Colonoscopies and gastroscopies aren’t fun, but sometimes you just gotta have one to spot a problem before it becomes too big. When you get to a certain age these procedures tend to become more routine — a way to keep an eye on the plumbing and only fix it when you have to. Better that than to find out too late and be forced into emergency for a costly and risky surgery. The same can be said for our municipal water infrastructure. Let a problem fester and you might unexpectedly see a major burst in a water main that floods part of town and costs a bundle to fix and clean up. I point to the water main break in Toronto at the beginning of January, when five homes were flooded and had to be evacuated. The pipe in question was 89 years old, so the city should have seen it coming. (Just in: Yet another water main break in Toronto, this one causing an all-day power outage in part of the city). It simply makes sense to routinely inspect your pipelines so you can spot leaks and breaks before they become catastrophic bursts. At that point you can target the fix, which is ultimately a cheaper approach to pipeline management.

Or maybe not. The problem with inspections is that they usually require the pipeline to be dewatered beforehand. This can be expensive, and the logistics are a bit daunting. This presented an opportunity for Mississauga, Ont.-based Pressure Pipeline Inspection Co., which has developed a technology that can be inserted into a pipeline while the water is flowing. A combination of sensors and cameras can be used to spot leaks and assess the overall condition of a pipeline, giving water utilities more information for better managing pipeline renewal. I recently wrote an article on Pressure Pipeline in the Toronto Star.

The company has two main technologies: Sahara and PipeDiver. Sahara consists of a long cable that can be fed through an access tap into a “live” pipe. It has a sensor on the tip and a small parachute-like collar opens up once inside to capture the flow of the water, which pulls the cable deep into the pipe. As it travels it sends out acoustic signals. An operater on the surface listens with a special device and tracks the location of the sensor, at the same time listening for acoustical changes that indicate a leak or trouble spot. Sahara can also be equipped with a fibre-optic digital camera at the tip, allowing for live video inspection at the same time.

PipeDiver ditches the cable altogether. It’s a remotely controlled free-swimming robot that is injected at one point in a water main and extracted many kilometres away. PipeDiver is targeted at press-stressed concrete cylinder pipes, which are typically quite large. In Mexico, Pressure Pipe recently broke a record by letting its PipeDiver device swim 37 kilometres before it was finally retrieved. I encourage you to watch the video above — it shows how PipeDiver is put into the pipe and, even more neat, how it’s taken out.

This kind of technology will become increasingly important as municipalities struggle with aging water infrastructure. It’s estimated that 15 per cent of water is leaking from our infrastructure, a major waste to say the least. Municipalities, faced with limited budgets, are going to have to do a better job prioritizing projects and targeting fixes. The current approach — replacing or renewing large segments of infrastructure based on a pre-schedule, or simply responding to bursts when they happen — is an inefficient use of limited financial resources. Better management and maintenance of assets will require more inspection, and more inspection will require technologies that can do the job at the lowest cost and with the least disruption.

There’s an article in the Toronto Star today by real-estate lawyer Bob Aaron about the impact of stupidly planned wind projects (or any electricity project for that matter) on nearby property values. A resident in Ontario complained that his property taxes were too high because the assessed value of his property didn’t take into account a noisy wind-farm substation located across the street. This resident, according to the case, was subject to a constant buzz or humming from the substation that exceeded what was acceptable under regulation. The provincial Assessment Review Board agreed with the homeowner and slashed his property assessment in half, arguing that the humming would indeed make it more difficult to sell the house and therefore its market value must be dramatically discounted. The property owner’s “successful appeal of his assessment is only the first of many similar cases that are certain to follow,” wrote Aaron. “The result, of course, will be a significant reduction in the tax base of municipalities like Amaranth, which play host to wind farms.”

Wind developers should take this case very seriously. And in this case, Canadian Hydro Developers — the wind developer in question — should have done a better job of siting the substation in an appropriate place. But let’s be clear: this isn’t about noise from wind turbines, this is about a substation that was built 360 metres away from a house. If noise measurements were properly done the developer should have known not to locate the substation so close to the home. Substations can be a particular nuisance, regardless of whether they’re associated with a wind farm, a solar farm or a natural gas plant, because they buzz 24-hours a day. Wind turbines, however, must now be sited 550 metres away from a home, they don’t make noise 24-hours a day, and on windy days when they operate at full tilt the background sound of the wind drowns out much of, if not all, of the noise. The key things to take away from this case is that decibels exceeded regulation, it had to do with a substation, and it had to do with a particular developer. It says nothing particular about wind farms, so for that reason, I disagree with Aaron on the decision’s potential impact on wind energy projects.

Having been battered by the economic downturn, Burnaby, B.C.-based solar manufacturer Day4 Energy is on the upswing again. Today it announced it has sold 5.1 megawatts of its modules to Ontario’s Hybridyne Power Systems Canada, which designs and constructs utility-scale solar parks and is 47.5 per cent owned by Atlantic Wind and Solar Inc.

