this momentum continues to lure foreign manufacturers  and new business models to Ontario. Most recently SMA Solar Technology AG of Germany said it was establishing a 500-megawatt a year solar inverter production facility in the province that would serve the Canadian market. They join Korean’s Samsung, India’s Solar Semiconductor, Germany’s Bosch and potentially Denmark’s Vestas.

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Hi, just a note: Tonight on TVOntario I take part in a panel that discusses the media’s role in telling the climate-change story and whether we’re getting it right or wrong. The five others on the panel are Climate blogger Joe Romm of Climate Progress, Quentin Chiotti of Pollution Probe, Walter Russell Mead of the Council on Foreign Relations, Nature Magazine writer Nicola Jones, and Curtis Brainard of the Columbia Review of Journalism.

The one-hour discussion appears at 8 p.m. and again at 11 p.m. EST.

Tyler

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I got my start in mainstream journalism as a technology and telecommunications reporter for the Globe and Mail, a beat I later took on at the Toronto Star and covered for six years before switching to energy. When I first started we were still using the term “information highway” to describe the coming convergence between the telephone and cable companies. Cable companies in Canada had their own networks, their own turfs, and their own regulated monopolies, while the phone companies had the same. The turfs overlapped, but the products and services stayed largely separate. You got cable from the cable guys, and phone service from the phone guys. The information highway threatened to change that, allowing the phone and cable guys to invade each other’s turf and bust through their respective monopolies.

The commercial Internet was still in its infancy and was considered part of the information highway. It was only in the mid-1990s that the Internet emerged as the dominant disruptive force in this technological vision. Internet Protocol, the communications standard underpinning the Internet, allowed all sorts of information — text, audio, video — to be treated as packets of data that could be shipped at high speed across cable and phone networks, which were privately operated networks that had on-ramps and off-ramps to the public Internet. As networks became faster, as compression of data got better, as computing power and memory grew exponentially, it became technologically possible and economical to deliver phone, broadcast, e-commerce, Web surfing and e-mail over both the cable and phone networks. The result: network convergence. Suddenly technology was creating competition in these regulated monopolies, forcing regulators to adapt and establish rules that permitted regulatory forbearance when competition in a market was deemed acceptable. For the phone and cable companies, the gloves were off. It was game on. 

Why am I telling you this? Because I’m seeing the same thing happening in the energy sector. Electric utilities and natural gas utilities — in Canada at least — have operated in largely different worlds, each with their own rules and regulations, each with their own regulated monopolies and turfs. Actually, that isn’t entirely the truth. The electric utilities still offer electric hot-water tanks and electric heating, though this is slowly being phased out. But on the natural gas side, offering electricity directly to residential customers just hasn’t happened. Sure, in some jurisdictions there are parent companies that own both a natural gas utility and electric utility and offer services to customers on the same bill. But that’s not the convergence I’m talking about. I’m talking about using a natural gas pipeline network as direct competition against an electric transmission and distribution network.

I got thinking about this more after Bloom Energy announced its Bloom Energy Server. As far as technology goes, I didn’t see this unveiling as a big deal. Solid-oxide fuel cells have been around for decades. Today, there are several companies working on the same thing. What Bloom comes to the party with is good marketing, high-profile financial backing, and a great vision. By calling it an “energy server” it’s drawing parallels to the Internet, which gave us ubiquitous distributed computing, storage and delivery of information. Bloom is aiming to encourage distributed generation — the idea that power is efficiently produced and delivered close to the point of consumption, rather than generated far away from a central plant and transmitted long distances to the consumer. The latter sounds like mainframe computing from the 1970s and 1980s. We know what happened there. And yes, we do have distributed generation today in the form of rooftop solar, on-farm anaerobic digestors, industrial CHP and community wind farms, but for residential purposes there is nothing economical that can supply all our electricity and heating needs 24-hours a day.

An affordable Bloom Energy Server in every home, or something equivalent, would dramatically change the market landscape. It would allow natural gas to provide electricity, heating and hot-water heating with a single energy source, squeezing out the electric utility altogether. And even if it’s not in the home, large Bloom Energy Servers could be situated in the middle of subdivisions. Connected to a larger natural gas pipe, or better, to a local source of carbon-neutral biogas, one can envision district heat and power systems that are complemented by solar or geothermal. Sure, under this scenario, some wires would need to go into the home, but the community would be effectively off-grid. Again, electric utility gets the squeeze.

