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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

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Tyler Hamilton

A number of impoverished villages in Brazil’s Amazonia region will soon receive a life-changing Christmas present from Canada.

As you read this a shipping container full of 560 solar panels is en route to Brazil aboard the cargo ship MSC Santhya. The panels, worth nearly $1 million (when shipping and delivery costs are factored in), were donated by Canadian Solar Solutions Inc. and manufactured out of the company’s new facility in Guelph.

Once these made-in-Ontario panels arrive in Brazil, they will be transported to a handful of villages and, come spring 2012, installed atop schools, hospitals, and water-pumping stations. The power they produce will be used directly, or stored in golf-cart batteries so the energy from the sun can be used at night.

It’s all part of a program started in 2001 by Brazilian social entrepreneur Fabio Rosa, who, along with help from Canadian investigative journalist Paul McKay, are on a mission to bring clean water, light, refrigeration, basic communications and, ultimately, better health and education to some of the poorest people on the planet.

McKay was a reporter at the Ottawa Citizen when he travelled to Brazil in 2004 to do a series of stories. It was there that he met Rosa and learned about how something as simple as a solar panel could have such a profound impact on the lives of so many.

Solar may have a growing role to play in cleaning up Ontario’s electricity system, creating green jobs, and helping homeowner reduce their environmental footprint – and their guilt.

But in these remote Brazilian communities with no connection to a power grid, solar technology can both enrich and save lives. Medicine, vaccines and food can be kept cool 24 hours a day. Light can come from CFL bulbs and LEDs instead of kerosene lamps that emit toxic fumes indoors. Sun-powered pumps can supply a constant flow of clean water.

The problem is villagers typically make as little as $2 a day. “There are 20 million people in Brazil without access to electricity and they can’t afford the panels themselves,” explains McKay, who in “retirement” is now a green energy advocate running his own foundation that acts as a kind of North American ambassador to Rosa’s efforts.

“Most utilities there have been privatized and are not interested in going after tiny customers in remote places.”

Rosa is offering these villagers an alternative, but to be clear, he isn’t giving the technology away. What he has developed is a low-cost leasing model that makes the systems and the energy they produce accessible to the poor.

Typically, he will install a solar panel, a battery, a charge controller, a few lights, and a water pump in each home and then charge less than $15 a month for what, in essence, is the service this equipment provides.

Keep in mind that these individuals would already be paying $15 a month on candles, batteries, and kerosene that would no longer be required, so there is no additional financial burden. What they get in return, however, is a far better quality of life and work.

Something as simple as the ability to pump water automatically for a cash crop operation can also generate new income for villagers.

The panels supplied by Canadian Solar will go a step further. Instead of being used to support individual households, they will support entire villages by bringing power to schools, hospitals, central pumping stations and even Internet and cellphone stations.

Milfred Hammerbacher, president and chief executive of Canadian Solar Solutions, which is a subsidiary of Canadian Solar Inc., says the decision to get involved came in 2010 after McKay brought Rosa to the company’s factory for a presentation.

The company fell in love with the idea, recalls Hammerbacher.

“It was a great opportunity for us to help out,” he says. “On a personal level, it’s really why I got into the solar business in the first place. There are so many cases where a few solar panels can make such a huge difference in people’s lives.”

Next spring, the company will be sending down a team of employees to help install the systems.

McKay says the donation of so many panels is significant and takes Rosa’s program to a new level. It has taken years to install 300 systems, as Rosa could only raise enough money to purchase five to 10 panels at a time. He also has to raise funds for all the batteries, pumps and lights that go with each system.

He hopes that by having Canadian Solar show such good will, other suppliers and non-governmental organizations will step up to the plate. In that regard, McKay’s and Rosa’s next priority is to get a similarly large donation of batteries to go with the panels.

The potential is there to grow Rosa’s program throughout Latin America and into the poorest regions of Africa and Asia. Indeed, that’s their plan.

It’s an idea that Hammerbacher finds appealing. “This is something we’d like to do on a long-term basis,” he says. “There are many other organizations like Rosa’s around the world that we’d like to support if we can.

“I hope a lot of other solar companies follow.”

