The Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), an Ottawa a Waterloo, Ontario-based think tank founded in 2002 by Research In Motion co-CEO Jim Balsillie, says we shouldn’t expect any major expansion of the nuclear market before 2030. After that, the future of the industry is no more certain.

After three and a half years of extensive study, which included exhaustive consultation with industry experts and review of peer-reviewed literature, the policy think tank released a report yesterday that says the nuclear industry will have a hard enough time just replacing older reactors in the existing global fleet. Fact is, nuclear’s contribution to the global power mix since 2000 has fallen, as has the number of reactors in the fleet. Meanwhile, 2008 was the first year since the mid-1950s that no new nuclear reactor was connected to the grid. There have been refurbishments and life extensions, and there has been a lot of talk about building new reactors, but so far the massive, fast-paced expansion the industry has touted simply isn’t materializing. There will be some modest growth, but CIGI doesn’t expect nuclear will play a major role in combatting climate change before 2030. Between now and then, it also says alternatives — solar, wind, energy efficiency, conservation, smart grid technologies — will gain momentum and may ultimately prevent nuclear projects from getting a foothold. “Research and development is proceeding at such a pace for most of these alternatives that improvements in performance and cost will likely arrive faster than for nuclear technology,” the study concluded.

Think about it: by 2030 it’s quite possible we’ll have energy storage breakthroughs that give intermittant renewables baseload characteristics, but instead of deploying them in massive multibillion-dollar chunks, they could be part of a distributed energy system that locates power closer to consumers, and deploys it quickly and when needed.

CIGI lists a number of issues that have held back expansion of the nuclear power market:

• High upfront cost — reactors that can cost up to $10 billion a piece.
• Labour shortages resulting from boomer retirements and lack of investment in training and education.
• Long construction lead time.
• High risk of cost overruns and delay.
• High reliance on government subsidies and public backstopping.
• Ongoing concerns with waste management.
• Alternatives becoming increasingly more competitive.

Now, the nuclear industry isn’t oblivious to these issues, and indeed, there is a move underway to build smaller reactors that can be built more quickly, on time, and at a more manageable cost and pace. Also, these mini reactors would fit better into a distributed generation model, and attempts at developing small thorium-fuelled reactors would address waste management and nuclear proliferation concerns. CIGI acknowledged these developments, but said we’re not likely to see thorium reactors or mini-reactors being adopted in any significant way before 2030 — again, too late to be relied on for climate-change mitigation.

All this said, there will be growth — in China, in India, and a handful of other countries — and there will be refurbishments. This should keep the industry busy for the next couple of decades. No jobs are likely at risk here. Over the long term, however, the future of the nuclear industry would appear more uncertain.

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.

Bloom Energy, a semi-stealthy investment of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, has been making more noise lately about its fuel-cell technology. The company, in a recent BusinessWeek article, claims its system — about the size of a refrigerator and capable of supplying both heat and power to a home — will come down so much in cost over the next three to five years that it will hit grid parity. It’s not like the technology that Bloom’s product is based on is new. Solid-oxide fuel cells have been around for years and several startups have combined heat and power products based on the design. But Bloom, obviously, has figured out a way of making it reliable and cheap enough to deploy widely — or so we’re led to believe. The system would run on natural gas or a selection of renewable feedstocks, such as ethanol, offering a way for natural gas companies to indirectly become power utilities. I compare it to the battle between telephone and cable companies, which have infrastructures based on different technologies but eventually began competing in each other’s market for the same services — phone, cable, Internet. Utilities — gas or electric — will soon just be called energy utilities, capable of providing a package of electrons and BTUs.

Like many secretive Kleiner Perkins investments — EEStor, for example — let’s hope the hype and promise leads to something truly disruptive. Speaking of EEStor, tick, tick, tick… the end of the year fast approaches.

I have to be honest, up until last week I’d heard a lot about the potential of metal-air batteries — i.e. zinc-air, lithium-air, etc… — but really didn’t know much about the batteries, how they were made, why they are be potentially better, and what challenges need to be overcome for them to unseat the current king of batteries, lithium-ion technology.  Then I was put onto an Arizona-based company called Fluidic Energy, which recently received $5.13 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy as part of the recently announced first-phase of ARPA-E awards. Fluidic, a spin-off of Arizona State University, will use this money over the next few years to achieve its mission: a metal-air battery that’s up to 11 times more energy dense than the best lithium-ion battery today, and potentially half or even a third of the cost.

Certainly a big mission, but after chatting with Cody Friesen, Arizona State professor and founder of Fluidic, I quickly realized it’s not mission impossible. And it gave me great hope that five or 10 years from now, whether it’s Fluidic or EEStor or Premium Power or some other company, the big breakthrough we’re looking for will happen. And that, my friends, is an exciting thing.

I urge you to read this story on MIT Technology Review, posted today, which explains what Fluidic is doing and why it may overcome many of the challenges that have dogged the commercial, mass-market introduction of rechargeable metal-air batteries.

My Clean Break column today is a bit of an update on ZENN Motor, the potential of EEStor’s EESU, and an interesting comment about EEStor from Elon Musk, co-founder and CEO of Tesla Motors, who before becoming an entrepreneur had plans to enroll in engineering graduate studies and focus on ultracapacitors for vehicles. I also mention some interesting work on ultracapacitor materials being done at Queen’s University in Kingston, and talk about a new ultracapacitor bus operating in Shanghai that will be demonstrated Wednesday in Washington, D.C. (for another more detailed article on the ultracap bus check out this Technology Review article).