Ryel told me he’s had trouble getting the media to pay attention to his hunger strike. So I’m posting this here to help him spread the word. He’s got a Facebook page where he’s trying to build up members — so far he’s at 855. He’s calling his activist group Starving for Change. You can see some of the YouTube videos he has posted here.

The one-hour discussion appears at 8 p.m. and again at 11 p.m. EST.

Tyler

The commercial Internet was still in its infancy and was considered part of the information highway. It was only in the mid-1990s that the Internet emerged as the dominant disruptive force in this technological vision. Internet Protocol, the communications standard underpinning the Internet, allowed all sorts of information — text, audio, video — to be treated as packets of data that could be shipped at high speed across cable and phone networks, which were privately operated networks that had on-ramps and off-ramps to the public Internet. As networks became faster, as compression of data got better, as computing power and memory grew exponentially, it became technologically possible and economical to deliver phone, broadcast, e-commerce, Web surfing and e-mail over both the cable and phone networks. The result: network convergence. Suddenly technology was creating competition in these regulated monopolies, forcing regulators to adapt and establish rules that permitted regulatory forbearance when competition in a market was deemed acceptable. For the phone and cable companies, the gloves were off. It was game on. 

Why am I telling you this? Because I’m seeing the same thing happening in the energy sector. Electric utilities and natural gas utilities — in Canada at least — have operated in largely different worlds, each with their own rules and regulations, each with their own regulated monopolies and turfs. Actually, that isn’t entirely the truth. The electric utilities still offer electric hot-water tanks and electric heating, though this is slowly being phased out. But on the natural gas side, offering electricity directly to residential customers just hasn’t happened. Sure, in some jurisdictions there are parent companies that own both a natural gas utility and electric utility and offer services to customers on the same bill. But that’s not the convergence I’m talking about. I’m talking about using a natural gas pipeline network as direct competition against an electric transmission and distribution network.

I got thinking about this more after Bloom Energy announced its Bloom Energy Server. As far as technology goes, I didn’t see this unveiling as a big deal. Solid-oxide fuel cells have been around for decades. Today, there are several companies working on the same thing. What Bloom comes to the party with is good marketing, high-profile financial backing, and a great vision. By calling it an “energy server” it’s drawing parallels to the Internet, which gave us ubiquitous distributed computing, storage and delivery of information. Bloom is aiming to encourage distributed generation — the idea that power is efficiently produced and delivered close to the point of consumption, rather than generated far away from a central plant and transmitted long distances to the consumer. The latter sounds like mainframe computing from the 1970s and 1980s. We know what happened there. And yes, we do have distributed generation today in the form of rooftop solar, on-farm anaerobic digestors, industrial CHP and community wind farms, but for residential purposes there is nothing economical that can supply all our electricity and heating needs 24-hours a day.

An affordable Bloom Energy Server in every home, or something equivalent, would dramatically change the market landscape. It would allow natural gas to provide electricity, heating and hot-water heating with a single energy source, squeezing out the electric utility altogether. And even if it’s not in the home, large Bloom Energy Servers could be situated in the middle of subdivisions. Connected to a larger natural gas pipe, or better, to a local source of carbon-neutral biogas, one can envision district heat and power systems that are complemented by solar or geothermal. Sure, under this scenario, some wires would need to go into the home, but the community would be effectively off-grid. Again, electric utility gets the squeeze.

This changes the game, and presents challenges to energy regulators that have treated the natural gas and electric folks as distinct industries and markets. Suddenly these overlapping turfs mean something. Competition is possible. Regulation is out of date. This is a trend that will increasingly take hold over the coming decade.

K.R. Sridhar, founder and CEO of Bloom Energy, described his vision this way in the company’s first press release: “We believe that we can have the same kind of impact on energy that the mobile phone had on communications. Just as cell phones circumvented landlines to proliferate telephony, Bloom Energy will enable the adoption of distributed power as a smarter, localized energy source.”

I don’t agree with Sridhar. The cell phone analogy doesn’t work, because he conveniently ignores that you still need a natural gas pipeline. Mind you, if a small village in India wants to turn manure and other waste into biogas and use that to power itself, that would work and the Bloom Energy Server would enable it. Also, the fact that the Bloom box works in reverse means you can hook up a wind mill or solar panel and have it generate storable hydrogen, which can be converted back into electricity by reversing the process again. It’s possible, one day, but a lot of things are possible — let’s stick with what’s practical, economical and likely.

