Cool Tech vs. Global Warming

Cool Tech vs. Global Warming: BC’S Cutting Edge against Climate Change A Tyee Solutions Series, Published by The Tyee

Tyee reporters search out made-in-B.C. technology with potential to make a serious dent in global warming. We investigate which policies are helping or holding back such innovations, what it would take for B.C. to further develop a cluster of cool tech businesses, and which firms rise above greenwashing to truly earn a green label. The research and reporting for this occasional series, produced by the non-profit Tyee Solutions Society, is made possible with support from the Bullitt Foundation.

Cool Tech vs. Global Warming

BC’s Cutting Edge Against Climate Change BC Charts a ‘Clean Tech’ Future, but Is the Map Right?.......1

By Colleen Kimmett, 4 May, 2010 Here Comes the ‘Smart Grid’ Way to Save Power.............5

By Colleen Kimmett, 13 May, 2010 Is BC Ready for Smart Meters?.........................................9

By Colleen Kimmett, 19 May, 2010 Out with the Old Engine, In with the New.........................13

By Christopher Pollon, 28 May, 2010 Geothermal Just Got Hotter..............................................17

By Andrew MacLeod, 2 June, 2010 Turning Waste Wood into Gas-Fueled Energy..................21

By Andrew MacLeod, 25 June, 2010 King of Poop Power..........................................................26

By Colleen Kimmett, 7 July, 2010 Green You Can Use, at Vancouver’s Olympic Village......30

By Christopher Pollon, 14 July, 2010 Breeding Trees to Be Better Biofuel..................................35

By Christopher Pollon, 4 Aug, 2010

This publication was produced and distributed by The Tyee Solutions Society. It was published by The Tyee.

The entire series is available at http://thetyee.ca/Series/2010/06/01/CleanTechSeries/

BC Charts a ‘Clean Tech’ Future, but Is the Map Right?

Too many mega-projects, say some experts, who see big gains from lower-impact, local community projects.

By Colleen Kimmett, Originally published on May 4, 2010, http://thetyee.ca/News/2010/05/04/CleanTechFuture/ “You are here,” says a smooth male voice, as an animated map of British Columbia appears onscreen.

“Right here, in the windy, sunny, hydroelectric, geothermic, hydrogen-celled, bio-energy heart of the clean energy future.”

This is the opening segment of a new video produced

by Clean Works BC that was aired for foreign business contingents during the Olympics -- a kind of coming-out party for B.C.’s nascent clean tech sector -- and again last month at GLOBE, an international conference on business and the environment. There, in one of the Vancouver Convention Centre’s expansive ballrooms, Energy Minister Blair Lekstrom told delegates that clean tech is the oil and gas of the future.

“In British Columbia,” he said, “we’re open for business, we’re open for innovation and together we’re going to build a clean, green economy.”

Last week, with the release of its Clean Energy Act, the provincial government promised to build that economy by combining increased conservation within the province, while producing more power to export outside of B.C. The act comes on the heels of a slew of other energy legislation and funding initiatives like the carbon tax, greenhouse gas emissions targets, a biofuels mandate, and an Innovative Clean Energy Fund with $174 million earmarked to develop clean and renewable energy technologies. British Columbia has one of the lowest

corporate tax rates in North America, and increased the amount of tax credits available to clean tech investors. In many ways, these policies put us ahead of other jurisdictions.

But still, this so-called “windy, sunny, hydroelectric, geothermic, hydrogen-celled, bio-energy heart of the clean energy future” has no solar, wind or geothermic electricity generation to speak of. At GLOBE, Nexterra president and CEO Jonathan Rhone was optimistic about what the future would bring.

“We’d like to see some explicit policies around supporting the development and adoption of all manner of small-scale generation technologies,” he said. “So small communities can develop, own and operate solar facilities or wind turbines and be able to feed that into the grid. I think some of the policies that government are working on will hopefully move us in that direction.”

‘Feed-in tariff’ would promote competition Small scale, community ownership -- these are the same elements of a truly green energy plan that environmental organizations also advocated for in advance of provincial legislation on energy development.

While the Clean Energy Act outlined clear directives around export in a bid to increase investment in this sector -- some aren’t sure that it has what it takes to create a sustainable and green economy.

In December 2009, Ernst and Young LLP hosted a brainstorming session in Vancouver, in which members of the municipal and provincial governments, as well as industry executives, were invited to share their thoughts on what would help or hinder clean tech and clean energy growth.

