Just days before the Ontario government is expected to officially launch its much-anticipated feed-in tariff program (FIT), Energy and Infrastructure Minister George Smitherman announced that the province — through crown-owned utility Hydro One — will spend $2.3 billion on 20 projects designed to expand and upgrade its transmission system. The investment is expected to take place over three years and create 20,000 “green-collar” jobs in the process. Many of the projects are aimed at expanding capacity along existing corridors to carry more power from the Far North where there remains an abundance of untapped wind and hydroelectric projects. But some of the money will also go toward constructing enabler lines for areas of the province where renewable-energy development clusters have been identified. It’s being called an historic investment in transmission, the largest single commitment in decades, and the government said it was important to make this commitment to signal to the market that Ontario is serious about accommodating development of green-energy projects. Indeed, it’s a wise investment to announce just before the launch of the FIT program, and just after announcing a $250-million loan guarantee program dedicated to aboriginal-owned renewable generation and transmission projects.

A description of each projects can be found here. The province has also supplied a map showing where existing lines will be reinforced and where enabler lines will be built.

Not that I find it at all that surprising, but the International Energy Agency has pinpointed Canada as a laggard on energy efficiency in a report released a few days ago. The report targets Canada’s pulp and paper, iron and steel and cement industries, specifically. IEA analyst Ceclilia Tam told Canwest News that Canada’s performance isn’t just poor in comparison to the 29 other members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, but it ranks low on a worldwide basis. “The reason for this is that in many cases Canada is using older, less efficient technology, and significant improvement can be achieved by switching to current, best-available technology,” said Tam.

Compared to building new power plants the investment in industrial efficiency should be seen as low-hanging fruit to Canadian politicians, but sadly it’s not. This study gives us yet another reason to more aggressively embrace approaches such as co-generation as a way to lower Canada’s industrial emissions and become more globally competitive at the same time.

Is anybody listening? Sadly, when multinational industrial giants look to cut costs by shutting down facilities, where do they go first? They zero in on those facilities that are least competitive, and that means least efficient.

Catch The Wind Inc. is on a roll.  It was only last month that it announced a large field trial of its Vindicator wind sensor with Canadian Hydro Developers, Canada’s largest independent wind developer. To follow that up, it is now reporting the formation of a collaborative R&D project with Gamesa, Spain’s biggest wind-turbine manufacturer and one of the top manufacturers in the world. Just to recap, the Vindicator is a sensor that can detect wind speeds and direction up to 1,000 metres away, giving a wind turbine’s control system enough time to adjust blades and nacelle position accordingly. Over time, this improves the efficiency of the turbine and reduces wear on components and blades. Gamesa has agreed to mount the Vindicator on one of its operating 2-megawatt turbines at a yet-to-be-announced wind farm in the United States. Phil Rogers, Catch The Wind’s CEO, called the partnership a “significant breakthrough.”

It’s often said there’s not much more innovation that can take place around wind technology, aside from tinkering at the edges, and that the big manufacturers have no incentive to change a formula works. But this teaming up of Gamesa and Catch The Wind shows that innovation is alive and strong and that even the majors, like Gamesa, are looking for ways to distinguish themselves in the market. Complacency is no longer an option. Others, including WhalePower, ExRo Technologies, Earthtronics, FloDesign, and secretive Lancaster Wind Energy are also raising the bar on what we can expect from wind technology over the coming years.

It’s that time again. Sustainable Development Technology Canada has awarded grants to another round of companies eager to demonstrate their respective clean technologies. This time around 18 projects are being funded to the tune of $54 million. To date SDTC has invested $425 million in 171 clean technology projects. Of the 18, here are a few that caught my attention:

* Duropar Technologies Inc. of Brampton, Ontario, has partnered with Canadian Pacific Railway on a project that seeks to replace the use of creosote-covered railway ties with ones that are made of 100 per cent waste-based composite material. By waste, I mean plastic that is difficult to recycle through municipal programs and old asphalt, which is a pain in the butt to dispose of. Now, no secret that the old creosote ties have toxic chemicals in them that leech into the soil and ground-water along train tracks. Here’s a fact I didn’t know: the railway industry goes through more than 20 million ties a year in North America alone. “Each tie leaches up to 15 kilograms of creosote over its lifetime,” according to SDTC. Duropar has no apparent Web site, but I did find this link to one of their patents. Its composite ties don’t leech, so are considered a much “greener” alternative.

* Saltworks Technologies Inc. of Vancouver, B.C., has developed a desalination system “that reduces electrical energy requirements by up to 80 per cent, thereby improving the affordability and accessibility of clean water,” according to SDTC. The key to this is an inexpensive, low-temperature thermal energy conversion system that uses solar energy or industrial waste heat (process heat) to reduce electricity consumption. For the SDTC project, Saltworks will build a commercial-scale 5,000-litre/day “transportable” pilot plant that can be used for ocean water. The process doesn’t rely on chemicals. The company, as you can see by its Web site, is still pretty much in stealth mode. If its process and technology are as efficient as promised, this could be huge for the Middle East, Australia, and shoreline areas of the U.S. southwest that have scarce fresh-water resources. The Middle East alone, certainly an area with terrific solar exposure, wants to build several massive oil-fired generating stations that will be used to power desalination plants. The potential market is massive.

* And then there’s StormFisher Biogas of Toronto, a company I’ve written about several times before. Seems StormFisher is moving ahead with plans to produce biogas in anaerobic digesters that can be injected into Ontario’s natural gas pipeline — specifically, the pipeline owned and operated by Union Gas. It will be a Canadian-first if they can do it, though “Canadian first” means little when we know it’s being done all the time in Europe. Still, nice to see us getting into the game. StormFisher’s system will take methane produced from manure and food processing by-products (i.e grape skins from wine-making, waste from cheese and milk production, etc.) and will convert it into pipeline-grade natural gas. At the same time, StormFisher’s own process by-product — i.e. the digestate — will be turned into a quality organic fertilizer that can be sold back to farmers to displace the use of chemical fertilizers. “The project aims to validate next generation biogas technologies which, although commercially available in Europe, are not in use in North America,” according to SDTC.

I was at the International Symposium on Solar Energy from Space this week in Toronto where scientists gathered to discuss the feasibility and challenges of establishing massive solar farms in space that beam energy back to Earth. For a quick overview of Day 1, you can read my story on the three-day conference in the Toronto Star. Anyway, one interesting thing I’ll point out is the live demonstration of power being transmitted across a 10-metre open space. Now, it wasn’t a lot of power, but it was enough to light up a cluster of red LED lights and to move a motorized object on wheels. The demonstration team was from Kobe University in Japan, and they were led by vice-dean of graduate engineering Nobuyuki Kaya. It was a neat demo, and all I can say — not being an engineer who lives and breathes this stuff — is that scientists in the room were impressed. Now, all they have to do is scale it up to 1 gigawatt of power travelling 36,000 kilometres via a 1o-kilometre wide beam that doesn’t fry birds or knock down planes.

Challenges aside, it was pretty cool to watch.