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.

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!

The following Victoria Day weekend guest post is by Gideon Forman, executive director of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment.

The Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE) – along with nurses and leading health charities – is running an advertising campaign to support renewable power and the speedy phase-out of coal-fired electricity. It’s a project unique in the country. Under the heading, “Doctors and Nurses Support Green Energy”, the ads – which are appearing in 15 newspapers as well as in magazines and online – tell readers that last year Ontario’s coal plants caused over 150,000 illnesses and over 300 deaths. They state: “Ontario doctors, nurses, and other health professionals support energy conservation combined with wind and solar power – to help us move away from coal.”
 
The ads are signed by organizations — such as the Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario, the Lung Association, CAPE, and the Asthma Society of Canada – which represent literally tens of thousands of health professionals. These professionals have long condemned air pollution for its damage to human well-being. In a landmark report entitled “No Breathing Room” the Canadian Medical Association calculated that, in 2008, air pollution killed 21,000 Canadians and it projected that, by 2031, the “number of deaths due to long-term exposure to air pollution will be 710,000.”
 
But CAPE’s campaign is different because it does more than just assess harm – as important as that is. This initiative, for the first time in Canada, sees health professionals  combating air pollution by urging both an end to coal and an embrace of renewables. Ontario has promised to close its coal-burning plants by 2014 but doctors and nurses want it to happen much sooner. They point out the province has more than enough coal-free power to close the plants right now. And they emphasize that coal is a disaster from start to finish. (Ontario is by no means the only offender. In Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan over 50 per cent of electricity comes from this fossil fuel; in Alberta the figure is 82 per cent.)
 
Coal mining devastates landscapes by literally removing the tops of mountains. Burning the fuel releases a host of poisons including lead and mercury (neurotoxins), chromium and arsenic (carcinogens), and components of acid rain (sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides). Perhaps most worrying is its contribution to climate change: Ontario’s coal facilities emit the greenhouse gas equivalent of several million automobiles. If global warming is the world’s most pressing environmental threat, banning coal is job number one. In an article he published last Spring, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman had this to say about the issue: “James Hansen, the renowned climate scientist who deserves much of the credit for making global warming an issue in the first place, has argued forcefully that most of the climate-change problem comes down to just one thing, burning coal…”
 
This is why doctors, nurses, and health charities have launched an unprecedented campaign for this fuel’s phase-out and the development of renewable energy. Unlike coal plants, wind and solar operations do not contribute to brain damage and cancer nor do they produce acid rain, climate change, and smog. That’s a hopeful thought as we approach this year’s Clean Air Day (June 8). And it’s a good thing to remember the next time someone attacks green energy as “unsafe”.

Beyond the propoganda of the nuclear industry, I haven’t seen a single credible study that calculates the cost of (new) nuclear to ratepayers below 13 cents per kilowatt-hour. Indeed, there are many reports that suggest nuke power is above 20 cents per kilowatt-hour, particularly when you choose to not hide the hidden costs and subsidies. This makes wind power, landfill gas systems, waterpower and even some large biogas systems competitive with nuclear on a kilowatt-hour basis. And, of course, under the FIT we’re not held hostage to delays or cost overruns like we have been in the past with nuclear. You pay for what you get under the FIT. No risk, no large single points of failure, no risk of meltdown, no worries about handling future radioactive waste, and very high price transparency.

Now, Hudak would have Ontario voters believe that the rate we pay today is what we should expect to pay for future generation. I don’t believe this is a naive belief on Hudak’s part; I believe it’s to intentionally mislead. Fact is, there isn’t a single form of clean (or dirty) generation that can be built new today that isn’t more expensive than the 6 or 7 cents per kilowatt-hour that Hudak (and most media, for that matter) recklessly bandies about. Now, could we get wind generation cheaper through a competitive process? Yeah, we could maybe carve a couple of cents off the FIT rate. But the FIT was intentionally designed to lower barriers to market access — to open up the market beyond the big, deep-pocketed corporate giants who can afford the upfront millions required to respond to a request for proposals (RFP) and, after participating in such a process, can afford to walk away empty handed. The province created the FIT to encourage community participation, and to stimulate the kind of growth that would attract manufacturing and jobs — and it has, despite a few spineless moments and missteps from the Liberal government.