This changes the game, and presents challenges to energy regulators that have treated the natural gas and electric folks as distinct industries and markets. Suddenly these overlapping turfs mean something. Competition is possible. Regulation is out of date. This is a trend that will increasingly take hold over the coming decade.

K.R. Sridhar, founder and CEO of Bloom Energy, described his vision this way in the company’s first press release: “We believe that we can have the same kind of impact on energy that the mobile phone had on communications. Just as cell phones circumvented landlines to proliferate telephony, Bloom Energy will enable the adoption of distributed power as a smarter, localized energy source.”

I don’t agree with Sridhar. The cell phone analogy doesn’t work, because he conveniently ignores that you still need a natural gas pipeline. Mind you, if a small village in India wants to turn manure and other waste into biogas and use that to power itself, that would work and the Bloom Energy Server would enable it. Also, the fact that the Bloom box works in reverse means you can hook up a wind mill or solar panel and have it generate storable hydrogen, which can be converted back into electricity by reversing the process again. It’s possible, one day, but a lot of things are possible — let’s stick with what’s practical, economical and likely.

Another reason the cell phone anology doesn’t work is because the compelling part of cell phones is that you can carry them wherever you go. Unless Sridhar has plans for a pocket-sized Bloom Energy Server that operates on the sweat from your body, this won’t have the same impact as wireless portable communications.

I think a more accurate comparison is the impact of the Internet and Internet protocol. Before IP the phone networks and the cable networks operated in their own worlds. With IP they now invade each other’s worlds. We’re seeing something similar unfolding in the energy market. We’re seeing energy convergence.

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I reported Tuesday that Bosch Solar, a subsidiary of German conglomerate Bosch Group, had signed a deal with Calgary-based solar inverter maker Sustainable Energy Technologies that will see the firms integrate their respective products to create a kind of all-in-one solar package for the Ontario market. Sustainable Energy’s parallel inverter product, Paralex, would be integrated with Bosch’s micromorph thin film solar modules along with all necessary wiring. This would make it relatively easy for any contractor or home builder to install the systems without the need for specialized help. The companies hope this combination will distinguish themselves in an increasingly competitive market.

Sustainable Energy says it plans to move R&D and its inverter manufacturing to Ontario, where a feed-in-tariff program has lured many companies, including Korea’s Samsung, Chinese-focused Canadian Solar and India’s Solar Semiconductor. Denmark’s Vestas is also seriously eyeing Ontario’s offshore wind market.

If Sustainable Energy and Bosch follow through with these plans, it’s likely that Bosch will have to establish some sort of manufacturing footprint in Ontario. Not to produce the thin-film cells, but rather to do module encapsulation. Together, both companies could create several hundred direct jobs, but Bosch’s manufacturing presence would likely be minimal.

What’s unclear is whether Bosch sees Ontario as a launchpad to the United States. Sustainable Energy has indicated that it does, but Bosch has kept relatively quiet and, in all likelihood, if it was to pursue the California market it’s likely to set up assembly facilities there. And like most of the “deals” announced around manufacturing in Ontario, most of this is just talk so far. Samsung has a comprehensive framework agreement with the province, so it appears to be the real deal. The rest are just testing the waters, trying to get a sense of whether they can negotiate more from the Ontario government beyond the generous feed-in-tariffs being offered today. Whether the province is willing to step up with tax breaks and loan guarantees — that’s unclear. But until we get that clarity, most of what we’re hearing is nothing more than noise.

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My story in today’s Toronto Star is about a new industrial efficiency program that will soon be unveiled by the Ontario Power Authority. Under the plan, the province will agree to pay up to 70 per cent of the cost of an industrial energy retrofit, making it possible for the industrial energy user to achieve up to 30 per cent energy savings and a one- to two-year payback on investment. The aim is to get 300 MW of savings initially. The province’s contribution to each project is capped at $10 million. While giving away millions to help industry use less energy would seem misguided, it’s in fact a very smart and effective strategy. The money being paid out will be much less than what it would cost to built a 300 megawatt power plant. Meanwhile, helping key industrial players become more efficient makes the Ontario economy more competitive and insulates these industrial operations — and the jobs they create — from economic downturns.

