Kudos to Vincent Chornet. The president, CEO and co-founder of Montreal-based Enerkem (along with his father, Esteban) has in just a few years turned his company into a leading player in the emerging waste-to-fuel market. Today, Enerkem gained even more momentum, announcing it had secured $53.8 million in venture financing in a round that included Houston-based Waste Management, the continent’s top waste-management firm.

Enerkem uses a thermochemical fluidized-bed process to gasify municipal solid waste (organics, wood waste, plastics), demolition wood, and agricultural/forest residues. The resulting syngas is cleaned and, using a proven catalyst, can be turned into a variety of end products, including methanol, ethanol and high-value olefins (plastics). The company is in the process of building a waste-to-ethanol facility in Mississippi (75 million litres a year) and an Edmonton plant (36 million litres a year) that will also turn sorted municipal solid waste into ethanol. The Edmonton facility is being done in partnership with Greenfield Ethanol, Canada’s largest independent ethanol producer. Meanwhile, in Westbury, Quebec, the company has a commercial-scale demonstration facility that currently turns old wooden hydro poles into ethanol.

Rho Ventures, Braemar Energy Ventures and BDR Capital, all existing investors, participated in the financing round with Waste Management, along with new investor Cycle Capital. “This financing round validates Enerkem’s business and advances our path towards leadership in the waste and advanced fuels markets,” said Chornet in a release. In an earlier story (July 2008) I wrote for Greentech Media, Chornet said that burning waste or burning the syngas created from waste is, well, a waste. Based on electricity and ethanol prices at the time, a company can make three times more revenue per tonne of processed waste compared to a plant that simply burns its syngas to generate electricity, he said. Chornet also said Enerkem’s process is profitable with oil at $50 a barrel and if the company can get a competitive tipping fee to take the garage.

Mississauga-based Electrovaya Inc., maker of lithium-ion Superpolymer batteries, is supplying batteries for a utility-scale energy storage project being spearheaded by CEATI International Inc. of Montreal, an advanced technology centre for utilities. The $7.5 million project will be a large-scale initiative involving multiple utilities and sites. The batteries will be tested as storage for renewable energy generation and as a way to ease distribution and transmission bottlenecks in high-density urban areas. CEATI will also investigate the repurposing of electric-vehicle batteries for smart-grid applications, given that a battery that outlives its usefulness in a vehicle can still be used for many years as general energy storage for the grid.

On the acquisition front, two more promising Ontario cleantech ventures have been plucked up by U.S. firms. On Tuesday Toronto-based biogas maker Stormfisher Biogas announced it had been acquired by Virginia-based Greenhouse Gas Services. Despite having one of the most boring and uninspiring names, Greenhouse Gas Services is a venture of GE Energy Financial Services and AES Corp., so it has some serious backing. The company invests in and develops projects that reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, and it then sells the carbon credits. So here’s my question: If some of the biggest Stormfisher projects are expected to be in Ontario, and since the Ontario Power Authority doesn’t appear to be letting biogas projects keep carbon credits, then what’s in it for Greenhouse Gas Services? I can only speculate that the power authority has quietly decided to let developers keep credits from methane destruction. Something I’ll have to follow up on.

And just today, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Calisolar announced it had acquired Vaughan, Ontario-based 6N Silicon, a maker of solar-grade silicon that will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary. “In addition, $22.5 million in funding was raised from existing Calisolar and 6N investors,” the companies said in a statement. “The new funds will be used to increase capacity at the Sunnyvale, California cell manufacturing facility and expand silicon purification operations in Vaughan, Ontario.” It’s sad to see 6N fall under foreign ownership so early in its life, but the good news is that Calisolar is likely to set up some module assembly in Ontario to take advantage of the feed-in-tariff program here. Given that its solar cells will contain 6N’s silicon, the company will be well positioned to meet Ontario’s local content requirements and even supply other cell/module makers.

Finally, I have a follow to my story about Vestas and the possibility it will lay roots in Ontario. I spoke Wednesday to the company’s head of global offshore markets, who spoke highly of the Trillium projects and called the opportunity to develop offshore wind in the Great Lakes “fantastic.” He wouldn’t say if Vestas plans to establish manufacturing in Ontario — which isn’t surprising — but given the potential in the Great Lakes, the liklihood of Trillium’s projects moving forward first, and the positive policy and regulatory environment in Ontario (including the feed-in-tariff program, which offers 19 cents per kilowatt-hour for offshore wind power), all the stars are aligned and it’s only a matter of time before Vestas makes its move.