 Now, on to solar. Hudak and his legion of backers, including National Post columnist Parker Gallant (who has somehow managed to turn his column into an official soap box for the Ontario PCs — hell, he even hands over fresh quotes for Hudak’s press releases now), always point to solar prices when talking about the FIT. After all, it’s easier to anger voters by saying generally that we’re paying 80.2 cents per kilowatt-hour under the FIT and that this is 10 times more than the wholesale market rate for electricity. Wow — 10 times more! Crazy. But the comparison shouldn’t be to the wholesale market rate, and the rate itself is far from representative of the FIT program pricing. That scary 80.2 cents, which will soon be lowered, is for less than 1 per cent of FIT contracts when measured on a megawatt-hour contribution basis. Also, that money doesn’t go to big corporate conglomerates intent on vacuuming money out of Ontario. It goes to farmers and homeowners who are taking risks to become participants in the electricity system. The thousands of people taking part are literally changing the energy landscape in Ontario and they’re creating local jobs. You can see it just driving around this province. Put into perspective, the premium being paid to them is more than worth what the province is getting back. Hudak, however, would prefer to demonize them to score votes.

Now, let’s talk about the elephant in the room — big solar. Big, multimegawatt solar projects are getting 44.3 cents per kilowatt-hour. But unlike the small solar rooftop systems, these larger systems will collectively have an impact on electricty rates over the coming years. At the same time, we have to acknowledge that it is because of these large systems that a lot of manufacturing has shifted to Ontario. Still, it’s a lot of solar and a lot to pay, and this is in my view the Achilles heal of Ontario’s FIT program. If there are going to be changes to the program, the most dramatic changes have to come here, but it has to be done in a way that balances the need to nurture an emerging industry and the interests of ratepayers. The answer, in my view, is to embrace a competitive bidding process for these large-scale projects and set caps (targets?) on the amount of big solar we want in Ontario by 2015, 2020 and 2025.

But Hudak isn’t thinking or talking that way. He wants to throw the baby out with the bath water, and in doing so kill investor confidence in the Ontario market, kill green jobs and build new nuclear plants that we’ll have to start paying for 10 years before the first kilowatt-hour is generated. His approach is reckless at a time when Ontario needs surgical, not blunt force, solutions. He’s being destructive at a time when Ontarians want our politicians to be constructive.

On a final note, let’s keep in mind that we don’t have to choose nuclear over renewables or vice versa. While building new nuclear plants may be an unwise decision economically, there is plenty of job creation to come from reburishing or extending the life of Ontario’s existing nuclear fleet — even if we retire a couple of plants, such as Pickering. Indeed, OPG and Bruce Power have expressed concerns about doing these refurbishments and building new because of the limited labour pool and the logistical nightmare of taking so much on in such a tight window. So, the message here is you can continue to aggressively build green energy and capture the associated jobs while keeping folks in our nuclear industry gainfully employed for the next 10 years, simply following through on an existing refurbishment schedule. Talk of building new nukes is a distraction — there will be opportunities in both sectors, and plenty of jobs to go around. We don’t have to choose one over the other.

A good sign that more will happen was the announcement yesterday that Anaergia, which operates in Europe under the name UTS Biogas, has chosen Ontario as the location for its $70-million global headquarters, which will include R&D and manufacturing. The company expects to hire 200 people, and it plans to support and drive growth in biogas systems across Ontario and presumably the rest of Canada and northeastern parts of the United States. “The industry, in my view, is still in its infancy,” Andrew Benedek, company CEO, told the Toronto Star. “It has not evolved technologically. I really see an opportunity to become far away the leader of the world.” Benedek, a Canadian citizen, has a track record for running successful cleantech businesses. He was previously founder of Zenon Environmental, the Ontario-based water treatment company that went on to be purchased by General Electric in 2006 for about $700 million.

This is another healthy sign that the Green Energy Act and FIT program, despite their fixable problems and Hudak-spun controversy, are luring future-looking investments and jobs to the province.

The United Nations, which tracks world population growth, has upped its estimates. We know that we’ll pass the seven billion mark sometime this October, but the U.N. is now saying we could hit 10 billion within the century – nearly a billion more than expected. Actually, by 2050 we will likely hit 9.3 billion. For some perspective, the planet held five billion people back when Johnny Depp was just starting his career on the TV show 21 Jump Street (Yes, I admit, I was a huge fan of that show). That was the mid-1980s – not so long ago, is it?