NOTE: If you represent a company that would like to help fund or contribute solar panels, batteries, LED lights, water pumps and/or power electronics to Rosa’s initiative, please contact Paul McKay at paul@paulmckay.com

Does it want to be in the same club as integrated oil company Cenovus, which has captured many headlines related to its venture investments in everything from fusion power to water desalination technology? Not sure, but perhaps this is the first of more tech investments to come — as sign that corporate capital is playing a more important role in a country where venture capital is hard to come by.

Morgan Solar, mind you, hasn’t had a tough time raising capital. In March 2011 it aimed to raise up to $25 million (U.S.), but with Enbridge joining the party the round is oversubscribed at $28.8 million. The interest in Morgan Solar is understandable. It has developed an inexpensive and innovative light-guide solar optic that captures and directs incoming sunlight into a tiny, high-efficiency, finger-nail sized PV chip, achieving a balance of cost, efficiency, weight, and low-profile (i.e. the system is really thin) that may be unrivaled in the market. The company says its systems cost less to build, ship, deploy and maintain than competing technologies. Indeed, it’s bold enough to say that its Sun Simba product will offer a lower Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE) “than solar technologies on the market today, or known to be under development.”

It should be pointed out that Enbridge owns three solar facilities that together represent 100 megawatts of capacity. Most of that comes from its 80 MW Sarnia Solar Project, which until recently was the largest operating PV facility in the world. It’s unclear whether Enbridge eyes using Morgan Solar’s CPV systems in future projects, but the potential certainly exists for collaboration on smaller demonstration projects. The reality, however, is that Enbridge has so far let others take on solar development risks. It then steps in and buys finished, operational projects that are already generating cash.

Morgan has other partners in the mix, some of them strategic. Iberdrola S.A., one of the world’s largest renewable-energy utilities, is a strategic investor, as is Nypro Inc., a contract manufacturer specializing in precision injection molding. Nypro, for example, makes the light-guide optic for Morgan Solar.

Morgan Solar, by the way, was recently named — for the second time — to Corporate Knights’ Next 10 list of most promising Canadian cleantech companies.

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By Tyler Hamilton

Ontario’s new Energy Minister Chris Bentley has much to learn over the coming weeks about the province’s complex energy file, and hopefully with that learning will come some genuine listening.

It’s tempting to think that the Liberal win earlier this month was a vote of confidence in the government’s green energy strategy, warts and all.

But one could just as easily argue that the outcome of the election would have been very different if PC party leader Tim Hudak hadn’t taken such an extremely negative position against the Green Energy Act, the feed-in tariff (FIT) program and associated initiatives.

Voters, by and large, are supportive – and many quite proud – of Ontario’s green energy vision. They see that it’s the direction we must take. They also see economic opportunity by heading in that direction, if done properly. For this reason, it appears most voters weren’t prepared to let Hudak hit stop and press the rewind button.

At the same time, the fact that the Liberals only squeaked ahead in the popular vote seems a clear message that the approach behind the vision needs some fixing – and fast.

For one, the ball has been dropped on energy conservation. We know that the cost of programs that help us reduce energy consumption is much less than building new power supply. We know that investment in energy efficiency has a much faster payback, represents a permanent reduction in carbon emissions, and is a significant job creator.

We also know that widespread support for energy conservation is the best way to help ratepayers cope with rising electricity rates. After all, who cares if the rate goes up if the monthly bill stays the same?

Yes, the smart grid will help us take control of our energy use, and smart meters can encourage us to shift when we use electricity. All of this helps, but it doesn’t encourage us to use less electricity. It’s not true conservation. And trust me, we waste a lot of energy. There’s much to conserve.

The Liberals have also paid a lot of lip-service to helping seniors and those on fixed-income cope with rising energy bills, but what’s lacking is meaningful action. The Clean Energy Benefit temporarily slapped on everyone’s bills is not an answer, nor is an end-of-year tax credit on a bill that’s paid monthly.

Another fix is needed with the FIT program itself. The rate structure is terribly out of date, and the Ontario Power Authority is already late in launching its two-year review of rates paid out for solar, wind, small hydro and biomass projects.