My friend Tom Rand has a short but no less interesting video filmed during a presentation he gave recently in Toronto. Rand helped build a “green hotel” that emits a quarter of the emissions of a comparable hotel. The workhouse behind this approach is geothermal, and Rand said it can be done in a way where energy savings exceed the monthly payments on a long-term low-interest loan. Now, the key is to get that cheap loan. Rand said it’s up to the federal and provincial governments to backstop such loans and mandate the banks to lend the money. It would help, he added, if use of this technology was mandated where it was appropriate. This, as Rand says, is low-hanging fruit that we’re simply not picking. Instead, with each new building or home we build we’re letting this ripe-for-picking fruit fall on the ground. Rand, it should be pointed out, is behind another move to have the government sell green bonds that would help fund these kinds of projects, or backstop the low-interest loans required to do them. It’s all perfectly logical, but I guess politics is never as logical as it could be.

Click here to watch the short video.

Joe Romm’s Climate Progress has a lengthy post on the benefits of creating a public green bank that could work with the private sector to ease the transition toward a clean energy economy. The post is actually reproduced from the Center for American Progress, which praises proposed amendments to the U.S. Waxman-Markey bill that would create a clean energy bank within the Department of Energy. According to the amendments, the Clean Energy Deployment Administration, or CEDA, would direct loans, letters of credit, loan guarantees, insurance products and other financing options to support clean energy production, transmission, storage and other projects that could reduce greenhouse gas emissions or save energy. The administration would take a “portfolio investment approach” and “ensure no particular technology receives more than 30 per cent of the total funding available.” And all of this would be on top of existing loan guarantees and incentives offered by the feds.

Sounds like something Ontario could use, because even though our new Green Energy and Green Economy Act is an ambitious and progressive piece of legislation, and even though a newly proposed feed-in tariff program offers a huge incentive for developers, I’m still not convinced there won’t be a capital constraint that will ultimately slow down development. This is particularly true if, as the Ontario government has said, it wants to encourage community co-op and First Nations projects. I would even argue the federal government should consider creating such an institution, but that is not likely to happen under our current Conservative government, so no point in asking. (more…)

Worldwide cleantech venture investments were up 38 per cent to $8.4 billion (U.S.) in 2007 2008, according to the Cleantech Group. Companies in the United States raised $5.8 billion, or 68 per cent of the global total, up 56 per cent compared to 2007.

China was up 22 per cent on the year. Germany was up a staggering 217 per cent. Israel, not to be outdone, was up 224 per cent.

And Canada? Shamefully, cleantech companies from my home and native land only managed to raise $159 million from 14 disclosed financing rounds, down 58 per cent from 2007. Of the countries mentioned by the Cleantech Group that saw a fall in 2008 investments, Canada performed the worst — the others were the U.K., which fell by 11 per cent, and India with a 20-per-cent decline.

I’m bummed. I know there’s huge talent in this country, smart entrepreneurs, game-changing ideas and a solid stable of cleantech ventures — just look at the list of companies that have been funded by Sustainable Development Technology Canada over the years, and more seem to emerge by the day. Where are the champions from the financial community? Academia? Government? The high-profile talking heads ready to promote the best and brightest that Canadian, Ontario, or Toronto cleantech has to offer? Where’s the branding? The chest-thumping?

I need a glass of wine.

Maybe I’m going on a tangent here, but I can’t help but see this as an early sign of Dutch Disease, which happens when there is a reallocation of resources from high-tech service and manufacturing industries to the exploitation of natural resources, particularly as the prices of those resources rise. The Canadian government’s obsession with rapid oil sands development, the run-up last year in the price of oil, and the lack of serious attention to high-tech innovation, including cleantech, does fit that bill. It seems like the rest of the country is being gutted to support a one-trick pony, which is a blessing or a curse depending on whether you’re riding the pony or not.

I recall a speech by Mike Lazaridis, founder and co-chief executive of Research In Motion, back in March 2006 in Toronto. “Our oil resources can only carry us so far. What are we going to do after they run out?” asked Lazaridis. “What happens if there’s a major breakthrough and we’re no longer as dependent on oil as we have been in the past? What will we do? Will we have made the wise research investments, industrial investments, infrastructure investments to prepare Canada for a world without oil?”

In a word, no. These latest cleantech investment figures, IMO, are but one example of this neglect.