Been crazy busy this past week but there’s been no shortage of interesting news in the cleantech and green energy space, so I’ll summarize a few of them here instead of doing individual posts. BTW: Hope everyone is enjoying their summer.

Click to the next page to read about General Fusion’s new infusion of cash, new fluids that can make enhanced geothermal more efficient, a McKinsey report that details the incredible payback of investments in energy efficency, and a University of Calgary report that says Alberta would benefit tremendously by plugging into electric transportation.

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My feature in the Toronto Star today is about General Fusion, a Vancouver-area startup that believes it can build a prototype of a nuclear fusion reactor for $50 million within four years. While the multibillion-dollar ITER and U.S. fusion programs are using costly lasers and electromagnets to achieve “net gain” — that is, creating a fusion reaction that releases more energy than put it — the folks at General Fusion are cleverly pursuing a mechanical approach that uses concentrated sound waves to compress a deuterium-tritium plasma and trigger a fusion reaction. The key, as you’ll see, is the use of precision digital controls that simply didn’t exist back in the 1970s when the idea of magnetized target fusion was first explored.

You can read the article for more details and a deeper explanation of how it works. General Fusion recently secured $13.9 million from Sustainable Development Technology Canada so it can pursue its prototype development, contingent on the company raising another $30 million or so from private investors. SDTC’s average deal size is around $3 million so the fact it’s giving General Fusion nearly five times that amount speaks to the credibility of what it’s doing. (more…)

Sustainable Development Technlogy Canada just completed its 13th funding round, this time putting $53 million into 16 cleantech projects and bringing its total funding to $376 million. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, SDTC only invests if private consortia come to the table with two-thirds of project funding. In total, 154 project have been funded with $1.3 billion in public-private funds.

Here are, in my opinion, some of the more interesting projects that got funded in this round: (more…)