The rates under the FIT program were first announced in early 2009 and designed to assure a “reasonable” return on investment – about 11 or 12 per cent—for developers. The problem is that technology costs shift over time, sometimes dramatically. Solar is a case in point.

A recent report from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory concluded that the average pre-incentive cost of residential and commercial solar PV systems fell 17 per cent last year and a further 11 per cent in the first half of 2011.

“Solar cell prices around the world have gone down significantly,” Paco Caudet, general manager of solar module maker Siliken Canada, told me this summer. “We have brought down costs over the last five months alone by almost 30 per cent.”

You hear the same story over at Celestica, which is manufacturing solar panels and inverters in Ontario for other companies looking to comply with local content rules.

Mike Andrade, the company’s senior vice-president, echoed Caudet’s view. He said the original solar FIT rates were based on a price for panels and inverters that is now 30 to 40 per cent lower. “Developers can make a fine return on investment at a much lower FIT rate than we have now,” he said.

Yet we continue to wait for rate adjustments. In retrospect, the two-year review was a mistake. Rate structure reviews should be done annually so the program can more quickly adapt to a changing marketplace.

We might also want to ask: should developers of multi-megawatt solar projects and large wind farms be booted out of the FIT program entirely?

After all, the program was created so community cooperatives, small businesses, farmers and homeowners could participate more easily in an electricity system previously dominated by the big developers, who were the only ones with the resources to take part in a competitive bidding process.

The level of community participation hoped for just hasn’t happened under the FIT, and this may explain why the McGuinty government had such a poor showing in rural Ontario ridings. People in many of these ridings are feeling like big projects are being imposed on them and that they have little say in the process.

European studies show that there is less resistance to projects when those in the community feel they have part ownership and a voice that will be heard. The FIT needs to move in that direction.

Not to say we still won’t need the big projects. But developers of these should be required to bid against each other so that Ontario ratepayers are assured the best deal.

And that, in a nutshell, is the problem we have so far: a great green vision, but not necessarily the best deal.

There’s much room for improvement, but first the government has to recognize the need.

Tyler Hamilton, author of Mad Like Tesla, writes weekly about green energy and clean technologies.

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By Tyler Hamilton

Mining companies operating in the most remote areas of Canada may want to take notice. Ditto for humanitarian groups looking for better ways to get life-saving medical supplies to hard-to-reach, disaster-stricken regions.

A Toronto company called Solar Ship has designed an aircraft that it says will be able to travel 1,000 kilometres carrying up to 1,000 kilograms of cargo, powered only by the sunlight that shines on its back. It will also be able to take off from — and land on — a spot no larger than a high-school soccer field.

Not quite an airship, not quite an airplane, the solar ship is a hybrid of both. The delta-shaped aircraft will be filled with helium, but slightly less than what’s required to lift it off the ground.

Solar panels across the top of its body, likely backed up by a lithium-ion battery system, will supply enough electricity to drive it forward and into the air. In this way, the design achieves just the right balance of static lift (like a blimp) and aerodynamic lift (like a plane).

Jay Godsall, founder and chief executive of Solar Ship, says his aircraft will be able to go where no roads are built, where landing locations are too small or have been destroyed, and where existing airplanes and helicopters can’t reach on a single tank of fuel.

The need is certainly there. When a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti on Jan. 12, 2010, it took eight days before supplies and other aid could be delivered to the city of Jacmel.

Roads from the capital, Port-au-Prince, were blocked. The small airstrip and fuelling infrastructure in Jacmel were too damaged to accommodate supply flights from the closest U.S. city, Miami.

“Nobody could land,” says Godsall. “If we could make a similar run, and do it here in Ontario, it would be an irrefutable demonstration of our aircraft.”

He plans to hold just such a demonstration in summer 2013. A test flight of a smaller solar ship designed to carry a light load of medical supplies is expected in late 2012, somewhere in Africa.

Solar Ship’s target market is any industry with logistical headaches, including mining companies trying to open up areas of the north where roads are either non-existent or made of ice that is becoming less stable because of climate change.

Godsall recognized the need for such an aircraft back in the early 1980s while running a lawn mowing business in Ottawa.

Just 16 years old at the time, the young entrepreneur had become friendly with some students from Burundi who spoke poor English. He gave them some lessons, and in exchange his lawn mowing business got access to the African embassy crowd.

