My latest Clean Break column on Ontario inventor Ian Marnoch and his new heat engine design that could make efforts at turning low-grade heat into electricity more economical.

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Tyler Hamilton

The Geological Survey of Canada put out a research paper in 2010 that concluded the country has enough geothermal heat to power itself many times over.

The big question is how much of that heat can be economically tapped?

As a general rule, the hotter and shallower the resource the more economical it is to exploit based on current technologies. The higher the temperature the easier it is to extract the volume of heat required to spin a turbine and generate electricity.

But there aren’t many places in Canada, beyond northern B.C., Alberta and the Yukon, that have that right combination of temperature and depth. Everywhere else, you’ll have to drill deep – as much as 10 kilometres down – to find enough heat. That’s a deal-breaker with respect to cost and risk.

It’s also a nut Ian Marnoch of Port Severn, Ont., is trying to crack. For the past seven years the Ontario inventor has been developing a new kind of “heat engine” that he says can generate electricity more economically from lower-grade heat. And that heat could come from anywhere: the ground, the sun, or an industrial waste process.

Not that the technology doesn’t already exist to do it. There are other heat-engine technologies out there, most notably those based on the Organic Rankine thermodynamic cycle. These systems transfer heat to a working fluid with a low boiling point, such as ammonia.

As the fluid heats up, expands and vaporizes it drives a turbine that generates electricity. The vapour is then cooled, condensing it back into a fluid which is recycled back through the process.

Marnoch’s heat engine works under a different principle. There is no vaporization of fluids. Instead, the Marnoch system relies on dry pre-pressurized air that expands and contracts as it is heated and cooled, causing pistons to turn that generate electricity.

This in itself may not be new, but it’s the way Marnoch has configured his machine that may give it an edge over other technologies. He says his thermal power engine can process heat much faster and at bigger volumes than Organic Rankine machines.

“It can process about three times as much heat by value as an Organic Rankine machine of the same size,” says Marnoch, adding that his heat engine can be designed to be much smaller and, therefore, less expensive.

That it operates more efficiently also means it can tap into lower temperatures that aren’t viable with other technologies. One area where Marnoch hopes to demonstrate the superiority of his design is in northern communities that currently rely on diesel generators for electricity production.

All he needs is the right temperature differential – that is, the gap between the heat source, such as the water in a deep mine shaft or temperature at the bottom of an old oil or natural gas well, and the heat sink, which would be the cool northern air.

If that gap is 20 degrees C or higher there’s potential to generate electricity. The system becomes more economical the wider the gap.

Marnoch has been working to perfect his patented heat engine with a team of PhD students and professors at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, which has supported development of the machine for the past five years with funding from the federal and Ontario governments. The Ontario Power Authority and Ontario Centres of Excellence were also early funders.

The latest prototype of the machine is at the university’s new Clean Energy Research Laboratory, but Marnoch is eager to get the machine out in the field and tested in a real-world situation.

St. Marys Cement is one possible candidate. The company is exploring using the Marnoch engine to generate electricity from the waste heat of its Bowmanville cement plant.

“It is in very early discussions but we are very enthusiastic about the potential and what this can mean for industries with large volumes of low-grade waste heat,” says Martin Vroegh, environmental manager at St Marys.

Marnoch is hoping that the smaller size of his machine, relative to an Organic Rankine set-up, will make his technology more attractive to operators of industrial facilities, which often lack the real estate to host such equipment.

“It could open the door for us,” he says. “We just need to get out there and prove it works.”

If only it were that easy. Like any inventor or entrepreneur trying to bring a new clean technology to market, particularly one that directly challenges well-entrenched products, Marnoch knows he has many more hurdles to overcome and many years of trying.

It comes with the territory. But persistence is the soul of innovation, and Marnoch has plenty of it.

Tyler Hamilton, author of Mad Like Tesla, writes weekly about green energy and clean technologies. Contact him at tyler@cleanbreak.ca

My Clean Break column this week looks at a small company in Toronto called TowerLabs that helps get green building technologies tested and ultimately embraced by major condo and tower developers, a notoriously conservative bunch at the best of times. The company is a spinoff of condo developer Tridel, and so far its efforts at matching up tower builders with new cleantech startups is showing strong results.

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By Tyler Hamilton

Technologies abound, many of them developed in Ontario, with promise to reduce the amount of energy consumption in buildings, particularly the big energy-hogging towers that dot our urban and increasingly suburban landscapes.