According to a subsequent report, “There is a risk that the province’s more obvious natural advantages may actually cause people to overlook other resources that have the potential to be viable, such as geothermal energy... There needs to be greater competition in the province to encourage smaller, more entrepreneurial players to be able to bring their innovations to market.”

One of the recommendations gleaned from the brainstorming session was that government create a feed-in tariff (FIT), offering higher prices for electricity in order to encourage unconventional types of generation.

In Germany, this mechanism stimulated what is now one of the largest solar manufacturing markets in the world. Ontario’s new feed-in tariff program requires that developers procure 50 per cent of project material from within the province. The rationale for this contentious rule is that the subsequent job creation will justify higher electricity rates.

Alison Thompson, chair of the Canadian Geothermal Energy Association and vice president of corporate relations for Vancouver-based Magma Energy Corp., says the inclusion of a FIT in the Clean Energy Act is good news. She said she’d also like to see the industry receive the same kind of government assistance that oil and gas currently do -- such as relief on infrastructure costs and funding for training programs.

“We have some catching up to do as the ministry of energy hasn’t allowed land tenure for geothermal since 2004 which has prevented geothermal projects from going ahead,” Thompson pointed out.

The British Columbia Sustainable Energy Association also recommended that the province adopt a voluntary FIT program.

That “would do wonders for the development of solar, tidal, wave biogas, biomass, geothermal, run-of-river hydro, and wind energy in B.C.,” wrote president Guy Dauncey on the BCSEA website in February. “B.C.’s market price system locks the first six of these energy types out of the B.C. market, creating much frustration among solar and tidal energy [etc.] companies, and stymying [sic] the government’s desire to make B.C. a Clean Energy Powerhouse.”

Raise rates to promote conservation?

Though the Clean Energy Act opens up the possibility of a FIT, “to foster the development of emerging technologies in renewable power production,” Minister Lekstrom said it’s a mechanism that the government “may or may not use” and assured reporters that it would not involved subsidies.

“This is not about subsidies,” said Lekstrom. “This is about working with our clean tech sector, looking at new emerging technologies to build the infrastructure and to build opportunities here in British Columbia.”

Paying a subsidized rate for as many as 695 projects under the FIT program will cost the Ontario government -- and ultimately taxpayers -- $8 billion. According to a recent CBC article, residential electricity rates could increase by as much as $300 per year.

“I’m not sure that would go over at all well here in British Columbia,” said Lekstrom. “We don’t compare ourselves to Ontario, to be honest. It is a different world in British Columbia.”

But for a province that puts energy conservation high on its list of priorities (the act also calls for BC Hydro to meet 66 per cent of new demand through conservation efforts), an FIT resulting in higher prices for ratepayers could be the best way to encourage conservation, argue some.

“The truth is that rising energy costs are going to happen,” the Green Party’s Philip Stone told The Tyee during last year’s provincial election, when his party campaigned for a FIT. “The question is whether we’re

going to use the money to subsidize large mega-projects or put the money into a public-owned utility.”

It was during this election that the Liberal’s energy plan came to the forefront of public debate. The issue quickly became polarized; a question of private vs. public, all or none. Not long after the election, four environmental groups -- Watershed Watch Salmon Society, the Pembina Institute, the David Suzuki Foundation and West Coast Environmental Law -- made recommendations on how the province should move forward with renewable energy development.

“Many British Columbians -- including those deeply concerned about climate change -- harbour concerns about how renewable electricity is currently planned, promoted and developed in B.C.,” reads the first paragraph of the report, which was endorsed by 22 other organizations. “They want to see renewable electricity projects, but they want to be confident that those are planned and developed in a way that limits impacts and maximizes benefits for British Columbians.”

Key recommendations included a strategic planning strategy, to identify which types of electricity projects could be developed with the least impact, and where they shouldn’t be developed at all. They asked the government to create guidelines to prioritize lowimpact projects that provide maximum benefits to communities.

Approvals too politicized?

Josh Paterson of West Coast Environmental Law said part of the new act includes an integrated resource plan. BC Hydro has 18 months to conduct the plan, from the time the bill gets royal assent.

As part of this planning process, there are specific questions that the act requires BC Hydro to answer, such as how much capacity, and what kind of transmission lines, will be required. But Paterson says there are also “a whole bunch of weaknesses” with the plan.

“They don’t explicitly have to consider trying to find the best low-impact way of generating electricity,” he said.