This led to occasional social visits to the Burundi embassy. One Saturday — Feb. 5, 1983, to be precise — Godsall attended a luncheon and overheard a gentleman talking about landlocked countries in Africa that had major transportation challenges.

“We have the least reliable transportation infrastructure in the world,” the gentleman said. “We have a lot of resources, but we can’t get them out to the global economy.”

The teenage Godsall responded, “Why don’t you just get yourself an airship?”

Once uttered, the idea was firmly planted. “I caught the bug,” says Godsall, explaining how he ended up doing high school projects on airships and, later at university, did an economics thesis on the use of airships to spark economic development in Africa.

“The thesis was rejected as lunacy,” he recalls. He’s had a chip on his shoulder ever since.

Godsall pressed on, starting his first airship business in the early 1990s. But he couldn’t attract the funding required to get it off the ground, so he directed his efforts instead to helping people start up businesses in Africa.

In the decade that followed, he travelled to Africa dozens of times and got to know the continent intimately, as well as the many infectious diseases that were common to the region. This included a bout with malaria in 1997 that nearly killed him.

But adversity gave birth to opportunity. Godsall ended up teaming up with the doctor who saved his life, and they built a business around getting life-saving medical supplies to remote communities.

Once again, the airship idea was floated. Only this time, Godsall decided to rethink his approach, knowing through experience that airships lifted by helium alone were difficult and awkward beasts to control.

In 2004, he approached James DeLaurier, a professor at the University of Toronto’s Institute for Aerospace Studies and, according to Godsall, “the king of engineering for airships.”

He posed a very specific problem to DeLaurier: get 1,000 kilograms of refrigerated medical supplies from point A to B. DeLaurier pulled out a model that looked like both an airship and an airplane.

“It was a freaky design, like a stealth bomber but all ballooned out, all puffed up,” Godsall recalls.

The two men agreed to pursue just such an aircraft, so DeLaurier recruited some of his U of T students and worked away to refine and improve the design. Happy with the progress, Godsall and DeLaurier registered the company Solar Ship in 2006.

Today, DeLaurier is the company’s chief aerospace engineer, and along with a team of top-notch engineers and bush pilots, the company is quietly preparing to show the world what its oddly shaped, emission-free aircraft can do.

For Godsall, the initiative is about building on Canada’s world-recognized leadership in airship design and, particularly, remote-area aviation. He knows full well there’s likely to be turbulence along the way, and that the aircraft will operate best where the sun shines and weather is steady and predictable.

But if anyone can get it right, it’s us Canadians. “Canada has the best bush plane community in the world,” says Godsall. “We have the best engineers and pilots. We’re the experts.”

This, to him, is another chance to prove it.

Tyler Hamilton, author of Mad Like Tesla, writes weekly about green energy and clean technologies. Contact him at tyler@cleanbreak.ca.

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.

You see, Hydro One and its union are complaining they can’t keep up with the demands of homeowners and farmers who want to connect their solar rooftop systems to the grid. Industry, in response, is wondering what gives? If Hydro One can’t do it — and many justifiably accuse the utility of intentionally dragging its feet — then let’s let other players come into the market that can do it. Of course, Hydro One doesn’t want that because it threatens its hegemony over the Ontario grid. Hydro One has had two years or more to prepare for the increased connection requests that were expected to come through the feed-in tariff program, yet it is acting now as a deer in the headlights that couldn’t possibly accommodate the influx without sacrificing grid reliability. It leads one to believe whether top officials and union leaders at this utility — which earns generous incomes through Ontario ratepayers (they seem to forget about this) — are intentionally delaying action in hopes that a Progressive Conservative government will be elected, after which they can continue with the status quo: nuclear and fossil fuel generation.

What gets me is the misinformation they’re prepared to spread through these full-page advertisements. Here’s one: “So far, the tens of billions Ontario has spent on intermittent wind and solar energy is not delivering the promised benefits to the environment or the economy.” Wha? Would be nice to see something backing up that claim. I mean, Ontario ratepayers only pay for the renewable energy they receive, and two, any capital costs have come from the private sector, not ratepayers, and these investments have created thousands of jobs — non-unionized jobs, which is what is ruffling the PWO’s feathers.

