The deal is very similar to how many car manufacturers already offer satellite radio, or how some have offered a year’s worth or more of free gasoline. “It works out to 7.5 megawatt-hours of electricity over the course of the two years,” he said. I asked if this is an exclusive deal with GM, or whether Bullfrog is able to make a similar offer with other EV manufacturers. “It takes a while to put a program like this together, so we don’t anticipate anyone else coming aboard within the next year. At some point in time, we would hope that all EV manufacturers would begin offering it.”

Siemens has agreed to purchase RuggedCom for $382 million or $33 a share, compared to the $272.4 million or $22 a share offer from Beldon. It represents a 50% premium on a per-share basis and, quite frankly, Siemens is a better fit for RuggedCom and for keeping innovation in Ontario.

Siemens Canada, which is based in Burlington, Ont., has a strong and growing presence in Canada — about 4,400 employees and $3 billion in annual revenues. It is also pushing hard into the same smart grid space occupied by its main competitor, General Electric. Ontario is shaping up to become a hub of smart grid development in North America, so it makes sense for Siemens and Vaughan, Ont.-based RuggedCom to hook up.

I was the first journalist to write about RuggedCom with a story in the Toronto Star back in July 2006. Since then it has consistently grown revenues and profits, even during the downturn. “Either we’re going to get acquired by a strategic peer or reach a point where we’ve got … a good story to take it to an IPO,” company founder and CEO Marzio Pozzuoli confidently told me when we first spoke nearly six years ago. Pozzuoli, by the way, was a technology manager in GE’s power management operation before deciding to leave the company to found RuggedCom. Such a good move. The successful IPO part came true in 2007, and now the strategic acquisition part is coming true with the Siemens purchase. As Pozzuoli stated today, “We have great respect for Siemens and believe RuggedCom will be well positioned for continued growth and industry leadership under their ownership.”

Could RuggedCom have done it alone? Perhaps — but with the massive clout of Siemens behind it, it can do a heck of a lot better. That’s just how the cleantech space is expected to be over the coming years, as startups with great technology and proven leadership seek the resources and reach of established multinationals. An added benefit to this deal is that it seems to reinforce Siemens’ commitment to Ontario.

It’s nice to be loved.

The consortium, calling itself the Lake Ontario Offshore Network, aims to make Ontario the North American capital of offshore wind development. The group includes Windstream Energy Inc., the only company that holds a feed-in-tariff contract with the Ontario Power Authority to sell power from offshore wind turbines into the province’s electrical grid. It doesn’t matter that Windstream, because of the moratorium, can’t currently develop its project. It hopes that by bringing together an industrial consortium it can dangle thousands of jobs in front of the government and possibly convince the powers that be to reconsider its offshore ban.

The cast that has been assembled for this PR play is impressive. The consortium includes turbine suppliers Siemens Wind Power and Vestas Wind Systems, steel fabricator Walters Inc., steel supplier Essar Steel Algoma Inc. and a number of small and medium-sized companies — Anchor Concrete Products Ltd., Ortech Power, Samuel & Son Limited, Akzo Nobel Coating Ltd. and Bermingham Foundation Solutions, to name a few. In total, 18 companies/organizations large and small have signed on, representing a comprehensive supply chain and about 1,800 jobs that could exist over a five-year period if Windstream’s project ever got the go-ahead.

And what is this project? Windstream, which is based in Burlington, Ontario, is planning to build a 100-turbine, 300-megawatt offshore wind project about five kilometres west of Wolfe Island, which is an island just offshore the city of Kingston, itself about 250 kilometres east of Toronto. My own personal feeling is that it’s not the greatest site for development, if only because it’s not far from the onshore wind farm that’s currently located on Wolfe Island and has been a lightning rod for controversy from the beginning (partly because of the density of wind turbine development there). Windstream is proposing that the government keep its moratorium but allow an exemption for its $1.5 billion Wolfe Island shoals project, on the grounds that it would be a pilot project used as part of studies that would determine if further offshore development is the right step forward.