“Also, the integrated resource plans will be approved by cabinet in a political process, not independently vetted by the BCUC [BC Utilities Commission]. This is cause for concern.”

Paterson said a lack of details around the planning process makes it hard to say what kind of an impact it might have.

“It remains to be seen whether the process is going to have a really robust systematic way of weighting the potential benefits of these projects against the potential drawbacks.”

Excerpts from the Ensuing Discussion in the Tyee’s Comment Section: wilderness fragmentation posted by “max von smartt” on 4 May, 2010

here’s some posted by “hugh” on 4 May, 2010

The many projected run of the river projects are not so green when considering they are mostly in wilderness areas and will come with access roads and transmission lines which will fragment the environment. Moreover the energy is intended for export to Kalifornia so they can keep their pools heated and air conditioners running. They will need our water soon too. Let’s emphasize small scale projects and conservation.

Here’s some thoughts:

FIT yes! posted by “Stonebreaker” on 4 May, 2010 It costs well over 50 cents a kwh to generate electricity from solar panels on your roof. But BC is currently only willing to pay homeowners and small biz about 7 cents for those solar kwh.

Without a FIT like Germany or Ontario the dream of small scale renewable power will remain just that...a dream.

The reality will remain gigantic power plants and gobs and gobs of climate-shocking fossil fuels.

The primary energy source in BC today is imported oil...far out pacing all BC Hydro clean electricity.

We have been choosing for decades to inflate a “cheap and dirty” energy bubble that is about to pop. Time to pay the full price and create something we can be proud of and want to live with.

Remember E.F. Shumacher? posted by “Freebear” on 4 May, 2010 Small is beautiful! Decentralize energy production at various scales including individual buildings. Also use less energy.

Gets in the way of selling 3D TVs though!

People can use a lot less electricity.

New technologies like LED lights can conserve.

The old turbines at BC Hydro’s plants can be replaced with more efficient ones.

We are entitled to the power from the Columbia Treaty, produced in the U.S. BC’s population is aging, not really growing. Electricity usage has leveled off in the past few years.

We don’t need all those expensive, unreliable wind farms and ROR projects.

Here Comes the ‘Smart Grid’ Way to Save Power The US is investing billions in a wired feedback loop telling consumers how to be electricity misers. A BC firm is on the cutting edge.

By Colleen Kimmett, Originally published on May 13, 2010, http://thetyee.ca/News/2010/05/13/SmartGridWay/

Though pop culture credits Thomas Edison with inventing the light bulb, in reality, it had been around for decades by the time he got his hands on it. Edison and his lab took it to the next level by creating a safe, practical and affordable system in which to put those bulbs in people’s homes. His real contribution to society was the first electrical transmission grid, which, in 1882, provided nighttime lighting for a few dozen customers in lower Manhattan.

Over the next century, transmission grids across North America grew to criss-cross the continent, until just about everyone was able to flip on a switch and have power and not have to think much about where it came from. Aside from getting bigger, this grid hasn’t fundamentally changed much in the past century: meter readers still have to walk from house to house to bill customers, utilities often don’t know about outages until someone calls it in.

But now, utilities and governments are rolling out smart grid technologies, the first wave in a virtual sea change of how we use and think about electricity.

Imagine a world in which you could switch off an oven with your cell phone while sitting on the Skytrain. Where washing machines run off electric vehicles plugged in at night. Where homes become not just consumers, but also producers of electricity, able to

meet peak demands without bringing expensive new power projects online. All possible, with a smart grid.

The savings aren’t just measured in your bank account. Cutting power consumption reduces greenhouse gases causing climate change, too.

‘Smart grid’, defined Smart grid is really blanket term that covers many aspects of the modernization of the existing grid. These include highly technical aspects of monitoring and managing transmission and distribution components (for more, see this Carnegie Mellon paper) as well as advanced metering systems -- or smart meters -- that measure electricity use at its final destination.

The fundamental difference between a smart grid and a regular grid is that it turns our existing one-way electricity delivery system into a two-way system, one that communicates real-time information to utilities from points across the entire grid.

“The core of the smart grid is this: Can we put a layer of intelligence on a built-up environment where electricity is the primary source of energy?” asks Hassan Farhangi, director of the Group for Advanced Information Technology (GAIT) at the BC Institute of Technology.

BCIT’s student housing experiment The answer is yes.

GAIT is helping create the Intelligent Micro Grid on BCIT’s Burnaby campus. Farhangi calls it a “skeleton” grid at this point -- a kind of blank slate for testing all kinds of smart grid technologies.