Another reason the cell phone anology doesn’t work is because the compelling part of cell phones is that you can carry them wherever you go. Unless Sridhar has plans for a pocket-sized Bloom Energy Server that operates on the sweat from your body, this won’t have the same impact as wireless portable communications.

I think a more accurate comparison is the impact of the Internet and Internet protocol. Before IP the phone networks and the cable networks operated in their own worlds. With IP they now invade each other’s worlds. We’re seeing something similar unfolding in the energy market. We’re seeing energy convergence.

It’s a perfect example of what managers of the electricity system need to be aware of when trying to balance supply and demand on the grid. It ranges from the weather to what’s on your TV on a given evening.

Enerkem uses a thermochemical fluidized-bed process to gasify municipal solid waste (organics, wood waste, plastics), demolition wood, and agricultural/forest residues. The resulting syngas is cleaned and, using a proven catalyst, can be turned into a variety of end products, including methanol, ethanol and high-value olefins (plastics). The company is in the process of building a waste-to-ethanol facility in Mississippi (75 million litres a year) and an Edmonton plant (36 million litres a year) that will also turn sorted municipal solid waste into ethanol. The Edmonton facility is being done in partnership with Greenfield Ethanol, Canada’s largest independent ethanol producer. Meanwhile, in Westbury, Quebec, the company has a commercial-scale demonstration facility that currently turns old wooden hydro poles into ethanol.

Rho Ventures, Braemar Energy Ventures and BDR Capital, all existing investors, participated in the financing round with Waste Management, along with new investor Cycle Capital. “This financing round validates Enerkem’s business and advances our path towards leadership in the waste and advanced fuels markets,” said Chornet in a release. In an earlier story (July 2008) I wrote for Greentech Media, Chornet said that burning waste or burning the syngas created from waste is, well, a waste. Based on electricity and ethanol prices at the time, a company can make three times more revenue per tonne of processed waste compared to a plant that simply burns its syngas to generate electricity, he said. Chornet also said Enerkem’s process is profitable with oil at $50 a barrel and if the company can get a competitive tipping fee to take the garage.

The basic idea is that specially designed hydraulic wind turbines are used to compress nitrogen into existing gas or oil pipeline infrastructure, some of it unused throughout North America. Several hundred, even thousand, kilometres of pipeline could be filled with nitrogen and kept under pressure, in effect becoming a kind of massive nitrogen battery for wind. When electricity needs to be generated anywhere along the pipeline, the nitrogen gas is released and expands to turn a turbine that generates electricity. Wind, under this setup, suddenly becomes dispatchable and has baseload characteristics. Also, the pipeline eliminates the need for transmission lines.

There’s still much to learn about Lancaster’s approach, but it’s an intriguing idea that in my mind is worth investigating. Some questions: Can these pipelines handle the expansion/compression cycles over time? How efficient would the process be? Can such a small company pull off such an ambitious feat? How does it compete with other options, such as compressed-air cavern storage or pumped storage or even flow batteries?

Stay tuned…

Spin is in, but climate change still there
Hardcore climate skeptics smell blood and so do some in the mainstream media, adding momentum to a boisterous campaign to discredit and confuse

Tyler Hamilton
Energy Reporter

The following e-mail arrived last week from an instructor at Seneca College. He was gleeful, commenting on all the negative publicity recently directed at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“How will the Star explain to her devoted believer’s (sic) why Al Gore and David Suzuki are being led away in handcuffs?” he wrote. “ClimateGate, ThermometerGate, GlacierGate, AmazonGate… Button up Mr. Clean – it’s real (sic) cold out there this winter.”

These taunting, often hateful e-mails arrive all the time from folks who don’t believe climate change (human caused or otherwise) is happening, and who believe their case is strengthened every time some libertarian pundit adds to their arsenal of doubt.

They mock the green economy and green energy. On climate action, they worship the status quo. Lately, they smell blood. And like underfed sharks at an annual seal gathering, they’re whipping themselves into a frenzy in hopes of turning a scratch into a fatal gorging.

Sarah Palin is now writing off all climate science as “a bunch of snake oil.” Fox News host Glenn Beck said last week that IPCC scientists have so dishonoured themselves they should perform hara-kiri – that is, commit mass suicide by plunging a sword into their bellies.