You’ll recall from an earlier column of mine that the “pilot project” approach is one that I support and proposed last July. Specifically, I wrote, “Maybe we would have been better off to focus initially on a public-private pilot project, one located several kilometres offshore in a carefully selected location; one that could be closely studied and be a launch pad for future economic growth.” I’m happy that Windstream has embraced this approach, and it will be interesting to see how the government responds to this invitation.

But here’s the thing: I’m not convinced this is the “carefully selected location” that would be ideal for a pilot project. I’m also not convinced that a 300-megawatt project could rightly be called a “pilot”. I understand the need to go big. There are simply better economies of scale. But if a pilot was truly what Windstream envisions, it should break up the project into smaller phases, with the initial pilot phase being no larger than 20 or so megawatts (similar in size to the world’s first lake-based wind farm in Lake Vanern, Sweden) with plans to develop larger phases once the pilot has been properly studied and ultimately convinces the Ministry of Environment that offshore wind makes sense for Ontario.

I would also argue that there are much better sites to consider for a pilot, including those once held by Trillium Wind Power before the government wiped the slate clear and unjustly forced all developers without a FIT contract to start from scratch. Trillium, by the way, had also started developing a supply chain consortium before the rug was pulled from under it, resulting in a $2.25 billion lawsuit filed against the Ontario government. One wonders how any company could trust dealing with Queen’s Park these days.

But Windstream is the one that finds itself in the fortunate position of being the only developer with a FIT contract. Whether the piece of paper it holds gives it the edge when it comes to pilot-scale projects, that’s unclear. After all, pilots are given special consideration. Presumably, FIT or not, picking the location of a pilot project should be based on the site, not the developer.

The saga continues…

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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

From a greenhouse-gas perspective, the emission reductions aren’t massive — up to 25 per cent reduction — but the real gains here are in the reduction of smog-causing pollutants. Nitrogen oxides and diesel particulate matter are reduced by 90 per cent. Over time, it leaves open the possibility of using renewable natural gas, sourced from landfill gas and municipal wastewater biogas, to displace its fossil fuel cousin. The city of Surrey, B.C., is already heading in this direction. It now requires that natural gas-powered trucks be used for its municipal waste collection, a service being performed by BFI Canada, which has purchased 75 trucks that run on CNG. At the same time, it is launching an organics collection program for Surrey’s 470,000 residents and businesses that will see the household waste converted into biogas that will be cleaned, conditioned and used in BFI trucks. Surrey hopes the new biogas facility will begin operation in 2014.

Toronto was supposed to head in this direction as well, but from what I understand the plan has unraveled under the administration of Mayor Rob Ford.

Fact is, Layton and Dion supported a price on carbon — that should have been more important than the details on how that price was created. By making it an election issue, Layton helped sabotage any momentum to price carbon in Canada, making it a toxic issue that to this day no federal politician without suicidal tendencies will touch.

My argument is that we need to get over this fear of a carbon tax (or carbon pricing in general), create a discussion about it — both nationally and in Ontario — and recognize how putting a price on carbon can help get our fiscal house in order and strengthen an otherwise weak climate strategy.

See column below:

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Tyler Hamilton

It’s hard to hold a grudge against Jack Layton.

Passionate. Likeable. Well-intentioned. Caring. These are all words to describe the former federal NDP leader.

He had a lot of things right, but many still don’t forgive Layton for helping to sabotage a proposal in 2008 that called for the creation of a national tax on carbon emissions.

The idea came from then Liberal leader Stéphane Dion, who called his plan “the Green Shift.” Money collected from a carbon tax would be used to lower personal income taxes and invest in social and environmental programs, ultimately reducing Canada’s dependency on fossil fuels and assisting the shift to a low-carbon economy.

Layton aggressively attacked the plan, contributing to a Liberal implosion at the polls and a Conservative re-election that gave us our current do-little climate strategy.

