Colonoscopies and gastroscopies aren’t fun, but sometimes you just gotta have one to spot a problem before it becomes too big. When you get to a certain age these procedures tend to become more routine — a way to keep an eye on the plumbing and only fix it when you have to. Better that than to find out too late and be forced into emergency for a costly and risky surgery. The same can be said for our municipal water infrastructure. Let a problem fester and you might unexpectedly see a major burst in a water main that floods part of town and costs a bundle to fix and clean up. I point to the water main break in Toronto at the beginning of January, when five homes were flooded and had to be evacuated. The pipe in question was 89 years old, so the city should have seen it coming. (Just in: Yet another water main break in Toronto, this one causing an all-day power outage in part of the city). It simply makes sense to routinely inspect your pipelines so you can spot leaks and breaks before they become catastrophic bursts. At that point you can target the fix, which is ultimately a cheaper approach to pipeline management.

Or maybe not. The problem with inspections is that they usually require the pipeline to be dewatered beforehand. This can be expensive, and the logistics are a bit daunting. This presented an opportunity for Mississauga, Ont.-based Pressure Pipeline Inspection Co., which has developed a technology that can be inserted into a pipeline while the water is flowing. A combination of sensors and cameras can be used to spot leaks and assess the overall condition of a pipeline, giving water utilities more information for better managing pipeline renewal. I recently wrote an article on Pressure Pipeline in the Toronto Star.

The company has two main technologies: Sahara and PipeDiver. Sahara consists of a long cable that can be fed through an access tap into a “live” pipe. It has a sensor on the tip and a small parachute-like collar opens up once inside to capture the flow of the water, which pulls the cable deep into the pipe. As it travels it sends out acoustic signals. An operater on the surface listens with a special device and tracks the location of the sensor, at the same time listening for acoustical changes that indicate a leak or trouble spot. Sahara can also be equipped with a fibre-optic digital camera at the tip, allowing for live video inspection at the same time.

PipeDiver ditches the cable altogether. It’s a remotely controlled free-swimming robot that is injected at one point in a water main and extracted many kilometres away. PipeDiver is targeted at press-stressed concrete cylinder pipes, which are typically quite large. In Mexico, Pressure Pipe recently broke a record by letting its PipeDiver device swim 37 kilometres before it was finally retrieved. I encourage you to watch the video above — it shows how PipeDiver is put into the pipe and, even more neat, how it’s taken out.

This kind of technology will become increasingly important as municipalities struggle with aging water infrastructure. It’s estimated that 15 per cent of water is leaking from our infrastructure, a major waste to say the least. Municipalities, faced with limited budgets, are going to have to do a better job prioritizing projects and targeting fixes. The current approach — replacing or renewing large segments of infrastructure based on a pre-schedule, or simply responding to bursts when they happen — is an inefficient use of limited financial resources. Better management and maintenance of assets will require more inspection, and more inspection will require technologies that can do the job at the lowest cost and with the least disruption.

This is a great start for a province that has only peaked above 27,000 megawatts in its history. And these results exclude the huge potential for large offshore wind projects in Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, as well as some larger hydroelectric and pumped storage projects. Again, it’s easy to flag these applications and shout victory, but the hard work is ahead — getting these projects built and generating power for the grid, as well as getting the transmission built to accommodate them. At the moment, there’s only enough transmission capacity to accept about 2,500 megawatts, so shovel-ready projects in capacity-spare areas are being given top priority. If, however, we can get a majority of these projects online within the next few years that will be a major accomplishment as Ontario works toward its goal of phasing out coal power by 2014.

Ontario, so it seems, is leading the charge for offshore wind development in North America. Never mind that we’re not a coastal jurisdiction. This isn’t about the ocean, this is about the lakes. On Monday, Canada’s largest independent wind developer, Canadian Hydro Developers, announced that it was purchasing the rights to an “Offshore Wind Prospect” that has the potential to be a massive 4,400 megawatt, multi-phase wind project. That would  make it the largest offshore wind project in the world. Located along an 80-kilometre stretch in the middle of Lake Erie (on the Ontario side), the first phase of the planned developed — between 400 and 500 megawatts in size — is expected to be operational by the end of 2014.

Canadian Hydro purchased the rights from Wasatch Wind Inc. of Utah, and said it decided to get into offshore wind because of the feed-in tariff program in Ontario that pays 19 cents for every kilowatt-hour of power that comes from an offshore turbine. Kent Brown, CEO of Canadian Hydro — which is the subject of a hostile takeover bid from Calgary-based utility TransAlta Corp. — said his company’s offshore plans, on their own, should be enough to convince a foreign manufacturer to set up shop in Ontario. While it’s unlikely Canadian Hydro will be able to develop the full 4,400 megawatts, its entry into the field certainly brings momentum to the Great Lakes offshore wind energy rush.

Toronto-based developer Trillium Power is leading the pack. Its first project would be a 710 MW offshore wind farm in Lake Ontario, called the Trillium Power Wind 1, followed by three more projects that add nearly 2,900 MW to its pipeline. Trillium Power Wind 1 is likely to be the first major offshore wind project in the Great Lakes, and possibly North America. In fact, New Energy Finance says there’s nearer-term potential for development in the Great Lakes than on the coasts, and that Ontario is clearly shaping up to be a leader in offshore wind.