PWO is pro-nuclear, pro-centralized generation, and pro-big transmission at a time when the global electricity market is moving to become more decentralized and less carbon-intensive. It is a throwback to an earlier era, and it’s struggling to protect what it has and it won’t let the truth get in the way.

That’s the real threat to the future of Ontario’s electricity system, not green energy.

I had to do a double-take. The world’s largest maker of thin-film solar modules, a company approaching $4 billion in annual sales and with a market cap of $8 billion, is getting nearly half a billion dollars in loan guarantees from the Export-Import Bank of the United States to develop seven solar projects totaling 90 megawatts in southwestern Ontario, Canada. According to the bank, the transaction constitutes the “largest financings in history supporting U.S. solar-energy exports to any country.”

“The Bank’s support was needed because viable long-term financing for these projects was not otherwise available in the commercial marketplace,” according to First Solar’s press release.

Wha? What a load of crap. There’s low risk to First Solar in doing these projects. It’s a large company with a strong balance sheet. It already has built more than 100 megawatts of solar in Ontario so it now has a track record. And, on top of that, it is being guaranteed 42 cents per kilowatt-hour under a 2o-year power purchase contract secured through Ontario’s older Renewable Energy Standard Offer Program (RESOP). As history indicates, it is building these projects then turning around and flipping them for an immediate profit, yet it will have 18 years to pay off the low-interest loans secured with the help of these loan guarantees. This company doesn’t need the help. If I were a U.S. citizen, I’d want these guarantees directed at companies that did need it or at least to projects in regions that carry less certainty and more risk.

This deal also highlights a big problem in Ontario. First Solar, when it’s done, will have built more than 200 megawatts of solar in Ontario but not as part of the feed-in-tariff program. You see, it hates the feed-in tariff program and supports protests from Japan, the EU and the U.S. against Ontario’s local content rules. Yet, ironically, it has been the most to benefit in the Ontario solar market. You see, all of its contracts were secured under the older RESOP program. This program had no local content rules, so First Solar brings very little with respect to job creation in Ontario. It’s painful to see at a time when Ontario has lured 18 solar module manufacturers with its newer FIT program but has failed to turn huge demand into finished projects connected to the grid. The Ontario Power Authority has offered contracts to more than 1,300 solar projects in Ontario but so far only 10 megawatts are in operation because of footdragging by Hydro One, an overly bureaucratic environmental permitting process, and political uncertainty — no thanks to Tim Hudak’s pledge to kill the program if elected.

Behind the scenes, however, First Solar continues to build away, using solar gear manufactured across the border in Michigan and apparently under no time restrictions (unlike conditions of the FIT program). Meanwhile, First Solar’s costs have dropped dramatically in the four or five years since it secured its power-purchase agreements under the now-discontinued RESOP program, yet it will continue to rake in 42 cents for every kilowatt-hour it produces. Its profits will be huge, thanks to a poorly designed RESOP program that didn’t build-in time restrictions for projects and local content requirements.

On both sides of the border, somebody is being had. Ontario boasts having the largest solar PV installation in the world in Sarnia, but that site has absolutely nothing to do with the FIT program. It was built with little Ontario content, it was sold to a natural gas company (Enbridge), and now that construction is done there is little to tout in terms of local job creation.

The FIT program, by comparison, is a gem with respect to the conditions it places on developers. The RESOP, at least with respect to solar, has proven a disaster in retrospect. First Solar is laughing.

BTW: Here’s my response to her last major assault on green energy back in April 2010.

Here’s my response to Wente’s most recent anti-green column, starting with the Globe’s headline: “Message to McGuinty: Most green-job schemes have been miserable failures.”

I can’t believe the headline writer and overseeing editor would allow the word “most” to make it into that headline. Wente doesn’t back up the “most” claim with any statistics, let alone credible ones. And the few examples she cites are small, based on someone else’s reporting (such as one problematic report in the New York Times) and/or come without any context.

