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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

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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.

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.

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?

“Our research shows that during the past eight years alone, (commodity prices) have undone the decline of the previous century, rising to levels not seen since the early 1900s,” according to McKinsey. “In addition, volatility is now greater than at any time since the oil-shocked 1970s because commodity prices increasingly move in lockstep. Our analysis suggests that they will remain high and volatile for at least the next 20 years if current trends hold—barring a major macroeconomic shock—as global resource markets oscillate in response to surging global demand and inelastic supplies.”

The report talks of the surging demand for energy, food, metals and water as 3 billion new middle-class citizens emerge over the next two decades. In India calorie intake will rise 20 per cent per person, while in China per-capita meat consumption is expected to rise 60 per cent. While such dramatic growth of consumption isn’t unusual historically, and while we have managed to accommodate that growth in the past, McKinsey says things are very different this time around:

There are three differences today. First, we are now aware of the potential climatic impact of carbon emissions associated with surging resource use. Without major changes, global carbon emissions will remain significantly above the level required to keep increases in the global temperature below 2 degrees Celsius—the threshold identified as potentially catastrophic.

Second, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to expand the supply of commodities, especially in the short run. While there may not be absolute resource shortages—the perceived risk of one has historically spurred efficiency-enhancing innovations—we are at a point where supply is increasingly inelastic. Long-term marginal costs are increasing for many resources as depletion rates accelerate and new investments are made in more complex, less productive locations.

Third, the linkages among resources are becoming increasingly important. Consider, for example, the potential ripple effects of water shortfalls at a time when roughly 70 percent of all water is consumed by agriculture and 12 percent by energy production. In Uganda, water shortages have led to escalating energy prices, which led to the use of more wood fuels, which led to deforestation and soil degradation that threatened the food supply.

So where do we go from here? McKinsey, citing forthcoming research, says better resource productivity can maybe meet more than 20 per cent of the forecast 2030 demand for energy, steel, water and land. Higher prices over the long-term will also create incentives for “breakthrough” innovations that could reduce carbon emissions. But even then, a heck of a lot more needs to be done, the consultancy argues — and it won’t be easy. “Major policy, behavioral, and institutional barriers must be addressed,” it argues. “Yet as we enter a new era for commodities, there’s little choice but to act.”

Action. Now isn’t that a novel concept. Sure beats denial.

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Clean Break

By Tyler Hamilton

Jigar Shah thinks large when it comes to battling climate change.

That’s a good thing, because reducing humanity’s global greenhouse-gas emissions to a manageable level is a titanic problem needing equally enormous solutions.

Shah is the chief executive of Carbon War Room, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit enterprise co-founded and funded by British-born billionaire Richard Branson.

His mission, as the organization’s name makes clear, is to wage a war against carbon emissions by harnessing the power of markets and entrepreneurs. The trick is to get massive amounts of private capital to flow in the right direction.

Government policy is nice and has a role to play, but in Shah’s words the real action we need will only come about “using greed as a force for good.” And incremental steps won’t cut it. In a world that tends to measure greenhouse-gas emissions by megatons, Carbon War Room is only interested in tackling gigatons.

In other words, go big and move fast or lose the war.

Time appears to be running out – and it’s not environmentalists issuing the warning these days. Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, said this week “the door is closing” on our ability as a society to keep global emissions and temperatures to within manageable levels.

We already know that temperatures are on course to rise 2 degrees C no matter what we do. We have about five years, said Birol, to put the world on a course that will keep the thermometer from rising much further. “I am very worried,” the economist told the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper.

One area where Carbon War Room is moving fast and aiming at a large target is energy efficiency in buildings, which accounts for about 20 per cent of global CO2-equivalent emissions.

For example, Shah and his team helped bring together a consortium that is aiming to spend $650 million (U.S.), to start, on energy-efficiency retrofits in commercial buildings scattered throughout Miami, Fl. and Sacramento, Calif.

Their approach, revealed in September, builds on the creative financing model I wrote about in last week’s Clean Break column, only in this case it’s focused on commercial real estate.

The consortium is led by Ygrene Energy Fund, which reviews retrofit proposals and then passes them off to technology and engineering giant Lockheed Martin. Lockheed does the building audits, calculates the energy savings that could come from a retrofit, and provides all technology and services required to achieve those energy savings.

Energi Insurance Services reviews what Lockheed promises and insures the deal. To add an extra layer of security, HannoverRe further backs Energi’s insurance policy. The idea is that risk has been reduced so much that Barclays Capital, the financing partner in the consortium, is more than happy to fund it all.

Barclay’s gets paid back through a charge on the building owner’s property taxes that is collected by the municipalities over 15 or 20 years. If done right, that charge is less than the energy savings achieved through the retrofit. And it’s all done off-balance sheet, meaning it doesn’t add to a building owner’s debt load.

Miami and Sacramento love it, too. “They are going to generate 17,000 jobs, and they will see city revenues increase from a jump in building permit fees and sales tax revenues,” says Shah, in Toronto last week to speak at an industry conference.

Carbon War Room’s target is to see $300 billion (U.S.) in capital deployed in this way by 2020, and Shah is convinced a tipping point has already been reached.

“We have 65 cities on three continents begging us to deploy (this model) in their cities right now, and we’re moving as fast as we can,” says Shah, adding that pension funds and big institutional investors, having seen Barclays take the lead, are now coming to the table.

“There’s nothing anyone can do to stop it. It has irreversible momentum,” Shah says. “I’m ecstatic about it.”

That’s the power of aggregation, scale and thinking large. It can tap into massive pools of capital that one-off projects can’t touch.

Toronto has its own program in the works called Tower Renewal, which is aiming to see 1,200 residential apartment buildings in the GTA retrofitted at a cost of about $6 billion over 20 years.

