Click here for release.

Highlights:

• 80.2 cents per kilowatt-hour for rooftop solar.
• 19 cents for offshore wind of any size (first jurisdiction in N.A. to set price)
• 13.5 cents for onshore wind of any size
• 14.7 for biogas under 5 MW.
• 44.3 cents for 10-MW-plus solar, sliding to 71.3 cents as projects scale down to 10 kilowatts.

The government will commence eight-week consultation process and expects to have the prices in effect this summer. More to come….

UPDATE: Here’s an article I just filed to the Toronto Star’s Web site. It contains more info regarding the proposed tariffs. Ontario introduced basic feed-in tariffs two years ago under its standard offer program, but project size was capped at 10 megawatts. The new advanced feed-in tariff program lifts the cap (though solar is still capped at 10 megawatts). It also offers higher prices for smaller projects, such as community-based wind and solar projects or residential solar. Most groups seem happy with the pricing with the exception of large solar developers, who despite getting a 2-cent increase to 44 cents per kilowatt-hour still argue it’s not enough to make projects economical (especially if you factor in poor Canadian-U.S. exchange rate and persistently tight credit markets).

Of course it remains to be seen whether this new feed-in tariff structure, despite being generous and being first on the continent, will be enough to attract investment, development, manufacturing and jobs. Curious to hear viewpoints on this.  Michigan introduced a bill last year that proposed similar advanced tariffs but it never got passed. Hawaii has proposed less ambitious tariffs, but Ontario’s will be first to go into effect and will be the most ambitious to date.

There’s a reason why Vancouver-based Advanced Lithium Power Inc. has a message on the home page of its Web site that reads, “ALP is expanding! Click here for career opportunities.”

As you’ll read in this Los Angeles Times blog entry, Fisker Automotive of Irvine, Calif., is using lithium-ion battery packs from Advanced Lithium to power its highly anticipated Karma plug-in hybrid. The Karma, at a cost of about $88,000 (U.S.), has Tesla-like looks but costs about $20,000 less. That’s partly because, as a hybrid (that is, like the GM Volt is has a gas-powered range extender that’s used to charge the battery while driving), its battery pack is less than half the size of the Tesla pack. First deliveries of the Karma are expected in spring 2010. About 1,300 have already been preordered.

Fisker, according to the LA Times piece, will make a “sizable” cash investment in Advanced Lithium and will get two seats on the Canadian company’s board.

Volatile anesthetics, used in hospitals for a variety of purposes, are halogenated ethers that make carbon dioxide look like a wimpy greenhouse gas. Isoflurane is 1,100 times worse than CO2, Sevoflurane is 1,600 times worse, and Desflurane is 1,900 times worse. When these anesthetics are used on a patient only about 5 per cent is actually metabolized in the body. The remaining 95 per cent gets vented into the atmosphere. Blue-Zone Technologies Ltd. of Concord, Ontario, has developed both a device (Deltasorb) that can capture those volatile gases and a complementary process for extracting and recycling them. The company’s goal is to have one of its devices — essentially an absorption cannister – in every operating room in every hospital around the world. It would install the cannisters for free but would regularly replace them for a monthly service fee. The compounds in filled cannisters would be extracted and used as a raw material for producing new anesthetics, offering another revenue stream for the company.

It’s estimated that the average hospital, in Canada anyway, releases the equivalent of 1,275 tonnes of CO2 each year because of the venting of volatile anesthetics. That’s like adding 400 cars to the road. Now, I don’t want to exaggerate how much volatile anesthetics contribute to global warming. One 1999 British study, admittedly dated, estimated that such emissions represented just .03 per cent of total CO2-equivalent emissions. (more…)

(Read to the end of this post for an update on studies and events around high-temperature geothermal opportunities in Canada)

The data is old — dating back to 1985 and earlier — but the Geological Survey of Canada is beginning to put together an inventory of geothermal resources across the country. The first study, published online last month in the journal Natural Resources Research, calculated total potential geothermal energy down to 250 metres. One of the most interesting findings, however, was that the temperature gradient wasn’t as steep as historically expected. The reason, the researchers concluded, is that  increases in surface temperature due to global warming was causing the first 50 metres of subsurface to also warm. It means the gap between temperature 50 metres down and temperature 100 metres and 200 metres down has narrowed. (See Toronto Star article here, in which researcher Stephen Grasby says in some locations shallow subsurface temperature has increased by a few degrees Celsius).

They put a positive spin on this finding, suggesting that there’s more thermal energy for home and residential heat-pump systems to tap, and that this energy will displace the use of fossil fuels. Hardly something to cheer about, however, given the initial causes of the warming. (more…)

Sustainable Development Technlogy Canada just completed its 13th funding round, this time putting $53 million into 16 cleantech projects and bringing its total funding to $376 million. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, SDTC only invests if private consortia come to the table with two-thirds of project funding. In total, 154 project have been funded with $1.3 billion in public-private funds.

Here are, in my opinion, some of the more interesting projects that got funded in this round: (more…)