Ten billion people are a lot of mouths to feed, bodies to hydrate and families to shelter. It translates into more vehicles on roads, more gigawatts of electricity demand, and more land needed for growing crops. And dramatically more garbage and pollution. It will become much more difficult for supply to meet this demand. Commodity prices will continue to rise, as they have been. Fresh water resources will become more scarce. Regional conflicts will grow. Greenhouse gas emissions will rise. This isn’t scaremongering, this is reality. Even climate skeptics must appreciate that the current path is unsustainable. Global warming isn’t the only reason to be concerned.

Now, reducing waste, eliminating inefficiency and doing things in a more intelligence way will help, but ultimately dealing with the planet’s population explosion will also require a complete rethinking of where we get energy and how we use it. We can’t simply “shoe-horn” renewables into an existing fossil-fuel infrastructure, at least not in the long term. We need to imagine an infrastructure that puts renewables and low-emission energy sources first, and then begin the difficult task of making the transition. Many barriers (entrenched interests, risk aversion, lack of political leadership and citizen buy-in) will need to be overcome, but what’s the alternative?

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a short preview of an upcoming report today that asserts we can make the transition. It concludes that nearly 80 per cent of the world’s energy supply could by 2050 be met through deployment of renewable energy technologies — particularly those that capture solar energy. Now, it’s a highly optimistic scenario, but it’s what we need to help keep GHG emissions below 450 parts per million and keep the global temperature from rising beyond 2 degrees C.

Are we too intimidated by the daunting task ahead? Perhaps that’s part of the problem. The IPCC spends many years putting together a massive and comprehensive report on the climate and then plunks it down for all the world to see. It’s information overload — simply too much to digest in one sitting — and it gives the impression that we have a problem that’s too big to tackle. The IPCC’s Fourth Assessment was roughly 3,000 pages! The Fifth Assessment, currently in the works, will be an equally large tome filled with depressing conclusions and broad calls for action that no countries appear ready to embrace.

I agree with folks like Andrew Weaver from the University of Victoria, who is perhaps Canada’s top climate scientist. He says we need to start targeting the science and dividing the problem into smaller, more manageable chunks. ”The science behind the problem is so utterly solid is that what we need to do is start carving pieces off and dealing with those,” Weaver recently told me.

Take, for example, global emission from landfills, which represent up to 4 per cent of total global GHGs. Why doesn’t the IPCC come out with a full report dedicated to the problem of landfill methane emissions and how to tackle it aggressively? Another report could focus on air travel, another major contributor, or tropical deforestation, or agricultural, or even geo-engineering as an attempt to buy time for adaptation programs. “Hiving off these parts and focusing international negotiations on individual sectors is probably where we need to go,” said Weaver. “The problem is so big people don’t know where to begin, so we have to go in this direction. Some are easy to tackle, some are more difficult. All of them are doable if you deal with them bit by bit.”

Now, back to the climate skeptics. Many say Canada is so insignificant that there’s no point in taking any action that could threaten our economy. How, for example, can a country of less than 50 million really register in a world heading toward 9 billion? One can see the allure of the do-nothing position when looked at this way. The problem with this argument is that it ignores the other problems — real, verifiable problems — that come with overpopulation and rapid depletion of resources, particularly fossil fuels. Air quality. Water scarcity. Geopolitical instability. Rising oil prices. Mass immigration that threatens to overwhelm the west’s social systems. Economic volatility. Even if you forget about greenhouse gases, there are plenty of hazards ahead that should concern us. Canada is not an alone. These issues will impact us, and will take a toll on our economy and standard of living.

Moving away from increasingly expensive fossil fuels toward locally generated, zero-emission energy sources, and using clean technologies to reduce waste will enhance our economic competitiveness during these trying times. By becoming more self-sufficient, we can become more insulated from many of the global challenges that lie ahead.

Putting our eggs in the fossil fuel basket, on the other hand, greatly exposes us to these challenges. Sure, a small group of people will get really rich (and this will skew our national GDP, which is a misleading indicator of a country’s economic health). But we will become more vulnernable to the volatility of oil and gas prices, commodity price swings and other gyrations of our international markets.

 I can’t help but think that North America, at the moment, is like a teenage athlete that continues to take steroids to win a race, only to ignore the heart attack that’s likely to come at age 25. Where’s the glory in that? There’s a quote in the Coppola movie Rumble Fish, in which Rusty James asks his brother what California is like (in the 1980s). His brother answers back: “California’s like a beautiful, wild girl on heroin who’s high as a kite, thinkin’ she’s on top of the world, not knowing she’s dying even if you show her the marks.”