But the companies that construct these giant towers are notoriously conservative, as are the banks that fund them, so cracking into this massive market hasn’t been easy for newcomers.

Jamie James is trying to break down some walls. As a sustainability adviser to Canadian condo builder Tridel for nearly 10 years, James helped build an internal R&D program that tested out the performance of new energy-efficiency technologies for buildings.

In 2010, with Tridel’s blessing and support, he decided to “externalize” the program and expand it to other tower builders, with the goal of speeding up the time it takes to get new green building technologies to the larger marketplace.

Along this path, James found a partner in MaRS Discovery District, which donated office space. The non-profit social venture TowerLabs was born.

“I go to cleantech innovators who are targeting the real estate sector with the proposition that I can get you into the buildings and working with potential customers,” James explains.

TowerLabs acts as relationship maker and project manager, helping to get the technology installed and its performance measured in both real-world and test scenarios. “To go into a building and have real-live demos can go a long way toward showing that something is viable,” he says.

The approach is already paying off for Vancouver-based dPoint Technologies, which has developed a new type of air ventilation system that dramatically reduces the need to heat or cool fresh intake air, depending on the season.

Some rooftop ventilation systems found on condo buildings will take fresh air from the outside, heat it (if in the winter), and blow it through the inside of the building via a network of ducts. The air flows into the hallway of each floor and, moving through the gap at the bottom of doors, enters each condo suite.

Stale warm air, meanwhile, is expelled through the bathroom fans of individual suites. When that warm air is ejected, so is the energy within it.

The dPoint system, or Energy Recovery Ventilator, takes a very different approach. Rather than have fresh air come from a central ventilation system on a rooftop, each condo unit has its own individual air intake and exhaust box.

As warm, stale inside air is exhausted the dPoint system instantly recovers and transfers the heat to the incoming flow of fresh air. It does this using a special polymer membrane that also filters out impurities and transfers humidity between the two air flows as they move in opposite directions.

“This is really a dramatic shift in the way a building breathes,” says James, adding that the dPoint technology passed the “sniff test” and is gaining traction after a few initial tests with Tridel.

With TowerLabs’ help, about 740 dPoint systems are now being installed in two Tridel condo towers in Scarborough.

“If all goes well, dPoint go from being a near total unknown in the market less than 18 months ago to being a specification for the largest condo builder in Toronto,” James says. “So that’s kind of proving out the approach we’re taking.”

Tridel continues to play a key role, but TowerLabs is hoping to bring on other builders. It also plans to test out technologies at the tower being built as part of the expansion at MaRS.

Another technology being put to the test is a new type of variable speed motor used in heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems from Toronto-based start-up InMotive.

To push warm and cool air around requires fans, and the motors that power those fans often only operate in two modes: completely on, and completely off. One way of saving energy is to swap out those motors with variable speed versions that can slow down or speed up based on air flow demands.

What InMotive has designed it was it calls a mechatronic variable speed drive that is more efficient and requires less maintenance than conventional variable-speed motor designs. TowerLabs helped the company get its first prototype tested in a high-rise building.

“The goal was to prove that the concept worked, and they achieved that,” says James, adding that more tests are planned as the product evolves.

TowerLabs also has Tridel testing out a solar co-generation system, which supplies electricity through photovoltaic panels and harvests solar heat at the same time.

“Once you get the innovation in there you can really change its fate overnight,” he says.

Tyler Hamilton, author of Mad Like Tesla, writes weekly about green energy and clean technologies.

On Dec. 16 I first hinted it would happen — and now it has.  Just days before Christmas, the Ontario government has backed away from plans to start phasing our inefficient light bulbs on Jan. 1, 2012. You can read in my earlier post why I think that is a mistake, and how the McGuinty government can no longer be believed when it says it cares about the impacts of climate change and recognizes the urgency of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Let me be clear: the Green Energy Act is great and full of potential, and the feed-in-tariff program is helping create green jobs, but it’s probably one of the most expensive ways to reduce emissions in Ontario. The government likes to point to the coal phaseout as if that’s all that needs to be done, but by neglecting the low-hanging fruit that is energy efficiency, it is showing that it’s still only interested in half-measures and sexy solutions that make for a great photo opp.

But what fires me up most is Energy Minister Chris Bentley’s reason for the delay to 2014.  He more or less blamed the federal government for being first to impose a delay, telling the Toronto Star it was essential to harmonize with the federal schedule. “To ensure a consistent approach and to make compliance easier for consumers, retailers and manufacturers, the province proposes to harmonize compliance dates for incandescent light bulbs with the federal government,” the Star quotes an energy ministry official in a statement.