Now, here’s Wente’s opening two paragraphs:

Dalton McGuinty has hit the campaign trail, and he’s paving it green. Earlier this month he announced that Ontario will pump $80-million into building charging stations for electric cars. “They are peppy, they are quiet, and the thing that I like best as a father, and ultimately a grandfather, I would hope, is that they’re clean,” he said. By 2020, he hopes, one out of 20 cars in Ontario will be electrically powered.

Meantime, Costco, the giant retailer, has pulled the plug on its electric car-charging stations, which it had installed in its California parking lots. The reason is that nobody uses them. Even China – which promised it would leapfrog the world in electric-car development – is backing off.

First, Costco is removing chargers that were installed back when GM introduced its EV1 electric vehicle to the market in the 1990s, before the cars were crushed and shredded. Costco says the chargers aren’t used, but that’s largely because electric vehicles only began hitting the market this year and the chargers that are in place are outdated (i.e. based on old standards) or simply stopped working, as you’ll read further down in this Daily Mail story.  Second, Costco is just one company seemingly going against the grain at a time when dozens of others, including Best Buy, IKEA, Walgreens and Lowe’s, are adding them. Personally, I don’t think retail stores are ideal places for EV charging systems, but the fact that so many big brand operations are beginning to test them and deploy them is a good sign. For Wente to cite the Costco decision as proof that EV charging systems, and thus electric vehicles, are being abandoned is quite the stretch. Also completely wrong is her unsupported comment that the Chinese are “backing off.” How she came to this conclusion is beyond me, but perhaps she didn’t read China’s 12th five-year plan. By 2015 China plans to have 4,000 charging stations and growth is expected to increase rapidly from there with plans to invest nearly $5 billion in charging infrastructure by 2020, at which point the country will have at least 10,000 public state-run charging locations, not including the tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of private home and business charging stations that are expected to emerge. That doesn’t sound like backing off.

Indeed, research firm Pike Research projected last week that there will be 7.7 million charging stations for EVs located in homes, workplaces and public spaces worldwide by 2017, with about 1.5 million of them located in the United States. So much for backing off. I’ll admit that’s an ambitious prediction, but the trend is clear — yet Wente cites a decision by Costco to remove obsolete charging systems as proof that the market for EVs and their associated charging infrastructure is fading.

The rest of the world has begun to discover that the green dream is a mirage. Across the U.S., federal, state and city governments have poured zillions into green schemes. Most have been miserable failures.

The city of Seattle, for example, got $20-million from the U.S. Department of Energy to retrofit houses and make them more energy efficient. The money was supposed to create 2,000 jobs and retrofit at least 2,000 homes. But by this month, only three homes had been retrofitted and only 14 jobs created. Even the greens admit the program is a total flop.

There’s that “most” word again, as in “most have been miserable failures.” She’s referring both generally to green energy initiatives spearheaded by government and specifically to a small $20-million household retrofit program in Seattle that didn’t deliver promised results. Forget that maybe, just maybe this specific program was mismanaged. So what? I mean, programs — private or public — get mismanaged and don’t produce results all the time. Hey, the market even screws up, too. You know, like how mismanagement by U.S. and European banks led to a worldwide financial crisis? No mention of that, of course. Also no mention of how successful the Canadian federal government’s EcoEnergy home retrofit program was before it was cancelled in 2010. In all, Ottawa committed $750 million to a program that encouraged Canadians to spend $4 billion of their own money. In doing so, those Canadians will save an average of $340 million a year every year on their energy bills — all of it money that will be reinvested in the Canadian economy each year. Also, the $4 billion spent by homeowners generated $250 million in GST revenue for the government. All of this also created thousands of jobs, contributing even more tax revenue to Ottawa. How can that be categorized as a miserable failure? It can’t, which is why Wente didn’t mention it — it didn’t fit with her message or her goal, which is to poke holes in the McGuinty government’s green energy and electric vehicle strategy and give momentum to the opposition PC party as a provincial election approaches.

Green projects, it turns out, don’t create many jobs, and those jobs are costly. Barack Obama recently visited a plant in Michigan to tout its investment in new battery technology. The plant got grants of $300-million, and expects to create 150 new jobs. That works out to $2-million a job. Then there’s SolFocus, a company in San Jose, Calif., that produces solar panels. The mayor called it an “enormously important” development for the city’s economy,” The New York Times reported. But the company assembles its solar panels in China, and its new headquarters employs just 90 people.