Atlantic and Hybridyne plan to use the panels for a 2 MW energy park in Newmarket Newcastle, about an hour east of Toronto, and Atlantic will use the rest for a variety of rooftop solar installations, part of its plan to take advantage of Ontario’s new feed-in tariff program. Hybridyne makes its own inverters in Ontario, so the projects are expected to qualify under the province’s local content rules. That said, the combo of Hybridyne and Day4 makes this an all-Canadian solar partnership, which is good to see.

Toronto-based Morgan Solar, maker of a new type of concentrated solar PV system based on light-guiding optics, has upped its first round financing to $8.2 million from $4.7 million after attracting the dollars of two Canadian venture-capital groups.

You’ll recall the first phase of this round when it was announced in October. Spain’s Iberdrola, the world’s largest renewable energy provider, and Nypro Inc., a leader in injection molding and contract manufacturing, were part of that announcement, along with venture-capital firm Turnstone Capital Management LLC. The addition of two Canadian VC groups is encouraging because, well, it’s nice to see Canadians investing in Canadians, but also because it increases the chance that Morgan Solar will remain based out of Canada. “The funds will finance activities through to the commercial release of Morgan Solar’s unique Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) solar panel — the Sun Simba HCPV,” the company said in a statement. “Early manufacturing for testing and certification has started at Morgan Solar’s facility in Toronto. Initial commercial deliveries are expected by the end of the year, with global sales, manufacturing, and delivery capabilities ramping up in 2011.”

Tom Rand at VCi Green Fund in Toronto led a Canadian investor consortium that contributed $2.3 million. It wasn’t a problem finding interest, he told me today. “I just reached into my network and within days it was filled up.” Another group took on $1.2 million, but the investors behind it were not disclosed. Rand said he visited a thousand or so booths at the Solar Power International show in Anaheim in October and found Morgan Solar to be the only company offering a non-commodity solar play. “It was the only one that had something significantly different,” he said. “Someone finally asked, why are we using lenses, which is a technology from the last century. We know how to guide light now, so let’s guide light.” Rand added that Morgan Solar has the potential to disrupt the industry on price. “The question is whether they can meet demand” if they can get to that magic price point.

Lithium-ion battery maker Electrovaya Inc. may finally be turning a slew of promising partnerships and MOUs over the past two years into more than just words. The Mississauga-based company ended 2009 on a positive note, announcing in its year-end results that revenue jumped roughly 50 per cent and losses shrunk from over $4 million to less than $600,000.  “Fiscal 2009 marked a turning point for Electrovaya,” said chief executive Sankar Das Gupta in a statement. “Over the course of the past year we have increased our presence in the global market for lithium ion batteries used for electrification of vehicles and for smart grid applications.” He emphasized that Electrovaya, for the first time, showed a profit in its most recent quarter 0f $549,000, what Das Gupta hailed as a “significant achievement.”

To put this into perspective, Electrovaya is still a small fry in the global battery game, pulling in less than $4 million in revenues last year. It’s also an increasingly crowded market, with players like A123, EnerDel, Advanced Lithium, Altair, Panasonic, Boston Power and a slew of others battling for electric-car supremacy. And while it has a history of touting partnerships that haven’t gone anywhere, even if just a fraction bear fruit it could elevate Electrovaya above the noise. And forget about the U.S. market, I’m talking Asia and the deals this company have brokered in India, China and Japan. Just last month it announced an MOU with India’s HEROElectric to jointly developed electric scooters and motorcycles (unlike in China, where electric bicycles are more popular, the East Indian crowd prefers scooters and motorcycles). HEROElectric controls half the market in India for two-wheelers, so it’s not such a bad partner to have. In November it signed another MOU with Japan’s Nippon Kouatsu Electric Co. to co-develop smart grid stationary battery systems based on its Lithium Ion SuperPolymer cell technology, and in late 2008 it signed an MOU with Chana International Corp., China’s third-largest automaker, to develop zero-emission electric cars. Significantly, Chana has joint ventures with Ford, Mazda and Suzuki. Electrovaya is also a partner with India’s Tata Motors as part of a joint-venture to manufacture its  batteries in Norway.

As would be expected, Electrovaya is doing a good job leveraging its own connections to India.

These are all potentially positive announcements. Problem with Electrovaya is that little is known about all these partnerships since their announcement. How is the Norway manufacturing plant progressing? Are the Chinese MOUs moving forward or have they fizzled? That the company has turned a corner by reporting profitability in its fourth quarter, and by announcing some solid revenue growth in 2009, may be a sign that some of the groundwork laid in 2008 and 2009 is beginning to pay off. Certainly a Canadian cleantech company to watch in 2010.