Roughly 50 to 60 big industrial players that connect directly to the province’s transmission system can participate in the program, which was spearheaded by international mining companies XStrata and Vale Inco, as well a steel giant ArcelorMittal Dofasco. The three companies, which formed a working committee that reported to the power authority, estimated that efficiency gains could “realistically” achieve 1,000 megawatts over five years.

Industrial efficiency might not be as sexy as solar and wind — actually, it’s definitely not as sexy — but the simple fact is that the greenest and cheapest megawatt is the one that isn’t used. This is a smart program. Oh yeah, and we shouldn’t forget the stimulus effect. These projects will create much-needed jobs over the next few years.

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Here’s a neat little statistic. Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator said that electricity use in the province jumped by 300 megawatts during the Canada-U.S. final on Sunday night, largely because of the number of TV sets that were turned on. Additional 300-megawatt spikes were measured during game intermissions, likely because viewers went to the washroom (after all, flushing the toilet consumes electricity) or opened the fridge to get a beer or threw a bag of popcorn in the microwave. Shortly after Canadian player Sidney Crosby scored the game-winning goal in sudden-death overtime, the province’s demand profile return to that of a typical Sunday evening.

It’s a perfect example of what managers of the electricity system need to be aware of when trying to balance supply and demand on the grid. It ranges from the weather to what’s on your TV on a given evening.

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Turns out the Chinese couldn’t get it together, as attempts by Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machines Co. Ltd. to acquire GM’s Hummer division have fallen through. GM, in response, announced today it will begin the orderly wind-down of Hummer. Sure, some Saudi prince could decide to step in and buy the operation at the last minute as his own play thing, but I doubt it. GM didn’t say why the deal couldn’t be complete, but who cares: one of the world’s most wasteful and pointless machines is at the end of its road. Sorry Arnie.

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Kudos to Vincent Chornet. The president, CEO and co-founder of Montreal-based Enerkem (along with his father, Esteban) has in just a few years turned his company into a leading player in the emerging waste-to-fuel market. Today, Enerkem gained even more momentum, announcing it had secured $53.8 million in venture financing in a round that included Houston-based Waste Management, the continent’s top waste-management firm.

Enerkem uses a thermochemical fluidized-bed process to gasify municipal solid waste (organics, wood waste, plastics), demolition wood, and agricultural/forest residues. The resulting syngas is cleaned and, using a proven catalyst, can be turned into a variety of end products, including methanol, ethanol and high-value olefins (plastics). The company is in the process of building a waste-to-ethanol facility in Mississippi (75 million litres a year) and an Edmonton plant (36 million litres a year) that will also turn sorted municipal solid waste into ethanol. The Edmonton facility is being done in partnership with Greenfield Ethanol, Canada’s largest independent ethanol producer. Meanwhile, in Westbury, Quebec, the company has a commercial-scale demonstration facility that currently turns old wooden hydro poles into ethanol.

Rho Ventures, Braemar Energy Ventures and BDR Capital, all existing investors, participated in the financing round with Waste Management, along with new investor Cycle Capital. “This financing round validates Enerkem’s business and advances our path towards leadership in the waste and advanced fuels markets,” said Chornet in a release. In an earlier story (July 2008) I wrote for Greentech Media, Chornet said that burning waste or burning the syngas created from waste is, well, a waste. Based on electricity and ethanol prices at the time, a company can make three times more revenue per tonne of processed waste compared to a plant that simply burns its syngas to generate electricity, he said. Chornet also said Enerkem’s process is profitable with oil at $50 a barrel and if the company can get a competitive tipping fee to take the garage.

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I just got back from a trip last week to Edmonton, Alberta, where I visited a startup called Lancaster Wind. I’ve been following this company for over a year now, but only recently has its founder and CEO — Dave McConnell — started talking about his approach to storing huge amounts of energy in the same pipelines used to carry oil and natural gas. You can read about it in my Clean Break column today, as well as in two stories recently written in the Edmonton Journal, here and here.

