Ian Clifford, chief executive of ZENN Motor Co., wrote in an e-mail Tuesday to investors and other friends of ZENN that, with respect to EEStor, “it appears less likely that we will have third-party verification of permittivity or the prototype EESU this year as we had hoped.”

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. EEStor CEO Dick Weir said as much back in late October. Barring some last-minute help from Santa, ZENN and everyone else will have to wait until 2009. But Clifford is staying positive. “I firmly believe that 2009 will be the year that the automotive industry changes forever — and not just because of the current economic turmoil we are all familiar with, but led by the commercialization of disruptive zero-emission automotive solutions by ZMC.”

Clifford also says he’s encouraged by the latest U.S. patent issued to EEStor dated Dec. 16. It gives EEStor another layer of intellectual property protection, and after a quick scan of this patent it appears Mr. Weir and team have made some important refinements on the road to commercialization. He also goes into much greater detail describing the manufacturing process. (more…)

My Clean Break column on Monday takes a look at a Vancouver-based company called MSR Innovations that has developed an interesting way of reducing the cost of installing solar on residential rooftops.

Analysts talk about the likelihood that solar PV module costs will fall 35 per cent in 2009 because of competition from thin-film technologies and an oversupply of polysilicon. This is good news for those contemplating solar, particularly developers with multi-megawatt projects on the drawing board. But in the residential market, even in Ontario where a 42-cent feed-in tariff is offered, solar PV is still too expensive and the payback too far off.

MSR Innovations has come up with a new type of roofing system designed specifically as an enabler of solar PV. (more…)

Just an update: The Air New Zealand two-hour test flight that will involve the use of Jatropha-based biofuel in a Boeing 747-400′s Rolls-Royce engine will now take place on Dec. 30.

The flight, initially scheduled for Dec. 3, was understandably cancelled after another unrelated test flight in November (not involving biofuels) resulted in the crash of an Airbus A320. Seven people died.

For background on this biofuel test flight, check this post.

I had the opportunity to chat yesterday with German legislator Hermann Scheer, who is the chief architect of the renewable-energy law that has turned Germany into a wind and solar leader. In fact, it’s now called “Scheer’s Law.”

Scheer said Ontario could easily follow Germany’s path, and is in even better shape to achieve 100 per cent renewable energy on its electricity system. The reason: 7,000 megawatts of hydroelectric that already exists. (more…)

I’ve often wondered about the wisdom of trying to co-locate offshore wind turbines with wave-energy technology as a way of saving on transmission-line costs and creating a capacity factor that’s much higher than the two technologies on their own. Back in July I e-mailed Francis Farley, inventor of the Anaconda wave power converter — basically a snake-like machine that captures the kinetic energy in the waves as its various segments bob up and down. I asked Farley what he thought about the idea of pairing his system with offshore wind. “You have a good point,” he said. “There would be some economies in combining offshore wind with wave energy, and some sites would have both.”

I dropped the idea, thinking it might be good fodder for a column at a later date. Then I noticed this week that Eric Stoutenburg, a researcher at Stanford University, came to a similar conclusion in a research paper that he presented this week at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting in San Francisco. “If wave energy wants to get off the ground, it might have better potential to develop in the shadow of an offshore wind plant,” Stoutenburg told Cleantech Group. (more…)