This completely contradicts Ontario’s earlier motives. Remember, it was Ontario that made the first move, announcing in mid-April 2007 it planned a phaseout of inefficient bulbs. This made it the first jurisdiction in North America to make such a commitment. Apparently harmonization of policy wasn’t a concern back then, as the federal government didn’t announce its intentions to do the same until a week later. McGuinty at the time basked in the glow of showing leadership on this issue. Leadership and setting an example mattered. Now it apparently doesn’t. Following is more important now.

British Columbia, meanwhile, announced its own planned ban after Ontario and has already followed through. That’s leadership, the same kind of leadership it showed by introducing a carbon tax.

When the Canadian federal government decided earlier this year to delay plans to phase out inefficient light bulbs, it drew the ire of environmental groups who argued the delay was unnecessary and would further set back the government’s already weak emissions-reduction strategy. The Pembina Institute, for example, said the two-year delay — from Jan 1, 2012 to Jan 1, 2014 — would negate 13 million of avoidable greenhouse gas emissions and potentially $300 million in permanent energy savings.

Fortunately, the provinces can do their own thing. As of Jan. 1, 2010, for example, retailers in British Columbia have been prohibited from restocking 75-watt and 100-watt incandescent bulbs. It was also assumed that Ontario would follow through with a similar commitment beginning Jan. 1, 2012, but there’s a strong possibility the government will backtrack at the 11th hour.

I was curious about the status of the planned phaseout, so put in a query to the Ontario Ministry of Energy. Here was the initial reply: “Following the decision by the federal government, Ontario is reviewing its options to proceed with proposed efficiency standards for general service lighting,” wrote spokesman Paul Gerard in an e-mailed reply. I asked whether the review would continue into next year, meaning the government would miss the Jan. 1 start date of the phaseout. “The outcome of the review will be announced very shortly, before the new year,” Gerard replied.

I’m not expecting good news — you never get good news during the holiday season. It may be that the province will stick to its guns and follows through, but I’m getting the feeling they won’t given the fact that, just today, U.S. Congress succeeded in neutering its own country’s 2012 light bulb phaseout by preventing the U.S. Department of Energy from enforcing the law, as detailed in the Energy and Independence Security Act 2007.

That would be a tremendous shame, making one question whether Ontario — despite the rhetoric — is taking the issue of greenhouse-gas reductions seriously. It would also further tarnish Canada’s already lackluster reputation on the climate file in the aftermath of climate talks in Durban, South Africa. At a time when we should be adding to our efforts, it seems we’re instead backtracking on previous commitments, including delaying our participation in the Western Climate Initiative (fortunately Quebec is following through). The momentum is in the wrong direction, and this is alarming. Perhaps some public pressure is needed over the next few days to convince Ontario to stick with its guns and start the light bulb phaseout Jan. 1, as planned.

Let’s be clear, this isn’t about banning incandescent bulbs — this is about bulb efficiency, where compact fluorescent bulbs and LED bulbs have the advantage. But there have been innovations around incandescent technology as well. As Steven Nadel, executive director of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, pointed out today, “five manufacturers are now producing and selling efficient incandescent bulbs that meet the standards.”  In the U.S. context law-abiding companies will still follow the rule. “Less scrupulous companies will take advantage of the lack of enforcement, selling products that waste energy and increase energy costs for consumers. If many manufacturers take advantage of the lack of enforcement, recent investments that these five manufacturers have made to produce efficient lamps could be undermined.”

Ontario needs to consider this as well. Many companies have made business decisions based on the expectation of a phaseout starting Jan. 1. Companies such as Sears Canada and IKEA have already stopped selling (inefficient) incandescent bulbs, proving that the time is right to follow through. There’s no justification for putting on the brakes now. Indeed, by forging ahead Ontario can stand out as a leader and not fall under the shadow of a federal government that’s more concerned about short-term economic gain than the long-term health of our economy and environment.

So what path will you choose, Mr. McGuinty?

FYI: This is a presentation and panel that I participated in in late September at the Evergreen Brick Works Forum on Leadership, Innovation and Sustainability. We were confined to a PechaKucha presentation format, meaning you have to go through 20 slides and spend no more than 20 seconds on each one — i.e. total presentation of just six minutes and 40 seconds. Needless to say, we all felt rushed, but it allowed more time for discussion. You can find the other panels here, as well as video of the keynote presentation from Jeremy Rifkin.