The basic idea is that specially designed hydraulic wind turbines are used to compress nitrogen into existing gas or oil pipeline infrastructure, some of it unused throughout North America. Several hundred, even thousand, kilometres of pipeline could be filled with nitrogen and kept under pressure, in effect becoming a kind of massive nitrogen battery for wind. When electricity needs to be generated anywhere along the pipeline, the nitrogen gas is released and expands to turn a turbine that generates electricity. Wind, under this setup, suddenly becomes dispatchable and has baseload characteristics. Also, the pipeline eliminates the need for transmission lines.

There’s still much to learn about Lancaster’s approach, but it’s an intriguing idea that in my mind is worth investigating. Some questions: Can these pipelines handle the expansion/compression cycles over time? How efficient would the process be? Can such a small company pull off such an ambitious feat? How does it compete with other options, such as compressed-air cavern storage or pumped storage or even flow batteries?

Stay tuned…

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There’s much hype around the 60 Minutes segment Sunday night about Bloom Energy and its miraculous Bloom Box. I’m scratching my head wondering why this is such a big deal, so maybe someone can enlighten me. This to me seems like a fancy solid-oxide fuel cell system. It’s still super expensive, though Bloom claims that it can get the cost down to $3,000 (U.S.) for a residential unit. It still relies on fuel, such as natural gas, meaning it still produces CO2 emissions. Yes, far less emissions than burning that natural gas in a power plant and sending it via transmission lines to your home, but it’s not the emission-free miracle that 60 Minutes is touting. I didn’t hear much talk on the segment about whether the Bloom Box has a dual purpose: that is, electricity generation and heat production. And while it may replace the need for electricity lines coming into your home, you still need a natural gas line. In this sense, I can see tremendous interest from natural gas utilities looking to compete against electric utilities (a good parallel is how cable and phone companies over the years ended up offering the same services as technologies converged).

Perhaps there’s more to this story that wasn’t revealed by 60 Minutes, but there are many companies out there working on this kind of fuel cell so I don’t see what’s particularly special or unique about Bloom Energy. More details are expected to be released on Wednesday, however, so maybe then my questions will be answered.

In the meantime, would someone out there please enlighten me?

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Car-share services across North America are proving they’re not a passing fad as a growing percentage of urban dwellers — facing high parking prices, a lack of spaces, urban congestion and urban smog, not to mention higher fuel prices — are choosing to not own vehicles. Research firm Frost & Sullivan predicts car-sharing membership will grow eightfold between now and 2016, when North American membership is expected to reach 4.4 million. This represents a car-share fleet of 70,000 vehicles. Since every car-share vehicle is estimated to replace 15 cars on the road, this works out to about a million fewer cars on the streets by 2016. It’s a trend that automakers can’t ignore, according to Frost, which predicts car sales will be affected over the long term.

I’ve got a weekend feature in the Toronto Star that takes a closer look at car-sharing in Toronto, where two services — Zipcar and AutoShare — currently compete. I’ve also got a short story on a new car-share service starting out in Baltimore called RelayRides, which pegs itself as the first peer-to-peer car-share service in North America. Instead of owning its own fleet, RelayRides enables anyone who owns a car to sign up and make their vehicles available for short-term rental by other members of the public. It’s an interesting model that, while full of risks and very tricky to implement, could work in certain markets.

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I’ve always said that if we are to pursue a biofuels strategy, it should first and foremost focus on developing renewable fuels for airplanes. Using batteries or fuel cells to power a large passenger jet is a non-starter, given the added weight to the aircraft. We can electrify most ground transportation, but we can’t electrify airplanes, so biofuels is what we’re left with if we want to reduce the carbon footprint of the airline industry.

There’s no question that biofuels are controversial, particularly when we talk of growing corn and other food crops as a feedstock for producing ethanol and other green fuels. There’s much potential in second- and third-generation biofuels, using wood, agricultural, and municipal wastes and algae, but there’s considerable doubt that even these non-food feedstocks could allow us to make a meaningful dent in our fossil-fuel consumption. This is why targeting the airline industry makes sense. It only represents about 12 per cent of global petroleum consumption, so maybe we can serve this market with the non-food feedstocks we have.

Momentum in this area continues. Last week British Airways announced a partnership with U.S.-based Solena Group, which plans to build the first commercial plant in Europe dedicated to producing jet fuel from municipal solid waste — everything from food waste to grass cuttings. The waste will be turned into syngas using a plasma-arc process, and that gas will form the basic chemical building blocks for the green jet fuel.

Joshua Kagan over at Greentech Media has a good update on this trend.