During his 2008 campaign, Mr. Obama promised to create five million green jobs over the next decade. But as The New York Times reported last week, “federal and state efforts to stimulate creation of green jobs have largely failed.”

At this point Wente hasn’t established that green projects don’t create jobs, but she goes ahead and makes this statement anyway, giving only a tiny snapshop of job creation by mentioning two more ventures — one an electric vehicle battery maker and the other a maker of solar panels. She talks about how one government investment in a battery maker worked out to $2-million a job, though she doesn’t talk about future job growth at that company that was seeded by this government money — she only talks about the situation as it stands today so early in the birth of this new market. And this is where Wente goes off tracks, referring to a recent New York Times report that was clearly the inspiration for her column in the first place. That is, she waited for a juicy story in a more left-leaning U.S. newspaper like the Times and used it as a way to legitimize her own biases on the green energy topic. After all, it’s juicy to quote the Times saying “federal and state efforts to stimulate creation of green jobs have largely failed.”

But the Times article was also a failure of journalism. As Joe Romm points out at Climate Progress, isn’t it kind of strange to declare a program a failure about two or three years into a 10-year mandate? As Romm writes, “Imagine if, in 1963, two years after JFK’s famous speech to Congress, the New York Times had run a story, ‘Space program fails to live up to promise.’” Let’s keep in mind as well that the space program wouldn’t have gone far either if, during that time, a U.S. Congress filled with anti-science, anti-government Tea Partiers prevented the flow of money into Kennedy’s vision. Obama’s goal is achievable but not when such programs are consistently under attack by state and federal legislators who have only one objective: to defeat and humiliate the U.S. president. This is Wente’s objective with respect to McGuinty, who is also facing resistance but has actually delivered so much more: 20,000-plus green jobs, and counting. Is that a failure? Wente mentions that job count, but she doesn’t directly call it a failure, preferring instead to breeze over results in Ontario and focus on negative outcomes in the U.S. market.

Maybe he should take a look at Spain, which also set out to become the solar-power capital of the world. Everything went fine, so long as the subsidies kept flowing. But when the world economy went south, the Spanish government couldn’t afford them any more and pulled the plug. Bye, bye solar, and bye, bye jobs. By one reckoning, Spain spent half a million euros for each green job it created.

The moral of the story is as clear as a row of giant wind turbines on the horizon. Governments that invest in risky, expensive and unproven technologies will probably lose big. The only way they are able to lure private investment is with generous subsidies and long-term contracts. And even then, the failure rate is high. Ontario has already attracted its share of “suitcase” companies that are here so long as the money flows, and not a moment longer. And when they go belly-up, guess who’s stuck with the bills?

It’s predictable that Wente again trots out the Spanish example, which she also used in her wind-bashing column a year earlier. It’s the only example she can really offer up, largely because Spain’s solar market did in fact go through troubles and it is one cautionary tale that’s worth learning from. However, Spain is not representative of the market and its health. Wente neglects to mention countries that are thriving, how quickly solar costs are falling, how worldwide investment in solar continues to grow at a healthy pace, and how Ontario solar manufacturers are saying they can deal with a 30 per cent reduction in the feed-in-tariff rate as part of a plan to eventually eliminate incentives. No question Ontario could have done a better job executing its green-energy programs, and while there may be the occasional dud along the way, what this province is doing is investing in a future that Wente apparently can’t see or appreciate, or maybe doesn’t want.

By the way, to call solar and wind and electric vehicles “unproven” technology is, well, wrong. This stuff works, and it works well. It’s no less proven than the iPhone or BlackBerry Wente carries on her hip. Is it risky? Yes, because the deck is stacked against it and folks like Wente don’t make it any easier. But risk is also a matter of perception. I mean, drilling deep in the Gulf of Mexico or North Sea is risky, and so is investing in the oil sands, and so is sending people deep underground to mine for coal.

Anyway, none of this is going to change Wente’s mind. But I do expect better journalism from her, at least on this issue. And I do expect the editors of the Globe and Mail to challenge unsubstantiated claims, even if they come from columnists.