Here in Canada, the Financial Post’s resident libertarian Terence Corcoran wrote a column in late January with a headline that shouted “Climate agency going up in flames,” while the Globe and Mail’s Margaret Wente wrote early in February that “the science scandals just keep on coming” and that the entire climate-change movement has been discredited. Columnist Rex Murphy, who has fittingly moved on to the National Post is pretty much saying the same thing, only with bigger words.

Wishful thinking doesn’t make it so.

Interestingly, both Corcoran and Wente supported their arguments by mentioning how climate scientist Andrew Weaver from the University of Victoria is, in the words of Wente, among the many climate scientists who “sense a sinking ship” and are “bailing out.” Corcoran wrote that Weaver is “heading for the exits” and this is “firm evidence that the IPCC is in trouble.”

Here’s what Weaver had to say last Wednesday when asked by the Star about the recent coverage. “It would be nice if they actually called me,” he said, referring to Wente, Corcoran and some journalists in England.

He said his comments from an earlier CanWest story have been cherry picked and twisted. “It’s all utterly ridiculous. The way it’s being spun is that there’s this sinking ship and the rats are trying to leave.”

But the true sinking ship is the Earth’s climate system, he said. “It’s as if the Titanic is going down and we’re all arguing about the colour of the deck chairs. Surely there was an error in the IPCC report. It’s wrong, and it shouldn’t have been there. But this is being used as an attempt by those who are desperately trying to undermine the IPCC.”

First, it helps to understand what the IPCC really is. It is an international scientific body established by the United Nations in 1988 to publish regular reports on the state of the Earth’s climate. The IPCC doesn’t do its own research. Rather it gets more than 2,000 of the world’s top climate scientists to review the latest peer-reviewed literature. It then gets a few hundred of them to write up its reports.

Here we have a similar body called the Royal Society of Canada.

Those who participate in the IPCC, like Weaver, are volunteers. They work for free on an issue that consumes a huge amount of their time. As scientists, they’re not the greatest communicators or managers. This contrasts with the industry-backed lobbyists and spin doctors who are paid big bucks to scrutinize, bully and discredit these scientists and add noise to the skeptics’ echo chamber.

Take the controversy some are calling GlacierGate, which relates to information on Himalayan glacier melt buried in a 3,000-page IPCC report from 2007. The report said there was a very high chance the Himalayan glaciers would completely melt by 2035. The statement was indeed rubbish, being based on a WWF-International report from 2005.

As a result, we certainly should be combing the rest of the report for similar errors. The recent obsession with this one error, however, ignores the true peer-reviewed evidence that the Himalayan glaciers are, in fact, still melting. We just don’t know exactly how fast.

And let us not forget the Arctic, Antarctica, Greenland and even the Alberta glaciers. David Barber, a University of Manitoba professor who is an expert on Arctic sea ice, recently reported that the Arctic ice is melting “faster than our most pessimistic projections.”

University of Calgary climate scientist Shawn Marshall led a study published last month that found Alberta’s Rocky Mountain glaciers will lose 82 per cent of their ice by 2100 compared to 2005 measurements. Earlier, the University of North British Columbia had already concluded that the glaciers lost about 25 per cent for their cover between 1985 and 2005.

Weaver points out that the 2007 IPCC report was, in fact, conservative with its conclusions. At the time they didn’t have access to more accurate satellite data under NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission.

The new GRACE data, said Weaver, “has revealed that Greenland has been melting rather dramatically. Also, not only is Antarctica melting, but West Antarctica is melting quite rapidly.”

The GRACE data and Marshall and Barber studies are just some of the more recent developments. They reinforce hundreds, even thousands of climate-change studies from the past two decades that form pieces of this complex puzzle. But there are enough pieces in place that we’re starting to see an image, and it doesn’t look good.

Is this alarmism? Sure it is, and so it should be. Do climate change scientists sometimes get worried and show it? Sure they do, but apparently that’s bad. Do we really expect them to go about their scientific duties with Spock-like precision that’s void of emotion and human imperfection?

This is where the so-called ClimateGate scandal comes into play. Remember those e-mails that were illegally hacked from the computer servers at the University of East Anglia, home to the U.K.’s Climatic Research Unit? The comments revealed an attempt by a small group of scientists to withhold some information from climate skeptics and allegedly deceive the public by massaging data.