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My Clean Break column today is a shot back at those skeptics in the media who are hopping on the kill-the-IPCC bandwagon. I’ve pasted below the fuller version of the column, which was cut to get into the paper:

Spin is in, but climate change still there
Hardcore climate skeptics smell blood and so do some in the mainstream media, adding momentum to a boisterous campaign to discredit and confuse

Tyler Hamilton
Energy Reporter

The following e-mail arrived last week from an instructor at Seneca College. He was gleeful, commenting on all the negative publicity recently directed at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“How will the Star explain to her devoted believer’s (sic) why Al Gore and David Suzuki are being led away in handcuffs?” he wrote. “ClimateGate, ThermometerGate, GlacierGate, AmazonGate… Button up Mr. Clean – it’s real (sic) cold out there this winter.”

These taunting, often hateful e-mails arrive all the time from folks who don’t believe climate change (human caused or otherwise) is happening, and who believe their case is strengthened every time some libertarian pundit adds to their arsenal of doubt.

They mock the green economy and green energy. On climate action, they worship the status quo. Lately, they smell blood. And like underfed sharks at an annual seal gathering, they’re whipping themselves into a frenzy in hopes of turning a scratch into a fatal gorging.

Sarah Palin is now writing off all climate science as “a bunch of snake oil.” Fox News host Glenn Beck said last week that IPCC scientists have so dishonoured themselves they should perform hara-kiri – that is, commit mass suicide by plunging a sword into their bellies.

Here in Canada, the Financial Post’s resident libertarian Terence Corcoran wrote a column in late January with a headline that shouted “Climate agency going up in flames,” while the Globe and Mail’s Margaret Wente wrote early in February that “the science scandals just keep on coming” and that the entire climate-change movement has been discredited. Columnist Rex Murphy, who has fittingly moved on to the National Post is pretty much saying the same thing, only with bigger words.

Wishful thinking doesn’t make it so.

Interestingly, both Corcoran and Wente supported their arguments by mentioning how climate scientist Andrew Weaver from the University of Victoria is, in the words of Wente, among the many climate scientists who “sense a sinking ship” and are “bailing out.” Corcoran wrote that Weaver is “heading for the exits” and this is “firm evidence that the IPCC is in trouble.”

Here’s what Weaver had to say last Wednesday when asked by the Star about the recent coverage. “It would be nice if they actually called me,” he said, referring to Wente, Corcoran and some journalists in England.

He said his comments from an earlier CanWest story have been cherry picked and twisted. “It’s all utterly ridiculous. The way it’s being spun is that there’s this sinking ship and the rats are trying to leave.”

But the true sinking ship is the Earth’s climate system, he said. “It’s as if the Titanic is going down and we’re all arguing about the colour of the deck chairs. Surely there was an error in the IPCC report. It’s wrong, and it shouldn’t have been there. But this is being used as an attempt by those who are desperately trying to undermine the IPCC.”

First, it helps to understand what the IPCC really is. It is an international scientific body established by the United Nations in 1988 to publish regular reports on the state of the Earth’s climate. The IPCC doesn’t do its own research. Rather it gets more than 2,000 of the world’s top climate scientists to review the latest peer-reviewed literature. It then gets a few hundred of them to write up its reports.

Here we have a similar body called the Royal Society of Canada.

Those who participate in the IPCC, like Weaver, are volunteers. They work for free on an issue that consumes a huge amount of their time. As scientists, they’re not the greatest communicators or managers. This contrasts with the industry-backed lobbyists and spin doctors who are paid big bucks to scrutinize, bully and discredit these scientists and add noise to the skeptics’ echo chamber.

Take the controversy some are calling GlacierGate, which relates to information on Himalayan glacier melt buried in a 3,000-page IPCC report from 2007. The report said there was a very high chance the Himalayan glaciers would completely melt by 2035. The statement was indeed rubbish, being based on a WWF-International report from 2005.

As a result, we certainly should be combing the rest of the report for similar errors. The recent obsession with this one error, however, ignores the true peer-reviewed evidence that the Himalayan glaciers are, in fact, still melting. We just don’t know exactly how fast.

And let us not forget the Arctic, Antarctica, Greenland and even the Alberta glaciers. David Barber, a University of Manitoba professor who is an expert on Arctic sea ice, recently reported that the Arctic ice is melting “faster than our most pessimistic projections.”

