So calm is the solar farm as its grid of thousands of panels bask gloriously in the sun. Quiet. Serene. You can almost smell the Tropicana suntan lotion. Wind turbines have it a little harder with unpredictable gusts and changing wind direction putting immense stress on blades, gears and other compenents. But of all these renewable sources, those that must rest in the ocean have it the toughest. Storms. Pounding waves. Salt. And who knows what else?

It’s why it comes as no surprise when attempts to capture the energy of our oceans don’t go as planned. The latest news comes out of Nova Scotia, where the province’s power company and partner OpenHydro Tidal Technology are trying to capture tidal energy in the Bay of Fundy. OpenHydro recently placed a 400-tonne, six-storey turbine in the Bay of Fundy, home of some of the most awesome and powerful tides in the world. Earlier this month, the two companies discovered that the harsh ocean environment had broken two of the turbine’s blades. The massive 1-megawatt machine is now scheduled to be removed sometime this fall. We’ve seen this story before with demonstration projects from Verdant, Pelamis Wave, Finavera and others. It’s not the technology doesn’t work, it’s that we haven’t been able to prove the technology can last for 20 or more years in service. The ocean is unforgiveable, as builders of offshore oil platforms and offshore wind projects known. That said, this is exactly why these demonstrations and pilot projects are so important. Unless we can test the many news wave, tidal and riverbed designs entering the market, we’ll never learn how to improve their designs. Computer modelling and simulations can’t replace real-world testing.

The G20 is set to get started in Toronto this weekend and it’s going to be a zoo. Canadians will end up spending $1 billion on security alone, and that’s just for a few days. The city’s downtown core will be in lockdown. Trees in the area have been removed for fear that protesters will use branches as weapons. Streets and businesses will be closed. Traffic around the city will be chaos. This, all so a bunch of leaders can get a bit of face time and likely accomplish very little.

Fun, eh?

So, after visiting Toronto, what will world leaders and foreign press walk away with? Probably the image they’ve always held of Canada — a large country with natural resources galore. Lumber, oil, natural gas, minerals, metals, fresh water. Will they walk away with the impression that Canada is an innovative nation that’s leading the world in creating a green economy? In a word, no. In fact, one of the key drivers of green economics — climate change — wasn’t even going to be part of the G20 agenda until leaders from the United Nations, the European Union and Mexico issued public protests. Canada’s current federal government is more than happy with the status quo.

Canada’s dependence on its natural resources will only continue to stifle innovation in this country, according to venture capitalist Andrew Heintzman in his new book The New Entrepreneurs (check out my Clean Break column for more info on this). But it’s not like this innovation doesn’t exist. In fact, many of them are designed to improve the productivity and efficiency of Canada’s natural resource-based sectors. Heintzman’s book goes into great detail profiling dozens of the entrepreneurs and clean technology companies that are the seeds of a green economy in Canada, and while some of these risk takers are world leaders in what they do, they’re based in a country that’s failing so far to see the opportunity they represent.

The issue is close to Heintzman’s heart. He is co-founder and CEO of Investeco Capital, a Toronto based venture capital firm that funds emerging clean technology companies. He’s also chair of Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty’s climate change advisory panel. “Canada has virtually no national strategy on renewable energy; no plans for high-speed rail lines in development; no national smart-grid plans of any consequences; no greenhouse gas emissions reductions goals of any meaning; and no energy efficiency goals,” he writes. “In short, Canada is lacking a coherent national strategy on the most important economic questions of our time – questions that will define our future competiveness, productivity and prosperity.”

Questions that are unlikely to be raised this weekend.

Swedish furniture goliath IKEA has become the first major retailer in Canada to commit to an all-out phaseout of incandescent light bulbs in 2011, a year ahead of a federal ban on the sale of low-efficiency light bulbs. In fact, IKEA said it will stop selling the bulbs by Jan. 1, 2011, about half a year from now. The retailer will focus sales on compact fluorescent, halogen and increasingly LED lighting options. “Clearly, Thomas Edison’s incandescent light bulb discovery was a landmark 19th century invention,” the company’s press release states. ”But times have changed. New discoveries prevail.”

Amen.

IEEE Spectrum’s online magazine has an interesting series of articles looking at the “coming clash between water and energy.” The idea is to highlight the water-energy nexus — the fact that conventional energy production requires enormous amounts of water, meaning the more electricity and fuels we consume the more water we consume. The opposite is also true: the more water we use the more energy required to keep it moving through pipelines and treating it. I found the following paragraph in one story compelling:

Plug your iPhone into the wall, and about half a liter of water must flow through kilometers of pipes, pumps, and the heat exchangers of a power plant. That’s a lot of money and machinery just so you can get a 6–watt-hour charge for your flashy little phone. Now, add up all the half-liters of water used to generate the roughly 17 billion megawatt-hours that the world will burn through this year. Trust us, it’s a lot of water. In the United States alone, on just one average day, more than 500 billion liters of freshwater travel through the country’s power plants—more than twice what flows through the Nile.

Another interesting way of looking at it is by measuring how much water is used every time somebody does a search on Google. “The 300 million searches we do a day take 150 000 liters. That’s a thousand bathtubs of water to power the data centers that handle the world’s idle curiosity.” Alternatively, most people haven’t a clue that flushing your toilet consumes electricity. That’s right — every time you flush that water needs to be moved and treated. That requires a vast network of pumps and treatment technologies that need to be powered. Remember during the Olympics, when Ontario’s electricity system operator released data on electricity consumption spikes during the final Canada-U.S. hockey game? During commercial breaks we’d see power use jump by 300 megawatts, mostly because people were going to the washroom and flushing their toilets. Did you know the single biggest consumer of electricity in Toronto is the city’s water and wastewater treatment facilities?

Power plants, it should be noted, are massive users of water — primarily for cooling. Just the Darlington and Pickering nuclear plants in Ontario require roughly 9 trillion litres of water a year for cooling. That’s about 19 times the annual water consumption of Toronto. Now, this water isn’t technically consumed. It’s considered a “flow-through” use of water, meaning most is returned back to Lake Ontario. I say “most” because 1 per cent is still consumed through evaporation, or what amounts to 90 billion litres for these two plants — i.e. the average annual water consumption of 750,000 Canadians, or the amount of water used in a year in a city nearly as large as Ottawa. (more…)

You own an electric car but the battery is only expected to last for seven or eight years before it needs to be replaced. Do you recycle it? Hell no — there’s still some juice in that there lithium-ion package, even if it’s not enough for powering a vehicle. The idea of having utilities collect these old batteries and use them for bulk energy storage has been around for a few years now. But why involve the utility? Researchers in California are looking at the idea of electric car owners using these old batteries as in-home energy storage, letting homeowners storage electricity overnight and then draw off the battery during peak times when power is more expensive. Alternatively, it could be used to store energy from microwind or rooftop solar systems. “Even after the end of usable battery life in the vehicle, the batteries will retain 70 to 80 percent of their residual capacity and be highly valued for stationary energy usage and other smart grid applications,” said Mike Ferry at the California Center for Sustainable Energy. “A viable secondary market for advanced automotive batteries could cut initial battery costs by spreading those costs over their entire useful lifetime.”

It’s funny that we’re talking about what to do with electric car batteries after they have served their purpose in a vehicle application. For one, there are only a few thousand plug-in electric vehicles that are highway-capable on the roads today. Second, it will be many years — say, five to 10 — before battery repurposing becomes an issue for these cars, and even then, on a very small scale initially. Still, this is the kind of advance study we should be doing during these early years of vehicle electrification.