One could say this of Alberta. In fact, some kind of are — and they’re not just environmental groups.

That’s why in my Clean Break column this week I argue clean technology, and specifically the efforts of SDTC, need to be part of the country’s election dialogue. We need to build on the progress SDTC has achieved to date, not abandon the momentum at a time when major world economies — Germany, China, India, Brazil, the United States – are racing to establish a dominant position in the emerging global green economy.

The leaders of the political parties looking to run the next government need to be asked: How are they prepared to support clean technology innovation and green economic development in Canada?

There has been much effort made in the media to lead the public to believe that their electricity bills have been spiralling due to the cost of subsidies to wind and solar initiatives of our energy conservation programs.  The 80 cents/kilowatt hour (kWh) for solar is frequently cited as the greatest offender, even though that rate only applies to rooftop solar with a capacity of 10 kW or less. In total, such installations currently amount to just 34 MW out of the 37,000 MW of installed generation in the province.   Not mentioned are the subsidies paid to our private natural gas generators, or those paid to Bruce Power, when the market price doesn’t meet their guaranteed price (which is almost all the time).  The latter subsidies involve 70% of the global adjustment monies paid out, simply because they pay for the delivery of much more power.  In fact, the Ontario Power Authority paid out $1.35 billion in 2010 to meet gas and nuclear power purchase agreements.

So how significant are the subsidies to renewable energy and the monies paid for conservation in a typical residential electricity bill anyway?  To answer that we had better clarify what a typical electricity rate is per kilowatt hour delivered to your home.  There has been much confusion about that as well.

A typical electrical bill consists of a charge per kWh of electricity used, plus a charge for transmission and distribution, plus a fixed fee to the utility, plus a regulatory charge, plus a debt retirement charge, plus HST, less the 10% the Province has just given us in the clean energy benefit.  It is a complicated system to be sure. To get an estimate of a representative rate, we looked at a typical home that heats with natural gas and uses 800 kWh of electricity per month, and we compared that to a similar house with electric heat that uses typically 2500 kWh of electricity per month (averaged over 12 months).  Although the costs per month obviously varied ($105 vs. $303) the cost of electricity per kWh “all in” was the same, about 13 cents.

So how much of that is due to renewables and conservation?   In 2010, the Ontario Power Authority paid electricity resource costs of $317 million for conservation programs, and $269 million for renewables.  That is a lot of money – but you must realize that it is recovered over a total Ontario consumption in 2010 of 142 terawatt hours (that’s 142,000,000,000 kWh), which amounts to 0.4 cents per kWh (split roughly equally between conservation and renewable subsidies).  So the cost of conservation and all the renewable subsidies in 2010 amounted to 0.4 cents of the 13 cents we paid for a kWh in our homes.  A significant amount, perhaps, but hardly the bogeyman that it is so often made out to be.

In fairness, it must be acknowledged that this 0.4 cent amount will rise as more green energy comes on line in future years, but in 2010 that is what it was.  During these times when we are publicly discussing a long-term electrical energy plan, I think it is important to be honest about the current cost of electricity.

Now, I think we need to start moving larger-scale wind and solar projects to a competitive bidding process to keep FIT costs from escalating too much, too quickly, but clearly the impact today doesn’t justify what public outcry there has been.

This deal makes a lot of sense, as Magma CEO Ross Beaty explains well in the company’s press release. “It has the potential to lower the cost of capital to develop each company’s existing growth assets, to enable those assets to be developed more quickly, and to better attract new opportunities for future development,” said Beaty. “Geothermal will remain a core focus of the new company, but hydro, wind and solar assets will be solid business platforms for future growth. In the renewable energy business, bigger is better and this combination will achieve that while enhancing returns to each company’s shareholders.”

There’s no doubt big is better in any energy development business, and if bulking up does give the new company access to cheaper capital this could open up plenty of opportunities. Even in a market like Ontario, with guaranteed feed-in-tariff rates for 20 years, banks are still reluctant to work with small companies without charging them an arm and a leg. This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be, but it’s the sad reality. Alterra is wise to bulk up, and in doing so is on the way to creating one of the largest pure-play renewable energy developers in Canada.