But on closer reading, even the U.K. Guardian newspaper, one of the IPCC’s biggest critics these days, admits the accusations are mostly baseless. “Almost all the media and political discussion about the hacked climate e-mails has been based on brief sound bites publicized by professional skeptics and their blogs,” wrote Guardian environmental writer Fred Pearce. “In many cases, these have been taken out of context and twisted to mean something they were never intended to.”

Now the skeptics are touting AmazonGate, which relates to an IPCC finding that small reductions in rainfall in the Amazon could devastate up to 40 per cent of the Brazilian rainforest. It was based on a WWF-International report. But was it wrong?

The report’s co-author, Andrew Rowell, is fighting back. In a letter to the U.K. Sunday Times, which first broke the story, Rowell said he was never called and the reporter failed to do proper research.

According to Rowell, the reporter “ignored evidence that the figure had been backed up by peer-reviewed research both before and after our publication.” One of the world’s top Amazon scientists, Daniel Nepstad, confirmed last week that Rowell’s report and the IPCC’s conclusion were both correct.

Yet the misinformation campaign continues. The skeptics say we’re cooling, pointing rather U.S.-centrically to the snowfall that has pummeled cities such as Washington, D.C. and ignoring record warming elsewhere – like in Vancouver, where snow is being flown in by helicopter so the Olympic ski events can be held.

By the way, snowfall is evidence of precipitation, not cooling, and climate science is about extremes – record snowfall and rainfall in one part of the planet, record drought in another. Same goes for temperature, where you’ll see record highs in one place and record lows in another.

It’s the rising frequency of records and higher global temperature averages we should be worried about. And that’s what we’re seeing. “In the Arctic, there have been parts that are 10 to 20 degrees C warmer this year,” said Weaver. “These are stunning temperatures.”

But why should we believe NASA, the World Meteorological Organization, and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which have each declared the 2000s as the hottest decade on record?

For the pundits, it’s far more interesting – and easier — to dwell on the colour of the deck chairs. This, and not the science, is the great global warming hoax.

On the acquisition front, two more promising Ontario cleantech ventures have been plucked up by U.S. firms. On Tuesday Toronto-based biogas maker Stormfisher Biogas announced it had been acquired by Virginia-based Greenhouse Gas Services. Despite having one of the most boring and uninspiring names, Greenhouse Gas Services is a venture of GE Energy Financial Services and AES Corp., so it has some serious backing. The company invests in and develops projects that reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, and it then sells the carbon credits. So here’s my question: If some of the biggest Stormfisher projects are expected to be in Ontario, and since the Ontario Power Authority doesn’t appear to be letting biogas projects keep carbon credits, then what’s in it for Greenhouse Gas Services? I can only speculate that the power authority has quietly decided to let developers keep credits from methane destruction. Something I’ll have to follow up on.

And just today, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Calisolar announced it had acquired Vaughan, Ontario-based 6N Silicon, a maker of solar-grade silicon that will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary. “In addition, $22.5 million in funding was raised from existing Calisolar and 6N investors,” the companies said in a statement. “The new funds will be used to increase capacity at the Sunnyvale, California cell manufacturing facility and expand silicon purification operations in Vaughan, Ontario.” It’s sad to see 6N fall under foreign ownership so early in its life, but the good news is that Calisolar is likely to set up some module assembly in Ontario to take advantage of the feed-in-tariff program here. Given that its solar cells will contain 6N’s silicon, the company will be well positioned to meet Ontario’s local content requirements and even supply other cell/module makers.

Finally, I have a follow to my story about Vestas and the possibility it will lay roots in Ontario. I spoke Wednesday to the company’s head of global offshore markets, who spoke highly of the Trillium projects and called the opportunity to develop offshore wind in the Great Lakes “fantastic.” He wouldn’t say if Vestas plans to establish manufacturing in Ontario — which isn’t surprising — but given the potential in the Great Lakes, the liklihood of Trillium’s projects moving forward first, and the positive policy and regulatory environment in Ontario (including the feed-in-tariff program, which offers 19 cents per kilowatt-hour for offshore wind power), all the stars are aligned and it’s only a matter of time before Vestas makes its move.