Canadian autoparts makers becoming green machiners
Monday, November 23rd, 2009
While travelling in New Mexico earlier this month I got a chance to spend the day at Sandia National Laboratories, which kindly made several of its scientists available to talk about the latest developments around solar, wind, battery, water, and fossil fuel technologies. During a walk of the lab’s solar test facility, I saw several Stirling Energy System heliostats, which concentrate solar heat onto a Stirling engine to generate electricity. I learned the engine is manufactured by Ontario-based Linamar Corp., and upon returning to Toronto also learned that Linamar had just signed a 10-year, $3.6 billion deal to manufacture the first made-in-Ontario wind turbine nacelles based on a unique design by startup CWind. Here’s a story on Linamar’s latest green manufacturing activities that appeared Saturday in the Toronto Star.
Also, here’s a story I wrote in MIT Technology Review updating Sandia’s very cool “Sun-to-Petrol” project.
Tyler Hamilton is senior energy reporter and columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the cleantech market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper. Tyler can be reached at tyler@cleanbreak.ca