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 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?

Nova Scotia is out to prove that tidal power can be competitive with other sources. It has the only tidal power facility in North America and one of just three in the world — the Annapolis Tidal Power Plant, which I visited and found fascinating. It’s an old barrage-style facility constructed in the early 1980 and only capable of generating about 20 megawatts. Newer technologies planned for the Bay of Fundy, however, include turbines developed by Ireland-based OpenHydro, which is testing one of its machines near the Annapolis site. N.S. Power sees it quite realist to develop about 300 MW of tidal power in Nova Scotia between now and 2020, or roughly 10 per cent of the province’s capacity. Not bad. Some studies suggest there’s as much as 2,000 MW of development potential there.

In a country where the federal government considers green energy policy and investment a nuisance, it’s refreshing to see yet another province kick its green plans into high gear.

It’s why it comes as no surprise when attempts to capture the energy of our oceans don’t go as planned. The latest news comes out of Nova Scotia, where the province’s power company and partner OpenHydro Tidal Technology are trying to capture tidal energy in the Bay of Fundy. OpenHydro recently placed a 400-tonne, six-storey turbine in the Bay of Fundy, home of some of the most awesome and powerful tides in the world. Earlier this month, the two companies discovered that the harsh ocean environment had broken two of the turbine’s blades. The massive 1-megawatt machine is now scheduled to be removed sometime this fall. We’ve seen this story before with demonstration projects from Verdant, Pelamis Wave, Finavera and others. It’s not the technology doesn’t work, it’s that we haven’t been able to prove the technology can last for 20 or more years in service. The ocean is unforgiveable, as builders of offshore oil platforms and offshore wind projects known. That said, this is exactly why these demonstrations and pilot projects are so important. Unless we can test the many news wave, tidal and riverbed designs entering the market, we’ll never learn how to improve their designs. Computer modelling and simulations can’t replace real-world testing.

The OpenHydro turbine is one of three being tested under a Nova Scotia government pilot program, which aims to tap the immense tidal-energy potential in the Bay of Fundy. The Electric Power Research Institute has identified the Bay as one of the best — if not the best — sites in North America to develop tidal-energy projects. In fact, it’s capable of realistically generating 300 megawatts of tital power. U.K.-based Marine Current and B.C.-based Clean Current are the other two turbine concepts slated for testing.

I dropped the idea, thinking it might be good fodder for a column at a later date. Then I noticed this week that Eric Stoutenburg, a researcher at Stanford University, came to a similar conclusion in a research paper that he presented this week at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting in San Francisco. “If wave energy wants to get off the ground, it might have better potential to develop in the shadow of an offshore wind plant,” Stoutenburg told Cleantech Group.

Developers pay for offshore projects based on the area covered. Dual energy-generating methods would give power energy per square kilometer, improving the project cost, Stoutenburg said. Additionally, the two power sources could share transmission cables, which are an expensive element. The plant operators would see savings in operations and maintenance, which can be costly for offshore projects that have limited accessibility, he said. However, even more notable than cost savings is the value of the energy generated, he said. Stoutenburg said he was surprised to learn that wind and wave power are not strongly correlated, which means that they don’t generate power at the same time, with the exception of during storms. That means a wind-wave energy project could deliver a consistent power supply, which is more valuable to utilities because it doesn’t stress the electricity grid as much as sudden surges of energy generation, Stoutenburg said.

Meanwhile, another report from Stanford University ranks the best combination of renewable energy and vehicle technology based on how it would reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve energy security, and cut down on air pollution. Prof. Mark Jacobson, in the university’s department of civil and environmental engineering, concluded after a thorough analysis that the best combination is to use wind power and battery-electric vehicles, though concentrated solar, geothermal, tidal, solar PV and wave power also rank high (in that order). Nuclear and clean coal with carbon capture ranked lowest. According to Jacobson:

In sum, use of wind, CSP, geothermal, tidal, PV, wave, and hydro to provide electricity for BEVs and HFCVs and, by extension, electricity for the residential, industrial, and commercial sectors, will result in the most benefit among the options considered. The combination of these technologies should be advanced as a solution to global warming, air pollution, and energy security. Coal-CCS and nuclear offer less benefit thus represent an opportunity cost loss, and the biofuel options provide no certain benefit and the greatest negative impacts.

Joe Romm over at Climate Progress offers a more thoughtful review of Jacobson’s study if you want to learn more.

Nothing a prescription of Ativan can’t deal with, right? But then the California Public Utilities Commission comes along and nixes a wave-energy power purchase agreement between Finavera and Pacific Gas & Electric, which agreed to buy electricity from the Canadian company’s 2-megawatt wave project — the first commercial wave contract in the country, experts say. It was to use Finavera’s AquaBUOY technology, devices that turn the kinetic energy of vertical wave motion into emission-free electricity.

Greentech Media has the messy details here. The bottom line is that the commission declared the power-purchase price too high and the technology too unproven to proceed. Finavera has since put on a brave face, saying it will focus its efforts on projects under development in Canada and Ireland. But as nobel or attractive or economic any of those projects could be, the sad reality is that in this market at this time there’s not much wiggle room for setbacks.

NOTE: Speaking of Darwinism, the credit crunch and those least fit to survive, read this post from the Globe and Mail’s Andrew Willis about the struggles wind developer EarthFirst Canada is having because of difficulty finding financing. The death watch is on.