Hi all, I’m delighted to report that the first review of my upcoming book, Mad Like Tesla: Underdog Inventors and Their Relentless Pursuit of Clean Energy, is in and it’s, well, pretty encouraging. Here’s what Library Journal, an important industry trade magazine used as a purchasing guide by library buyer and book wholesalers, had to say:

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!

I had a nice chat Sunday with Ted Sargent, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Toronto who is also Canada Research Chair in nanotechnology. Sargent and his team have for the past six years led research on the development of colloidal quantum-dot (CQD) solar cells. The basic concept, which I first wrote about back in May 2005, has to do with the ability to design nanoparticles that are tuned to absorb a specific part of the electromagnetic spectrum of sunlight — that is, the ability to create quantum dots that can tap into both the visible and invisible spectrum of light. The potential, of course, is the ability to place these particles in some kind of liquid that becomes part of a high-volume spray-on process for manufacturing solar PV cells. Sargent’s goal is to produce a solar cell that’s both extremely low cost to make but without sacrificing efficiency, which is generally the case today.

Over the years Sargent’s group has steadily improved the technology, including extracting electrons from the solar cells more efficiently. From efficiencies of less than 1 per cent six years ago they’re now up above 5 per cent. Another way of improving efficiency is to design tandem and triple-junction solar cells, where each layer is specifically and optimally tuned to the slice of spectrum it wants to capture. “You can change the colours of light they absorb very readily by just changing the size of the nanoparticles,” Sargent explained to me. But if you want two layers — one for invisible spectrum and one for visible — it means you have to stack them in a way where you don’t compromise the efficiency of one or both layers. Sargent, whose group just released its latest study in the journal Nature Photonics, says they have cracked that nut. “The bottom line is, we’ve figured out how to stack these two solar cells on top of each other and make a totally smooth path for electrons to flow between these two cells.” It removes a major barrier to progress.

Achieving this flow isn’t so easy. Sargent says there’s a high wall for these electrons to pass, so the trick is to lower the wall separating the front and back layers (both made of titanium dioxide boosted with light absorbers) or make the wall easier to surmount. The solution was what Sargent’s team labelled the Graded Recombination Layer, which is composed of a series of conductive metal oxides — starting with molybdenum, then indium-tin, then zinc and finally titanium –that help transport the electrons between layers. “It’s a staircase, a little escalator, that brings electrons from the front cell to the back cell without having the losses,” says Sargent, who also likes to make comparisons to an electron ladder. “We ended up building a ladder with step heights that make it easier for the electrons to surmount.”

The device they built is only a couple of millimetres square, but that’s all you need to show the approach works. It achieved 4.2 per cent efficiency, with about two-thirds of that coming from visible spectrum and the remaining third from infrared spectrum. This is less than the single-junction efficiency record, but Sargent says for this experiment the objective wasn’t to improve efficiency but to establish an efficient flow between the two cells. The next step will be to up the efficiency, and even look at triple- or quadruple-junction cells.

As far as technology commercialization goes, Sargent’s goal is to achieve 10 per cent efficiency, which with the potential for super low-cost manufacturing would allow for the manufacture of flexible solar PV modules for about 50 cents per watt peak solar — a highly competitive price-point. After that, the group will shoot for 18 per cent efficiency. The goal is to achieve the highest efficiencies at the lowest possible cost. “We don’t want to sacrifice either,” he says. Asked about competition from other solar technologies, such as organic solar cells or thin-film cells based on CIGS or cadmium telluride, he’s optimistic about the superiority of the quantum dot approach. “We have solid reasons to believe we can be superior on cost and have a roadmap to be potentially better in terms of efficiency.”

A 19-year-old Princeton student from Calgary is getting a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: $100,000 and the chance to turn a classroom invention into a clean technology business.

Eden Full invented a new type of tracker for Solar PV panels. Instead of using sensors and electric motors to keep the panels directly facing the sun as they move across the sky, Full’s panels track the sun with the help of bimetallic strips that bend and twist in certain predictable ways when heated by the sun. You can read more about it in my Clean Break column posted today. She calls her invention SunSaluter, and like most tracking systems the technology can help improve the energy output of a solar PV system by up to 40 per cent. It’s also much cheaper than using motor-based systems, improving the economics for solar PV and making the technology more accessible to developing countries.

Full has filed a patent for her invention and is now focused on developing it into a commercial product. And she’ll truly get that chance to focus. The second-year Princeton University student was selected as one of “20 under 20″ for a $100,000 fellowship from the Thiel Foundation, created by PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel. She’s packing up her bag, taking a two-year leave from Princeton and heading to Silicon Valley, where she’ll get the support she needs to build her invention into a business.

