I had the opportunity to chat yesterday with Tim Flannery, the Australian author of The Weather Makers, who stopped into the Toronto Star to speak with a handful of reporters and editors about what he’s been up to since the release of his eye-opening book on climate change. One of the most intriguing tidbids that came out of that conversation is that he’s been working closely with British billionaire Sir Richard Branson on ways of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, part of Branson’s $25 million Earth Challenge Prize announced in early February. In addition to Flannery, NASA climate scientist James Hansen and environmentalist James Lovelock and former U.S. vice-president Al Gore are helping Branson with the contest. According to Flannery, more than 2,000 innovations have been submitted for the prize.

One interesting idea that Flannery is involved with calls for reforestation of the tropics through special agreements with developing countries. He didn’t go into great detail, but from what I could gather these countries could make money based on the price of carbon by planting trees, including harvestable fruit trees that could double as food production. Countries involved in the projects would enter an agreement whereby communities would be paid based on the level of reforestation in a given area, and this would be accurately monitored by a global system of satellites. Both sides of the carbon trading scheme — the country paying for the carbon credits and the country receiving payment — would have access to this satellite system so they could calculate forest inventory based on the same visual data. If signs of deforestation appeared a country would have to refund payment accordingly, and presumably some kind of dispute mechanism would be created to handle disagreements.

Seems interesting, if not overly complex. But hell, at least somebody is thinking about these things. Flannery believes there’s enough tropical lands — former forests that are now grasslands — to stabilize CO2 concentration through permanent sequestration of the carbon.

Also, Flannery seems to be a big fan of pyrolysis technology, like the kind use by B.C.-based Dynamotive and a number of other Canadian companies to turn biomass, such as wood waste, into bio-oil, syngas and char. The bio-oil and syngas are both renewable fuels that can be use for power generation, heating and chemical production, while the carbon- and nitrogen-rich char, he says, can double as a fertilizer and way to permanently sequester carbon.

VIA Technologies, based out of Taiwan, competes against AMD and Intel in the computer chip market, but it’s admittedly a David up against two Goliaths. To carve out its own niche in the market, VIA has always focused on building the most energy-efficient chip platforms. Now “green” computing is trendy, judging by the activities of Dell, Sun and some of the other computer industry giants.

I had the opportunity to interview former Toronto native Scott Phipps, who heads up marketing for VIA out of the company’s Taiwan headquarters. Phipps talks about VIA’s carbon-free computing program, something Dell has since copied. He also talks about the need for energy-efficient computing in a world where making the most out of renewable energy, such as solar, means operating as efficiently as you can. Have a listen.

It’s interesting, I didn’t realize it until they were published back-to-back, but two stories I wrote recently — one published Sunday and the other Monday — demonstrate the critical importance of water and how the world is filled with those who have lots of it and those who have little, if any.

The first was a first-person piece about an exclusive tour I had of the Niagara Tunnel Project, which is using the world’s largest hard-rock boring machine to crush through more than 10 kilometres of Silurian rock under the city of Niagara Falls. The purpose of the project is to divert more water from the Niagara river for electricity generation. Apparently, Canada — under a bilateral treaty with the United States — wasn’t using its fair share of the resource so the Ontario government decided there was no better time than now to put that water to good use. It reminded me how lucky Canadians are in having such a vast supply of fresh water. The Great Lakes alone represent a lion’s share, and this excludes the thousands and thousands of smaller lakes scattered throughout Canada.

My second piece highlighted the other extreme — the fact that 20 per cent of Asians have no access to fresh water and that one third of the world’s population is in some way affected by water scarcity. This situation, as company’s such as General Electric have pointed out, will be a trigger in the future for civil and cross-border wars, and indeed, is already the source of conflict in many Central Asian countries. It’s why water technologies are going to play an increasingly important role in the world, and why companies such as GE have been aggressively consolidating the industry — most recently with its purchase of Oakville, Ontario-based Zenon Technologies. On the innovation front, one company I mention in the piece is Toronto-based Mobile Cube Corp., which is attempting to commercialize “water supply for a village in a box.” Specifically, the product is a portable water-filtration system developed in Switzerland that’s powered by a small wind turbine and foldout solar panels. It weighs only 850 kilograms, can be transported on the back of a big pickup truck, and after a two-hour setup can start generating up to 20 kilowatt-hours a day of electricity — enough to produce up to 20,000 litres of pure drinking water from sewage or 3,000 litres from seawater through desalinization. At a cost of $50,000, it could be a low-cost way for some struggling villages to get access to clean water without the need to lay expensive infrastructure, such as pipelines and transmission.