University of Calgary climate scientist Shawn Marshall led a study published last month that found Alberta’s Rocky Mountain glaciers will lose 82 per cent of their ice by 2100 compared to 2005 measurements. Earlier, the University of North British Columbia had already concluded that the glaciers lost about 25 per cent for their cover between 1985 and 2005.

Weaver points out that the 2007 IPCC report was, in fact, conservative with its conclusions. At the time they didn’t have access to more accurate satellite data under NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission.

The new GRACE data, said Weaver, “has revealed that Greenland has been melting rather dramatically. Also, not only is Antarctica melting, but West Antarctica is melting quite rapidly.”

The GRACE data and Marshall and Barber studies are just some of the more recent developments. They reinforce hundreds, even thousands of climate-change studies from the past two decades that form pieces of this complex puzzle. But there are enough pieces in place that we’re starting to see an image, and it doesn’t look good.

Is this alarmism? Sure it is, and so it should be. Do climate change scientists sometimes get worried and show it? Sure they do, but apparently that’s bad. Do we really expect them to go about their scientific duties with Spock-like precision that’s void of emotion and human imperfection?

This is where the so-called ClimateGate scandal comes into play. Remember those e-mails that were illegally hacked from the computer servers at the University of East Anglia, home to the U.K.’s Climatic Research Unit? The comments revealed an attempt by a small group of scientists to withhold some information from climate skeptics and allegedly deceive the public by massaging data.

But on closer reading, even the U.K. Guardian newspaper, one of the IPCC’s biggest critics these days, admits the accusations are mostly baseless. “Almost all the media and political discussion about the hacked climate e-mails has been based on brief sound bites publicized by professional skeptics and their blogs,” wrote Guardian environmental writer Fred Pearce. “In many cases, these have been taken out of context and twisted to mean something they were never intended to.”

Now the skeptics are touting AmazonGate, which relates to an IPCC finding that small reductions in rainfall in the Amazon could devastate up to 40 per cent of the Brazilian rainforest. It was based on a WWF-International report. But was it wrong?

The report’s co-author, Andrew Rowell, is fighting back. In a letter to the U.K. Sunday Times, which first broke the story, Rowell said he was never called and the reporter failed to do proper research.

According to Rowell, the reporter “ignored evidence that the figure had been backed up by peer-reviewed research both before and after our publication.” One of the world’s top Amazon scientists, Daniel Nepstad, confirmed last week that Rowell’s report and the IPCC’s conclusion were both correct.

Yet the misinformation campaign continues. The skeptics say we’re cooling, pointing rather U.S.-centrically to the snowfall that has pummeled cities such as Washington, D.C. and ignoring record warming elsewhere – like in Vancouver, where snow is being flown in by helicopter so the Olympic ski events can be held.

By the way, snowfall is evidence of precipitation, not cooling, and climate science is about extremes – record snowfall and rainfall in one part of the planet, record drought in another. Same goes for temperature, where you’ll see record highs in one place and record lows in another.

It’s the rising frequency of records and higher global temperature averages we should be worried about. And that’s what we’re seeing. “In the Arctic, there have been parts that are 10 to 20 degrees C warmer this year,” said Weaver. “These are stunning temperatures.”

But why should we believe NASA, the World Meteorological Organization, and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which have each declared the 2000s as the hottest decade on record?

For the pundits, it’s far more interesting – and easier — to dwell on the colour of the deck chairs. This, and not the science, is the great global warming hoax.

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Mississauga-based Electrovaya Inc., maker of lithium-ion Superpolymer batteries, is supplying batteries for a utility-scale energy storage project being spearheaded by CEATI International Inc. of Montreal, an advanced technology centre for utilities. The $7.5 million project will be a large-scale initiative involving multiple utilities and sites. The batteries will be tested as storage for renewable energy generation and as a way to ease distribution and transmission bottlenecks in high-density urban areas. CEATI will also investigate the repurposing of electric-vehicle batteries for smart-grid applications, given that a battery that outlives its usefulness in a vehicle can still be used for many years as general energy storage for the grid.

