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.

Reports surfaced last week that we’re running out of Web addresses. The Number Resource Organization, which is in charge of allocating Web addresses based on the IPv4 standard, warned that there is less than 10 per cent of these addresses left and that a severe shortage — and “grave consequences” – will be upon us if we don’t migrate quickly to the new IPv6 standard, which offers a virtually unlimited number of addresses.  “The limited IPv4 addresses will not allow us enough resources to achieve the ambitions we all hold for global Internet access,” said NRO chairman Axel Pawlik. “The deployment of IPv6 is a key infrastructure development that will enable the network to support the billions of people and devices that will connect in the coming years.”

Most media coverage has highlighted the growth in laptops, mobile devices, servers and routers, but more eye-opening is the coming wave of “smart” grid devices that will need to have their own IP addresses. Thermostats, smart meters, dish washers, laundry machines/dryers, intelligent lighting (in homes and buildings), electric cars — really any appliances or devices or machine that will be controlled remotely through the Internet. Here’s a question I honestly have no answer to: Are energy management and smart grid/appliance companies — General Electric, for example — aware of this coming shortage of IP addresses, and have they taken the necessary measures to avoid the crisis?

Network World had an informative article on this issue in October.

Apparently it’s not difficult to migrate from IPv4 to IPv6, but it does require a lot of investment in software and hardware upgrades. Will the energy sector be caught off guard by this? I’d love to open this up for discussion from some more knowledgeable people… please enlighten us.

My good friend Ann Cavoukian, Ontario’s privacy commissioner, has co-authored a new report that highlights the potential privacy breaches that could result as we move toward a smart grid infrastructure, one that will certainly have dozens of applications layered on top with the capability of capturing information about how and when we use electricity. It might seem like benign information gathering, but Cavoukian says there is room for abuse and efforts must be made during early design of the smart grid to build in privacy protection. “Electric utilities and other providers may have access to information about what customers are using, when they are using it, and what devices are involved. An electricity usage profile could become a source of behavioural information on a granular level,” according to the report, which gives examples of types of information that could also reveal when a person is away from home and if an alarm system is on or off. The benefits such smart electricity services and applications can provide shouldn’t come at the expense of personal privacy. “Much in the same way that we do not expect the postman to look inside our windows when he is deliverying the mail or the cable person to monitor the TV shows we watch after he has completed the cable installation, so too do customers not expect there to be any surreptitious profiling of their in-home energy-related behavioural patterns.”

Are we being paranoid? Maybe — but then again, the privacy erosion that came rapidly with the Internet caught many consumers and businesses off guard. Certainly, it’s worth learning from past mistakes and thinking about these privacy issues before, rather than after, the infrastructure and supporting applications for the smart grid are rolled out. (more…)

Smart meters and time-of-use pricing are always well-read stories because there’s true division within the general public on whether smart meters are consumer-friendly gadgets that encourage conservation or utility-friendly devices that make it easier to gouge consumers. See my story in the Toronto Star from Friday. My take is that electricity prices are going up whether we get smart meters or not, and that smart meters — and the applications they enable — offer households a way to shift and even lower their electricity use to buffer the impact of rising prices. The mistake — and again, just my view — is that smart meters have been improperly marketed to consumers as some kind of sexy wonder tool that will help them lower their bills. Instead, utilities should have downplayed the introduction and simply moved ahead with their installation as part of a less exciting grid modernization play — equivalent to a telecom company upgrading from analog to digital networks so that, down the road, new services can be offered to customers. Customers don’t care about the bandwidth, they just care about the handsets and what they can do.

By positioning smart meters as more of an infrastructure play the cost of deployment can be simply incorporated into annual capital budgets and households are more resigned to the fact that getting the new device is mandatory. Let’s face it, initially smart meters are about helping utilities manage their networks better — i.e. they can pinpoint problems and do more detailed analysis of individual household, neighbourhood, and community power consumption, improving system planning and maintenance operations and preparing utilities for increased distributed generation in their service territories.

By making this seem like some gift to consumers, as has been done, utilities open themselves up to consumers expecting certain results and wanting the option of getting or not getting the smart meter. (more…)

Just days before the Ontario government is expected to officially launch its much-anticipated feed-in tariff program (FIT), Energy and Infrastructure Minister George Smitherman announced that the province — through crown-owned utility Hydro One — will spend $2.3 billion on 20 projects designed to expand and upgrade its transmission system. The investment is expected to take place over three years and create 20,000 “green-collar” jobs in the process. Many of the projects are aimed at expanding capacity along existing corridors to carry more power from the Far North where there remains an abundance of untapped wind and hydroelectric projects. But some of the money will also go toward constructing enabler lines for areas of the province where renewable-energy development clusters have been identified. It’s being called an historic investment in transmission, the largest single commitment in decades, and the government said it was important to make this commitment to signal to the market that Ontario is serious about accommodating development of green-energy projects. Indeed, it’s a wise investment to announce just before the launch of the FIT program, and just after announcing a $250-million loan guarantee program dedicated to aboriginal-owned renewable generation and transmission projects.

A description of each projects can be found here. The province has also supplied a map showing where existing lines will be reinforced and where enabler lines will be built.