The plan is to create an arms-length entity called Tower Renewal Corporation that would manage the program and arrange all financing. Project director Eleanor McAteer says the potential for energy savings, emissions-reduction and job creation is huge.

“Our approach would be very similar to what we’re reading about in Sacramento and Miami,” she says.

“We’ve had some general discussions with the financing marketplace and yes, there is a great deal of interest, but we need to have regulatory approval from the province before we can enter into any serious discussions.”

The city asked the province to make those regulatory changes in summer 2010. As the end of 2011 fast approaches there’s still no word from Queen’s Park.

So as momentum around the world for this kind of climate solution builds, Toronto is sitting and waiting for a simple action from the province that will come at no cost to taxpayers or ratepayers.

What’s the holdup Premier McGuinty?

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

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Tyler Hamilton

What is the province doing to help homeowners conserve energy and cope with rising electricity prices?

Not much these days.

Ontario’s earlier commitment to match rebates under the federal government’s program has long expired. The program was extended to March 31, 2012, but the province decided to pull its support.

Instead, we got the Clean Energy Benefit – a 10 per cent rebate on electricity bills that will be in place until 2015 at a cost to taxpayers of more than $1 billion a year.

That’s money that could have gone toward conservation programs. Now it’s being used to undermine conservation by giving consumers less reason to care about energy wastefulness.

It’s hardly a sustainable approach. Clearly, the only way to help Ontario ratepayers cope with rising electricity rates over the long term is to push for deep energy conservation in households across the provinces.

And here’s the thing: it could, if done properly, barely cost anything for the province and municipalities to make such a serious conservation push.

It turns out that a lack of subsidies isn’t the biggest thing holding back major residential energy-efficiency projects; it’s the lack of affordable and easy-to-access financing.

It’s also about the lack of willingness on the part of provincial and municipal leaders to embrace programs that have already had successful test drives south of the border.

These programs come under a variety of names, but at their core is the ability of a municipality to raise cheap capital through a bond issue and then offer low-interest financing to homeowners wanting to do major energy-efficiency retrofits.

Under such a model, the homeowner repays the city (with interest) over 15 to 20 years through a type of “local improvement charge” added to property tax bills. The idea is that the permanent energy savings from the retrofit would more than cover the cost of repayment.

Also, the charge is tied to the home, not the owner, so doesn’t add to personal debt load. When an owner sells the property the new owner takes over the charge but also gains the benefit of having lower monthly energy costs in a climate of rising prices.

“There’s huge interesting in this approach, from people at all levels of government,” says Sonja Persram, president of Sustainable Alternatives Consulting Inc. in Toronto.

She says 26 U.S. states have already changed legislation to permit this kind of municipal financing, and late last year Nova Scotia made similar changes in support of a solar-thermal installation program in Halifax.

“It can be delivered at no cost to municipalities, and some municipalities have been looking at having programs that are even slightly revenue-positive,” she adds.

Under contract with the David Suzuki Foundation, Persram spent the past two years studying the approach, which she calls Property-Assessed Payments for Energy Retrofits, or PAPER for short. Her findings were published in three reports that came out in April, May and August.

The research has been well received in both financial and building appraisal communities, and earlier this year the Toronto Real Estate Board passed a motion supporting creation of a PAPER program for Ontario.

There is a big roadblock, however, and this is where the province plays a crucial role. Toronto and other municipalities can’t offer this kind of financing unless Ontario moves, like Nova Scotia did, to pass enabling legislation.

Queen’s Park would also need to assuage the concerns of mortgage lenders. After all, if you as a homeowner get $30,000 in municipal financing to retrofit your home, a bank might not like that the lien for that amount placed on your property takes priority over a mortgage in the event of default.

(Such a concern raised by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the U.S. has effectively brought all PAPER-like residential programs to a standstill until legal issues are resolved).

The province would have to make clear to all parties that it wouldn’t be the entire $30,000 that gets priority over the mortgage, but only any defaulted payments on that financed amount. That’s because once the property is sold, the new owner would take over the remainder of the retrofit financing.

“In order for such a program to work here you have to have the province, the financial institutions and the City of Toronto all sitting in the same room talking about this issue,” says Tim Stoate, an associate director and investment expert at the Toronto Atmospheric Fund. “I don’t think that conversation has happened.”

It needs to happen if the McGuinty government wants to pay more than lip-service to its energy conservation goals. It is unlikely happen, at least not at a scale that matters, if the province doesn’t step in as chief facilitator and coordinator.

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

Mad Like Tesla: Underdog Inventors and Their Relentless Pursuit of Clean Energy was launched this month and has been well-received. The reviews so far have been positive, and awareness of the book is slowly building. But not fast enough. I want to take this moment to ask my readers, many of whom have already purchased the book (thank you!), to help spread the word. Share this link or the Mad Like Tesla website (www.madliketesla.com) on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Refer to it when commenting on the various blogs you might follow. And for my media friends out there — whether in the mainstream press or the blogosphere — please consider a review, or alternatively, I’m happy to chat about the many odd and inspiring stories in this book. Please see press release here.

Thank you all for your ongoing interest and support. BTW: Many have asked, so I’m happy to report that the e-book version of Mad Like Tesla is now available at Amazon.com.

“This is an exciting time for REGEN as we receive follow-on orders from large corporate accounts. We’re excited to increase our channel partners’ revenues by delivering further value-added services to their customers,” said REGEN CEO Tim Angus. The company has had several successful pilot projects with utilities and is now focusing its efforts on the U.S. market, particularly California, where the company just opened up an office. It also has its eyes on the Northeast U.S., where there are plenty of demand-reduction and incentive programs that make this technology an attractive option.