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.

Hamilton, energy and technology writer for the Toronto Star, examines some of the latest, most far-out green energy innovations and the people behind them. How far-out? Take, for example, a retired engineer’s idea to produce electricity via an artificial tornado, or a plan for a space-based power station that would harvest the sun’s energy, using microwaves to beam it down to earth. Other gizmos and processes seem more amenable to commercial success and social acceptance: Hamilton tells of a secretive company called EEStor that claims to have made a breakthrough in energy storage, and of a team building a low-cost nuclear fusion reactor. He strikes a fine balance between hope and hard realism when considering barriers to energy transition. As the “tornado guy” says, upon considering financial and regulatory obstacles: “Holy crap, that’s a lot to get through.” VERDICT: Mad Like Tesla is easy to get through, even for readers with only a basic knowledge of energy issues. Hamilton makes complex technologies comprehensible, and he clearly enjoys the remarkable human stories behind the science. Many of the risk takers and visionaries portrayed are Canadian (rocker Neil Young makes a cameo appearance!), but this book’s strong appeal should transcend all borders.

Can’t complain with that. The book is scheduled for public release on Sept. 1 and is already available for pre-order on a number of sites, including Amazon.com/Amazon.ca and Indigo.ca. The book won’t break the bank, either. We decided to do paperback release on first run to make the book more accessible to a larger audience. You can likely pick it up for $13 or so. I built a Web site I’m not entirely happy with, so plan to have a newly designed site finished by the end of August. Stay tuned!

That’s why in my Clean Break column this week I argue clean technology, and specifically the efforts of SDTC, need to be part of the country’s election dialogue. We need to build on the progress SDTC has achieved to date, not abandon the momentum at a time when major world economies — Germany, China, India, Brazil, the United States – are racing to establish a dominant position in the emerging global green economy.

The leaders of the political parties looking to run the next government need to be asked: How are they prepared to support clean technology innovation and green economic development in Canada?

I’m delighted that Ballard is finding its way. It has inspired many spinoffs. It anchors the Vancouver cleantech scene. It’s the rock star that hit it big, rose quickly, then crashed into relative obscurity, only to emerge several years later with a more mature album that, while not having mass-market appeal, is critically acclaimed and attracting loyal followers.

I have a story in MIT Technology Review today that looks at a very cool engine design from a Vancouver-based startup called Etalim.  The story gives a somewhat technical explanation of how the engine works, but basically its a hybrid of a thermoacoustic engine and a Stirling engine. What’s impressive about this technology is that — according to the company, at least — it’s compact, made of non-toxic and recyclable materials, easy and inexpensive to manufacture, can use any source of high-grade heat (biogas, biomass, natural gas, solar, fossil fuels), and is not subject internally to mechanical friction, meaning the product is highly reliable and has a long life with very little need for maintenance.

Stirling engines, to put it simply, use heat to drive a piston as a fixed volume of gas, such as helium, heats, expands, then cools and contracts. This cycle of expansion and contraction repeats itself, and the higher the heat the higher the power. Problem is, there is a lot of mechanical friction and all of this has to operate within a sealed vessel under high temperature and high pressure. Leakage of gas is a big challenge. Rubber seals and lubricants don’t cut it, so parts have to be machined precisely to achieve metal-on-metal fittings and this adds a lot of cost, and even then, long-term reliability can be an issue. Etalim founder and chief scientist Thomas Steiner, a former chief physicist at Creo (where he worked side-by-side with Michel Laberge, founder of nuclear fusion startup General Fusion), decided to turn to thermoacoustics to solve the problem.

Research into thermoacoustics has been around for years, but it’s still a relatively new area. I’m not qualified to say too much about it, suffice to say it involves the bizarre interaction of thermodynamics and acoustics — i.e. heat can be used to stimulate the creation of intense sound waves that can be used to achieve mechanical work. Dr. Greg Swift, a thermoacoustics expert at Los Alamos National Laboratory and someone I quote in the article, has a great little essay here that describes what thermoacoustics is all about.

In a nutshell, Steiner designed an engine core that eliminates all rubbing parts (i.e. mechanical friction). The piston is replaced with a thick steel plate fixed to the engine wall. Helium gas on the top side of the plate is heated, triggering intense sound waves that cause the plate to vibrate. Below the plate and separated by a thin layer of helium is another metal plate — a diaphragm – attached to a shaft. As the first plate vibrates it causes the diaphragm (and the shaft) to move rapidly up and down. And I mean rapidly — 30,000 cycles per minute. The shaft is connected to a linear alternator that induces an electric current as it moves up and down. That movement is very minimal at only 200 microns so Etalim has had to cleverly configure its alternator to capture such small movement. (See video with this post to get a visual of how this all works).

The end result is a highly efficient and durable compact engine that moves less gas per cycle than a conventional Stirling engine but compensates by achieving dramatically more cycles per minute. Etalim is aiming to manufacture engines that can supply 1.6 to 3 kilowatts and it believes it can get the cost down to a stunning 15 cents per watt, which is more than competitive with internal combustion engines and leaves fuel cells in the dust. It if can deliver, this would change the economics of microCHP (combined heat and power) for the home, biogas/landfill generation, solar thermal power generation and a whole host of distributed generation applications in need of a small, efficient and affordable engine that’s agnostic to fuel or energy source, as long as it supplies heat.

Etalim has a long way to go. It made its first prototype last year and proved that the design works as expected, but efficiency was low — just 10 per cent. The second prototype will come this spring and will aim for up to 30 per cent efficiency, with hopes of achieving 40 per cent by the time Etalim comes out with its first commercial product in 2012. That puts it in the territory of fuel-cell efficiency, but at a fraction of the cost. Etalim’s goal is to reach 50 per cent, but it has to figure out how to design the engine to handle temperatures exceeding 1,000 degrees C, meaning some use of ceramic materials will be necessary.

This is a great emerging story. So far the company has raised about $4.7 million, roughly half private equity (no VC) and the rest a grant from Sustainable Development Technology Canada for a demonstration project. It will likely be seeking $6 to $8 million in a first round of VC financing this summer.

Bloom is obviously betting that low-cost natural gas, thanks to the shale-gas boom, is going to be around for awhile. And the model is not unlike what we see today with many solar projects — a developer such as SunEdison, for example, will sign long-term projects at no upfront cost to the customer, which pays for the electricity it receives, not the equipment on its rooftop. The difference is that Bloom has to factor in the future cost of natural gas.

It will be interesting to see the uptake, and wouldn’t it to be nice to see this tested out in Ontario? Companies such as Enbridge should be kicking the tires on this, not sitting back and waiting to see what happens.  Bloom says it eventually expects the Bloom Electrons service to represent half of its revenues, and that doesn’t surprise me.

Now, one question: is this a green energy offering? Kind of. Burning natural gas onsite for electricity production (if you capture the waste heat) is more efficient than burning it in a power station and transmitting long distances via wires. Burning natural gas in a Bloom Box instead of a standard microgeneration system is even more efficient and eliminates nearly all smog-forming emissions. But having a Bloom Box in a community or a large building, such as a data centre, opens up the possibility of using biogas instead of natural gas. There are other benefits as well, if not green in nature. The Bloom Box can sell surplus electricity to the grid, creating a kind of distributed backup system that makes the grid more stable.

Bloom still has a lot of work ahead of it, and it’s not the only fuel-cell maker heading in this direction, but it’s at least trying to be creative and its high profile is getting people thinking how we can do things differently, and that’s a good thing.

Anyway, the hydrogen economy may not be here as predicted 10 or 15 years ago, but Ballard is slowly proving there is a role for fuel cells and that costs, with volume, are coming down.