Just a few days ago, I reported that the Ontario government is in serious talks with Samsung C&T about bringing wind and solar manufacturing to Ontario. Samsung is also on record saying it’s interested in entering the offshore market, so perhaps there’s an opportunity there. And who knows, GE, since its purchase of offshore turbine maker ScanWind, may be tempted to chase this market as well. The Great Lakes are an interesting place to develop. It’s shallower, less turbulent, and there’s no salt water to play havoc with turbine machinery. All of this reduces wear and tear on gear, and allows for quicker construction because, unlike ocean-based projects, you don’t have to contend with often violent weather that causes costly delays. Now, one potential problem is ice flow, and that’s something developers will have to deal with. But certainly the opportunity is there for developers of offshore wind in the Great Lakes to put up projects at lower cost than the big ocean-based projects we’re seeing in Europe. They now have to prove it.

It’s that time again. Sustainable Development Technology Canada has awarded grants to another round of companies eager to demonstrate their respective clean technologies. This time around 18 projects are being funded to the tune of $54 million. To date SDTC has invested $425 million in 171 clean technology projects. Of the 18, here are a few that caught my attention:

* Duropar Technologies Inc. of Brampton, Ontario, has partnered with Canadian Pacific Railway on a project that seeks to replace the use of creosote-covered railway ties with ones that are made of 100 per cent waste-based composite material. By waste, I mean plastic that is difficult to recycle through municipal programs and old asphalt, which is a pain in the butt to dispose of. Now, no secret that the old creosote ties have toxic chemicals in them that leech into the soil and ground-water along train tracks. Here’s a fact I didn’t know: the railway industry goes through more than 20 million ties a year in North America alone. “Each tie leaches up to 15 kilograms of creosote over its lifetime,” according to SDTC. Duropar has no apparent Web site, but I did find this link to one of their patents. Its composite ties don’t leech, so are considered a much “greener” alternative.

* Saltworks Technologies Inc. of Vancouver, B.C., has developed a desalination system “that reduces electrical energy requirements by up to 80 per cent, thereby improving the affordability and accessibility of clean water,” according to SDTC. The key to this is an inexpensive, low-temperature thermal energy conversion system that uses solar energy or industrial waste heat (process heat) to reduce electricity consumption. For the SDTC project, Saltworks will build a commercial-scale 5,000-litre/day “transportable” pilot plant that can be used for ocean water. The process doesn’t rely on chemicals. The company, as you can see by its Web site, is still pretty much in stealth mode. If its process and technology are as efficient as promised, this could be huge for the Middle East, Australia, and shoreline areas of the U.S. southwest that have scarce fresh-water resources. The Middle East alone, certainly an area with terrific solar exposure, wants to build several massive oil-fired generating stations that will be used to power desalination plants. The potential market is massive.

* And then there’s StormFisher Biogas of Toronto, a company I’ve written about several times before. Seems StormFisher is moving ahead with plans to produce biogas in anaerobic digesters that can be injected into Ontario’s natural gas pipeline — specifically, the pipeline owned and operated by Union Gas. It will be a Canadian-first if they can do it, though “Canadian first” means little when we know it’s being done all the time in Europe. Still, nice to see us getting into the game. StormFisher’s system will take methane produced from manure and food processing by-products (i.e grape skins from wine-making, waste from cheese and milk production, etc.) and will convert it into pipeline-grade natural gas. At the same time, StormFisher’s own process by-product — i.e. the digestate — will be turned into a quality organic fertilizer that can be sold back to farmers to displace the use of chemical fertilizers. “The project aims to validate next generation biogas technologies which, although commercially available in Europe, are not in use in North America,” according to SDTC.

You’re at home cooking yourself some dinner. You fill your plate but before you sit down to eat you walk over to the garbage can and dump a quarter of your meal.

Insane? Well, that’s exactly what we’re doing with our drinking water.

In Ontario, some new numbers were released today and they’re staggering. A study by professors in the University of Toronto’s civil engineering department found that municipal water systems across Ontario have leakage rates of treated water ranging from 10 to 50 per cent, with the average conservatively estimated at 25 per cent. This, they estimate, translates into $700 million annually that taxpayers are paying for water that never reaches their taps.

“That’s some 327 million cubic meters of water lost each year — enough to fill about 131,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools,” according to the study, which was done in partnership with the Residential and Civil Construction Alliance of Ontario. Then there’s all the energy that’s used to treat and pump that lost water and the environmental consequences of having it leak into the ground, where sinkholes can form and basement can flood.

This isn’t the kind of thing consumers like to hear when they’re being asked to conserve water, install low-flush toilets, use rain barrels, and let their lawns and flowers go brown.

The study calls for large and immediate investments in rehabilitating water pipes. Problems tackled today in a significant manner will lead to more savings down the road. For example, the study calculates what Ontario could have saved had it made the necessary investments 10 years ago, rather than deferring maintenance. “The cumulative wasted energy due to deferring maintenance amounts to $161 million over the last 10 years. That is, had Ontario spent the same amount of money on maintenance of leaky pipes at one point (ten years ago) instead of distributing the same amount of money over 10 years, the savings in energy alone could have reached over $160 million.”

The pressing need to invest bodes well for companies such as Pressure Pipe Inspection Company in Mississauga, Ontario, which has developed better ways to detect underground leaks in municipal water infrastructure.