It’s not that Layton opposed putting a price on carbon; he just favoured a different approach — a complex cap-and-trade system that would let the market set the price and let the government set and adjust the emissions cap.

And it’s not like Dion did himself any favours. He had a decent policy in his hands but he did a horrible job of selling it to the public and failed miserably in defending it against Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s campaign of smear and fear.

The bitter pill is that Dion and Layton both had the goal of putting a price on carbon. Both saw it as necessary for making our industries more resource-productive while achieving meaningful emissions reductions and fulfilling international climate obligations.

But many blame Layton for playing the spoiler, and as a result, for taking talk of a serious carbon-pricing plan off the table, where it rests toxic to this day.

“You basically can’t speak of it in political company,” says Alex Wood, senior director of policy and markets at Sustainable Prosperity, a green economy think tank in Ottawa. “There’s no political home for it.”

Not federally, at least. British Columbia took the big step in 2008 with the same kind of revenue-neutral carbon tax proposed by Dion. As controversial as it was and continues to be in many circles, it hasn’t plunged the B.C. economy into an abyss.

Quite the opposite. The province now has the lowest per-capita consumption of gasoline in the country and the lowest income tax rates. Its GDP has grown over the past three years at a time when the global economy is struggling, and the expectation is that B.C. will outperform the Canadian provincial average in 2012.

Carbon emissions, meanwhile, appear to be heading in the right direction. Next year the tax will rise to $30 per tonne of CO2 equivalent emissions, pulling in nearly $1 billion for the province, which will redistribute that revenue mostly through income tax cuts.

Each year that passes makes it harder to kill the B.C. carbon tax, says Wood. “No government will be able to come in and say we’re cutting this but we’ve got to raise your taxes. Politically it’s achieved an almost untouchable status.”

So when Harper insisted Dion’s plan would “screw everybody,” as The Economist magazine recently reminded us, it’s instructive to look at B.C. as we head into climate talks next week in Durban, South Africa, and ask: are we collectively getting screwed by not having a national carbon-pricing scheme?

We have a sense of the economic costs of not acting. The independent National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy estimated in September that climate impact costs for Canada would reach $5 billion annually by 2020 and as high as $43 billion a year by 2050.

Australia, a kindred spirit to Canada with similar resource-dependent industries, has seen that writing on the wall. It decided after years of Canadian-style foot-dragging that a carbon price is good for the country’s long-term economic health.

It is now poised to introduce a national carbon tax in July 2012 that will morph into a cap-and-trade system after a few years. The policy is part of a larger economic reform initiative aimed at making the transition to a clean energy economy.

An optimist might hope that Australia’s move will rub off on Canada, which could use the revenues from a carbon tax (or cap-and-trade system) to help get its fiscal house in order. It could generate tens of billions of dollars annually by 2020 that could go toward lowering income taxes, reducing the deficit, or boosting investment in climate-friendly public infrastructure projects.

If not federally, maybe it will rub off on Ontario. Saddled with what’s expected to be a $16-billion deficit this year, the province could benefit by slapping a price on carbon.

That was the plan in 2008 when Ontario joined the Western Climate Initiative, a group of Canadian provinces and U.S. states (including California) trying to set up a regional carbon cap-and-trade system. But six U.S. states recently pulled out and Ontario, which was supposed to launch on Jan. 1, is now waffling.

Maybe former TD Bank economist Don Drummond can talk some sense into Premier Dalton McGuinty. Drummond is expected to issue a report in January that will advise the McGuinty government on how to proceed with economic reforms.

Drummond is a fan of carbon pricing, particularly the idea of a carbon tax, having endorsed Dion’s Green Shift plan for the benefits it could bring to the Canadian economy.

It’s not entirely impossible that Drummond might try to stimulate talk of an Ontario carbon tax for Ontario, as toxic as the two words might be.

No thanks to Jack.