On the acquisition front, two more promising Ontario cleantech ventures have been plucked up by U.S. firms. On Tuesday Toronto-based biogas maker Stormfisher Biogas announced it had been acquired by Virginia-based Greenhouse Gas Services. Despite having one of the most boring and uninspiring names, Greenhouse Gas Services is a venture of GE Energy Financial Services and AES Corp., so it has some serious backing. The company invests in and develops projects that reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, and it then sells the carbon credits. So here’s my question: If some of the biggest Stormfisher projects are expected to be in Ontario, and since the Ontario Power Authority doesn’t appear to be letting biogas projects keep carbon credits, then what’s in it for Greenhouse Gas Services? I can only speculate that the power authority has quietly decided to let developers keep credits from methane destruction. Something I’ll have to follow up on.

And just today, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Calisolar announced it had acquired Vaughan, Ontario-based 6N Silicon, a maker of solar-grade silicon that will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary. “In addition, $22.5 million in funding was raised from existing Calisolar and 6N investors,” the companies said in a statement. “The new funds will be used to increase capacity at the Sunnyvale, California cell manufacturing facility and expand silicon purification operations in Vaughan, Ontario.” It’s sad to see 6N fall under foreign ownership so early in its life, but the good news is that Calisolar is likely to set up some module assembly in Ontario to take advantage of the feed-in-tariff program here. Given that its solar cells will contain 6N’s silicon, the company will be well positioned to meet Ontario’s local content requirements and even supply other cell/module makers.

Finally, I have a follow to my story about Vestas and the possibility it will lay roots in Ontario. I spoke Wednesday to the company’s head of global offshore markets, who spoke highly of the Trillium projects and called the opportunity to develop offshore wind in the Great Lakes “fantastic.” He wouldn’t say if Vestas plans to establish manufacturing in Ontario — which isn’t surprising — but given the potential in the Great Lakes, the liklihood of Trillium’s projects moving forward first, and the positive policy and regulatory environment in Ontario (including the feed-in-tariff program, which offers 19 cents per kilowatt-hour for offshore wind power), all the stars are aligned and it’s only a matter of time before Vestas makes its move.

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I got a chance last week to drive a Tesla Roadster around for the day. A wonderful experience, to say the least. It also gave me some perspective that you might only get while zipping around in an all-electric car. As my Clean Break column this week explains, I got a bit smug — started to judge other cars and look at them as part of a collective of individual polluters — smokers, you might say. Sure, some people drive less or drive hybrids or drive super efficient little cars, but they’re still smokers. Smoking light cigarettes or just half a pack a day instead of a pack doesn’t make you a non-smoker. But electric car owners — they’re non-smokers in a room from of a smokers, and I gotta tell you, it’s quite disgusting being in that room.

Read column here.

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I have a story in today’s Toronto Star about Vestas and why the world’s largest maker of wind turbines is seriously looking at setting up shop in Ontario. Vestas already has a large manufacturing footprint in Colorado, but its interest in southern Ontario has more to do with the potential North American market for offshore wind. So why Ontario? Because offshore wind in the Great Lakes provides a huge opportunity, and Ontario happens to have the most freshwater offshore real estate, as well as a developer, Trillium Power, that is well ahead of the pack with respect to project development. Also, Ontario is the only jurisdiction in North America to have a feed-in-tariff for offshore wind — the province offers 19 cents per kilowatt-hour of offshore wind power. This makes it easier for Trillium, which has four projects totalling 3,700 megawatts in the pipeline, to pioneer offshore development in the Great Lakes.

Some signs that Vestas wants to come to Ontario? Last fall Vestas Offshore opened an office in Toronto that is serving as its North American headquarters for offshore wind sales. Last week company officials flew in to tour a number of potential sites in Hamilton, Niagara, Kingston and Belleville, among others, as possible sites for manufacturing facilities. The officials, according to sources, were also here to size up the local supply chain and supporting infrastructure. And this morning, Trillium announced that it has chosen Vestas as supplier of up to 740 offshore wind turbines for its four projects.

Laying roots in southern Ontario makes sense for Vestas, which is looking at long term growth. The feed-in-tariff program in Ontario provides certainty that demand will be there for both onshore and offshore projects, plus Ontario can serve as a great launchpad into the U.S. market, where states such as New York, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin also plan to develop in the Great Lakes. Of course, this is potential business on top of planned offshore projects on the east coast. Ontario simply makes more sense as a location for serving those markets.