Enthusiastic, creative, passionate… and just 19 years old.

I’ve heard from a few different sources now that Ontario may be considering imposing a moratorium on solar PV contracts issued under the feed-in-tariff program, and while any future backtracking by this Liberal government wouldn’t surprise me, I don’t think there’s any substance to these rumours. I may be wrong, but this appears to be a clear case of echo-chamber amplification. Sure, the Libs made an incredibly stupid decision by imposing a moratorium on offshore wind development. I say stupid for a number of reasons. One, it used the “lack of science” as an excuse to pull back, even though the previous moratorium on development was lifted precisely because the Ministry of Natural Resources said it was satisfied with the studies — the science – that had been done. Suddenly that science wasn’t good enough? Lame.

Two, it would have been more justifiable to impose another moratorium if the government had let developers keep the sites they had fairly secured. Instead, the government took the sites away and told developers that when the moratorium was lifted they’d have to start from scratch. Not a way to make friends of industry or to make investors feel comfortable in Ontario. It simply made zero sense to go that far, unless of course it was politically motivated — a likely explanation that is no comfort to the developers who put millions of dollars on the line and lost it all.

So, clearly the panicky Liberals are prone to making stupid decisions when under pressure by an opposition party that knows how to press its hot buttons. Will this be repeated for solar? If it was, it would IMHO completely sink the Liberal party heading into this upcoming fall election — particularly if it targeted small solar PV projects covered under the microFIT program. For larger projects, there is technically a moratorium in place. It’s called transmission restrictions, and it means only so many projects can be built in this province until transmission capacity is expanded to accommodate more. There have already been more project contract offers than the transmission system can accommodate, so really the throttle is the pace of transmission updates and the government, through Hydro One, controls that throttle. Better to make this fact clear to voters than to declare a moratorium that does nothing else but prove the Liberal party is on the run from a progressive energy plan it should be proudly promoting, with chest out and head held high.

For the record, I asked the Ontario Power Authority about these solar PV moratorium rumours and the agency flatly denied that a moratorium was coming. “OPA is not planning a moratorium for the FIT/mFIT program,” said spokeswoman Kristin Jenkins in an e-mail. “Right now, we are going through a process to issue contracts for the new Bruce to Milton transmission line which Hydro One recently received approval for. The developers that are eligible are the ones in the Bruce and West of London transmission areas on the FIT priority ranking list.  These developers did not receive contracts in the past because there was not transmission capacity.”

I asked as well about the planned two-year review of FIT pricing. Jenkins said the process will start in 2011, but she could offer no specifics on when. ”We will carry out the required two-year program review in 2011, but a date has not yet been set to start that,” she said. The sooner the better. (note: I deleted a paragraph from the original version of this post which messed up the dates of the upcoming review, leading me to an unnecessary rant. My apologies for the mistake for those who read an early version).

News that Toronto-based Morgan Solar raised another $16.5 million leaked out last week but the concentrated solar PV company is about to confirm the details, which include the fact that strategic investors Iberdrola and Nypro have returned for more. They join newcomer The Frost Group LLC, a private investment firm based in Miami that is led by Dr. Phillip Frost, who is also chairman of Teva Pharmaceuticals and CEO and chairman of OPKO Health, a publicly traded healthcare company that develops and commercializes a wide variety of medical products. The $16.5 million represents the bulk of what Morgan Solar is trying to raise in this round. For the rest, it’s aiming to bring aboard another strategic investor that has experience with project finance or develpment capabilities.

Morgan Solar is in the middle of ramping up. This year it expects to complete a number of demonstration projects at sites in Ontario and the United States. It’s establishing a manufacturing facility in San Diego, and it’s expanding its existing manufacturing and R&D presence in Ontario. The company’s Sun Simba product allows for the creation of super-thin CPV modules using proprietary light-guide solar optics, which continue to be unique in the industry as far as I can tell. Morgan Solar promises to deliver solar power — without subsidies — at costs that are grid competitive, and the company says it can offer this low-cost solar option this year, not in five years.

Personally, I look forward to checking out Morgan’s Ontario demonstration sites once they are complete, and I sincerely hope the Ontario government figured out a way to accommodate the company in the province’s feed-in-tariff program. Apparently there were some hiccups because the province’s local content rules didn’t account for the availability of CPV systems. Tisk, tisk.