But seriously, isn’t it time we had an honest and adult discussion about 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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Tyler Hamilton

There was a time not so long ago that seeing a single wind turbine spinning in the distance was a novel experience for most people.

Not so much any more. There are now hundreds of wind turbines scattered across the province, representing 1,700 megawatts of wind capacity in Ontario alone — or just over a third of all capacity in Canada.

Hundreds more are in the queue waiting to be installed. Most are large turbines, about 2 megawatts or more in size, and between 80 and 100 metres high. All look pretty much the same: a big tall white tower with three spinning blades attached by rotor to a massive nacelle, which houses the generator and gearbox.

But as researchers continue to improve the efficiency of wind power generation it’s quite possible that the turbine of tomorrow will look dramatically different.

There are proposals for two-bladed turbines. There are vertical-axis turbines that look and spin like egg beaters. One company called FloDesign has a turbine that looks like a jet engine on an airplane, while Toronto-based WhalePower wants future turbine blades to resemble humpback whale flippers.

Over at the University of Ottawa, a group of students and professors who dub themselves the “Green Engineer” have come up with their own creative approach — a wind turbine with two sets of blades each spinning in opposite directions.

They call it the contra-rotating small wind energy converter. Wind tunnel tests on a prototype have shown that the design is up to 40 per cent more efficient and far less noisy than a conventional single-rotor system.

The benefits of having contra-rotating blades are well known. In fact, the design has existed for more than a century and is widely used, for example, in propeller systems of submarine torpedoes. The concept is also used in airplane and boat propulsion systems, not to mention those remote-controlled toy helicopters you can fly inside your house.

Riadh Habash, professor of technology and engineering at the University of Ottawa, says his team decided three years to apply the same approach to wind turbines and are encouraged so far with the results — so much so that they’re busy building a second prototype that will be mounted next summer atop a building on the Ottawa U campus.

Why is having two blade systems spinning in opposite directions more efficient?

When the wind blows into a conventional three-bladed, single-rotor wind turbine less than 40 per cent of its energy is converted into electricity. The rest escapes, much of it in the air wake that’s created behind the blades. That wake spins in the opposite direction (i.e. counter-clockwise) to those blades.

If a second rotor with another set of blades is right behind the first rotor, and if it is designed to also spin counter-clockwise, it can capture energy from that wake. The end result is a turbine system that harnesses much more energy from the initial flow of wind.

Experiments to date also suggest that a turbine with such a design can operate at lower wind speeds, allowing it to tap into a broader range of wind resources.

Habash says an added, but just as important, benefit is that the design is also quieter. “We have observed that when you have two sets of blades that are contra-rotating they achieve a kind of vibration cancellation. There is a clear reduction in vibration.”

This is good news, as one of the biggest issues hindering the deployment of wind energy — particularly in Ontario, for some reason — is concerns related to noise and inaudible vibrations reportedly experienced by nearby residents.

The Green Engineers and their industry partners, including Ottawa-based TRIAS Innovations, have some other tricks up their sleeves. All of them are aimed at producing a superior wind turbine with all parts — blades, generator, power electronics, drive train and tower — manufactured in Canada.

They’re even chatting with WhalePower about incorporating its whale-inspired blade design, further adding to turbine efficiency and noise reduction.

“Our target market for now is small wind turbines,” says Habash, who leads the team. “We are aiming at 10 kilowatts. But in the future that could go up to 100 kilowatts, and if we can prove the concept it could then be applied to much larger turbines.”

The project has been funded by the university, Ontario Power Authority, Ontario Centres of Excellence and Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

Habash hopes to be able to demonstrate the second machine in a number of locations. One would be part of a combined wind and energy storage project in an aboriginal community. “We have some investors who are very interested in using this for community power,” he says.

It’s still early days, but it’s an example of how wind power design could evolve over the coming years, based on innovation coming directly out of Ontario.

Check out this YouTube video from the University of Ottawa.

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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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.