Seems the Philips/TIR deal was just the tip of the iceberg for Canadian cleantech companies. A few more to add to the list:

* CO2 Solutions announced that partner Babcock & Wilcox has acquired an exclusive North American option to license the Quebec City-based company’s CO2-capture technology, which is based on a novel enzyme process. Babcock has also agreed to contribute to the costs of a formal joint technological development program. “As part of the agreement, B&W will take on the expenses involved in adapting CO2 Solution’s technology for a pilot project at a coal fired plant, which was announced last October. The agreement also foresees that in light of the results obtained, the two companies may undertake negotiations for a license grant,” the companies said in a release. I wrote about this company last month. Of interest is that B&W put out its own release the same day discussing two projects — one in Canada, the other in the United States — involving the use of a rival oxy-coal process for separating near-pure CO2 in a coal plant. It appears B&W is hedging its bets through its agreement with CO2 Solution.

* Fuel-cell developer Plug Power Inc. has agreed to acquire Richmond, B.C.-based Cellex Power Products Inc. for $45 million (U.S.), part of an effort by Plug Power to round out its product offerings. Cellex has developed a fuel-cell unit for forklifts and other materials handling vehicles, something Plug Power considers a near-term revenue opportunity. From what I understand, Cellex has used Ballard fuel cells up until now (as has General Hydrogen, another forklift fuel-cell provider), though I’m not sure if this has been an exclusive arrangement. You can bet that will change quickly. I should point out this is another Canadian company being scooped up by a non-Canadian company. Sigh…

* Xantrex Technology Inc. has formed a joint venture with Shanghai Power Transmission & Distribution Co. Ltd., a member of the massive Shanghai Electric Group. The venture, 49 per cent owned by Xantrex, will “design, manufacture and sell solar and wind power electronics products exclusively for the renewable energy market in China from a facility to be built in Shanghai, China.” Xantrex chairman Mossadiq Umedaly called the deal an “important milestone” as his Vancouver-based company attempts to establish a presence in China. The company points out in a press release that China’s new renewable energy law requires 15 per cent of the country’s energy mix to come from renewable energy sources by the year 2020. This venture could be potentially huge for Xantrex.

* Finally, Vancouver-based Finavera Renewables Inc. announced that SAIC will be its systems integration partner for future “ocean energy conversion programs.” According to a statement, “SAIC will work with Finavera to develop, integrate, procure, install and test ocean energy conversion devices, including the patented ‘AquaBuOY’ in marine renewable energy parks.” Finavera is a company I’ve been meaning to profile, since I haven’t devoted enough attention in this blog to wave and tidal energy systems. This working relationship with SAIC isn’t a huge deal, but it’s a sign that the company may have enough interesting projects in the pipeline to get a company as respected as SAIC on board. Worth watching.

A couple of weeks after meeting rivals in Paris to discuss phasing out incandescent light bulbs, Royal Philips Electronics of the Netherlands has decided to beef up its stable of solid-state lighting technology with the $75 million purchase of Vancouver-based TIR Systems Ltd.

TIR is developer of the Lexel technology, an LED lighting system designed to produce high-quality light for general illumination. The company says its LED light source is designed to be analogous to a conventional lamp, socket and ballast so it can be easily adopted by lighting manufacturers.

Philips, meanwhile, said it expects solid-state lighting to be the fastest-growing segment of the lighting market over the next two decades, eventually surpassing compact fluorescents in a number of applications. The company became a leader in solid-state lighting when in 1999 it created a joint venture with Agilent Technologies called Lumileds. Philips took over Lumileds in 2005 as part of its commitment to developing LED lighting for everyday use.

“Through the successful integration of Lumileds in 2005, we ensured a leading position in Light Emitting Diodes for the general lighting market, and through the acquisition of TIR Systems we now strengthen our position in delivering integrated lighting products to lighting fixtures manufacturers,” said Peter van Strijp, chief executive of solid-state lighting at Philips Lighting. “Our focus will now be on making lighting products that utilize TIR Systems’ Solid State Lighting modules widely available.”

Philips is paying roughly a 30 per cent premium for TIR’s shares, a good haul for the B.C. company’s shareholders. It’s a bittersweet deal: It’s good to see a Canadian technology appreciated by a global giant, but sad to see a Canadian technology swallowed up by a global giant. Overall, however, it’s a positive that Philips is raising the bar on solid-state lighting, which is where we need to go as an energy-consuming society.