A team of electrical engineering undergrads from MIT have developed a new type of “regenerative” shock absorber that captures energy every time a vehicle hits a bump in the road. They claim a 10 per cent improvement in vehicle fuel efficiency, and have formed a company called Levant Power Corp. to commercialize a product. According to an MIT press release, “In their testing so far, the students found that in a 6-shock heavy truck, each shock absorber could generate up to an average of 1 kilowatt on a standard road — enough power to completely displace the large alternator load in heavy trucks and military vehicles, and in some cases even run accessory devices such as hybrid trailer refrigeration units.”

This is just one of several components/parts of a car where energy-efficiency improvements are still possible, and taken together they show how far we can take vehicle efficiency. I can only imagine how much vehicle fuel economy would improve at this time of the year in Toronto, given all the potholes we’re starting to see after the winter thaw.

BTW: I know biofuels aren’t a factor in vehicle efficiency, but they are a factor in the debate over carbon emissions. One problem with ethanol, aside from the whole fuel-from-food controversy, is that vehicle fuel economy takes a 27-per-cent hit because of the lower energy content in ethanol. So to drive the same distance on ethanol as you would with 100 per cent gasoline you’d be using much more fuel, and presumably paying much more. A U.K.-based engineering company called Ricardo Inc. says it has developed a technology that, according to president Dean Harlow, “turns the gasoline-ethanol equation upside down.” The flex-fuel technology, called Ethanol Boosted Direct Injection, offers the performance of diesel, at the cost of a gasoline engine, but running on ethanol or an ethanol-gasoline blend. Now, if we could just get cellulosic ethanol to start flowing on a commercial scale…

Ontario is famous for coming out with progressive programs and then trying to shoe-horn them into existing policies and procedures, with the end result being delay, dissatisfaction and eventually dead projects. When the province launched its standard offer program for renewable projects under 10 megawatts, developers of projects less than 500 kilowatts — e.g. farmers trying to set up biogas systems or community co-ops putting in a couple of wind turbines — found they were treated like the multi-megawatt big boys. They had to apply to the local distribution company for a “connection impact assessment,” which required a detailed engineering study. This application process typically involved a five-month wait in the queue before the application was even considered.

Somebody has finally realized that, hey, that dinky anaerobic digestion system or school-top solar system isn’t really going to impact the grid that much so, well, maybe we should let them skip ahead of those big wind farms that are hogging everyone’s attention and time.  That “somebody” is the Ontario Energy Board, which amended rules that will now let renewable projects between 10 kilowatts and 500 kilowatts in size avoid the queu altogether. Now, the local utility can still delay the project if it has any concerns, but at least these small developers can get to judgement day five months earlier. You can read the full story here.

The next step, which we’re supposed to see in the new Green Energy Act to be tabled next Monday, is a “right to connect.” We’ll see.

I meant to report this earlier but got sidetracked. Toronto-based WhalePower, maker of the tubercle-lined turbine blades inspired by humpback whale flippers, got the results back from its first independent study in the field. The blade design was tested on a 25-kilowatt Wenvor Technologies turbine at the Wind Energy Institute of Canada. The institude found that annualized energy production from the retrofitted blade increased by an estimated 20 per cent. You can find the data here and analysis here. “Rated power was attained at 12.5 metres per second versus the 15 meters per second previously published performance for the unmodified Wenvor turbine. (Caveat: it’s an estimate because the test of the retrofitted blade followed International Electro-Technical Commission standards, while the benchmark data did not). “An improvement of just 1 or 2 per cent in AEP is significant,” said Stephen Dewar, WhalePower’s director of R&D. “Here we have about 20 per cent with low noise. We’re thrilled by this result.”

The next step, I imagine, is to perform a more comprehensive apples-to-apples test on a larger turbine. Hopefully these results will help the company raise the capital it needs to take its testing to the next level. Perhaps at some point it will begin catching the attention of some of the bigger wind-energy players.

How does President Obama go about eliminating U.S. dependence on oil from the Middle East and Venezuela and at the same time discriminate against “dirty” petroleum from the Alberta oil sands? The U.S. president visits Canada on Thursday and environmentalists are aiming to get this message across: Oils-sand oil is dirty and the U.S. should impose tough emission standards on the final product before it’s allowed to be imported into the United States.

The Canadian government, single-mindedly focused on oil-sands development, will no doubt argue for an exemption from any kind of U.S. climate policy or continental cap-and-trade regime. The multibillion-dollar question is: What will an Obama administration do? Can he possibly achieve both objectives or, in need of energy security, will he give Canada a get-out-of-jail free card?

Curious to hear your thoughts, particularly from my friends south of the border.

Personally, I must have a dozen chargers from cellphones of Christmas past. I hate throwing them away, even though I’ve yet to find them useful for anything else. So it was with great delight that I heard about attempts to establish — finally — an international standard for cellphone chargers that would prevent unnecessary duplication of electronic crap that ends up in landfills (though I heard Apple and its iPhone is the odd one out). Thankful, car manufacturers seem to have learned from this mess and, apparently, such a standard is accepted for the connectors/cables used to charge up electric cars.