If Vestas did commit to Ontario, it would be another major win for the province, which last month confirmed a $7 billion deal with a Korean consortium, led by Samsung, which plans to manufacture and develop 2,500 megawatts worth of wind and solar projects in the province.

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France’s Areva SA is known mostly as a designer of light-water nuclear reactors, builder of transmission and distribution systems, and a miner of uranium, so the announcement today that it has purchased 100 per cent of concentrated solar power company Ausra Inc. came as a surprise. Ausra, based in Mountain View, Calif., was founded by Canadian inventor Dr David Mills. Mills developed the underlying technology as a student and professor in Australia, but located the company in Silicon Valley as part of a major venture capital infusion from Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Mills is currently the company’s chief scientific officer.

Areva said today that the acquisition marks its entry into the solar thermal power market, where it intends to be the leader. The market itself is expected to grow 20 per cent annually over the next decade. This is just the latest in a string of acquisitions and deals aimed at broadening Areva’s portfolio of renewable energy products and services. The company has been pushing heavily into biomass power and has been building biomass/biogas plants in the U.S., Brazil, India, Thailand and other countries. It is dabbling in hydrogen production and fuel cell systems, and through its acquisition of Germany’s Multibrid is trying to establish itself as a future leader in offshore wind.

It’s going to take big, deep-pocketed companies like Areva to really push deployment of solar thermal and other promising renewables, so this acquisition of Ausra is a good sign of where the market is heading. Given that the nuclear renaissance simply isn’t materializing as expected, it’s wise for Areva and other big energy conglomerates to hedge their bets.

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The Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), an Ottawa a Waterloo, Ontario-based think tank founded in 2002 by Research In Motion co-CEO Jim Balsillie, says we shouldn’t expect any major expansion of the nuclear market before 2030. After that, the future of the industry is no more certain.

After three and a half years of extensive study, which included exhaustive consultation with industry experts and review of peer-reviewed literature, the policy think tank released a report yesterday that says the nuclear industry will have a hard enough time just replacing older reactors in the existing global fleet. Fact is, nuclear’s contribution to the global power mix since 2000 has fallen, as has the number of reactors in the fleet. Meanwhile, 2008 was the first year since the mid-1950s that no new nuclear reactor was connected to the grid. There have been refurbishments and life extensions, and there has been a lot of talk about building new reactors, but so far the massive, fast-paced expansion the industry has touted simply isn’t materializing. There will be some modest growth, but CIGI doesn’t expect nuclear will play a major role in combatting climate change before 2030. Between now and then, it also says alternatives — solar, wind, energy efficiency, conservation, smart grid technologies — will gain momentum and may ultimately prevent nuclear projects from getting a foothold. “Research and development is proceeding at such a pace for most of these alternatives that improvements in performance and cost will likely arrive faster than for nuclear technology,” the study concluded.

Think about it: by 2030 it’s quite possible we’ll have energy storage breakthroughs that give intermittant renewables baseload characteristics, but instead of deploying them in massive multibillion-dollar chunks, they could be part of a distributed energy system that locates power closer to consumers, and deploys it quickly and when needed.

CIGI lists a number of issues that have held back expansion of the nuclear power market:

• High upfront cost — reactors that can cost up to $10 billion a piece.
• Labour shortages resulting from boomer retirements and lack of investment in training and education.
• Long construction lead time.
• High risk of cost overruns and delay.
• High reliance on government subsidies and public backstopping.
• Ongoing concerns with waste management.
• Alternatives becoming increasingly more competitive.

Now, the nuclear industry isn’t oblivious to these issues, and indeed, there is a move underway to build smaller reactors that can be built more quickly, on time, and at a more manageable cost and pace. Also, these mini reactors would fit better into a distributed generation model, and attempts at developing small thorium-fuelled reactors would address waste management and nuclear proliferation concerns. CIGI acknowledged these developments, but said we’re not likely to see thorium reactors or mini-reactors being adopted in any significant way before 2030 — again, too late to be relied on for climate-change mitigation.

All this said, there will be growth — in China, in India, and a handful of other countries — and there will be refurbishments. This should keep the industry busy for the next couple of decades. No jobs are likely at risk here. Over the long term, however, the future of the nuclear industry would appear more uncertain.

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