Now in the second year of the six-year project, they’ve installed smart meters at seven campus buildings and created a ‘central control’ station, where computers collect information from the smart meters (via power lines or wireless networks) and then spit it out in a way that the average homeowner would understand. (Like how much electricity they used when they came home and turned everything on, and how much it cost them.)

Central control can also talk, via the smart meter, to appliances in the buildings; it can turn the air conditioning down, for example. And the smart meters can even communicate with each other -- in fact, BCIT recently held a contest in which building residents compared electricity usage, and competed to be the most frugal. Faranghi recalls walking by the residences, seeing students studying with flashlights.

“Within two weeks, we were able to reduce electricity consumption by 20 per cent,” he says. “It was amazing, absolutely wonderful.”

This two-way communication is what, in effect, makes a grid smart, explains Farhangi.

With the regular grid, “we do not have any information whatsoever as to how much load do we have on our distribution network, what’s the rate at which the consumption is moving, what are the areas that requires more feed and different type of distribution.

“Simply due to that absence of information,” says Farhangi, “we have, over the past 100 years, overengineered the system.”

This has led to redundancies and waste. The grid is built for peak demand, but that demand isn’t always there. During those times BC Hydro runs turbines at its hydroelectric dams backwards, dumping water back into the reservoir and introducing 20 to 25 per cent wastage on the system, says Farhangi.

“I believe the legacy of our existing electrical grid will basically evolve into a network of integrated, distributed micro grids,” he says. “The old system is hierarchical. We need an evolutionary approach.”

With more funding, and a small, nearby source of clean electricity and heat, the BCIT’s Intelligent Grid could become an “island” -- completely independent of the main grid. Farhangi sees this as the model for other dense and urban areas.

Creating market incentives for smart grids Especially since the “layer of intelligence” that makes up a smart grid can be built on existing infrastructure.

If there’s a power outage, for example, and the transmission line is outfitted with sensors and networked communications capabilities, the utility would instantly know where and how to fix it. It even opens up the potential for self-healing software that could fix the problem without human intervention.

“You’re going to have increased reliability, security, flexibility. You’re going to be able to integrate renewable energy a lot easier. You’ll have a more efficient system -- not just consumer energy efficiency, but grid efficiency,” explains Katherine Hamilton, president of the Washington D.C.-based GridWise alliance.

GridWise is an industry advocacy group. Its goal is to “try to create market incentives for smart grids that allow everybody to participate, whether you’re a large company or a small company.”

“We think there’s room for everybody in this because it is sort of a brand new technology area that we think is ripe for innovation,” says Hamilton.

Hamilton says her organization lobbied hard -- and successfully -- for smart grid stimulus funding. President Barack Obama has made smart grid technology a pillar in his clean energy plan, and last year put $3.4 billion of federal stimulus funding into 100 smart grid projects across the country.

“It allows our state regulators to see projects being put in place that are 50-50 cost shared so that the state isn’t putting the entire onus on their own customers,” Hamilton says. “That cost-share with the federal government limits the risk and it’s going to really prove out all these different technologies. We think that’s a huge piece of it.”

How Tantalus of Burnaby is wiring rural US Burnaby-based Tantalus Systems Corp. is one company taking advantage of this boom in the U.S. Most of its clients are publicly owned utilities in rural regions of the southern states. Tantalus provides complete systems: smart meters, sensor devices in transmission and distribution gear, and the wireless communications network.

Rob Lauridsen-Hoegh, manager of marketing and communications, says rural utilities were early adopters of their technology because of its practical applications. For example, customers at the very end of a distribution line can often experience spikes in power, which can blow appliances and fry computers.

“Tantalus is able to go in and in a matter of a day or a couple hours, remotely measure the power quality so the utility can make the necessary adjustments. That’s a time-save and prevents the utility from getting sued or having to pay a customer for appliances that were lost,” he says.

Theft detection is another obvious example. “We can measure how much power is going into a neighborhood and how much is being used. You can determine that some place within a range of houses is pulling power illegally off the grid,” says Lauridsen-Hoegh.

“One of our customers was able to find out several

hundred thousands dollars worth of theft. That used to be hit or miss whether a utility was able to do it.”

Customer education is key Tantalus currently has no clients in B.C., and Lauridsen-Hoegh says only about 10 per cent of utilities across North America have deployed advanced metering systems. “But the industry is forecast for double-digit growth in the foreseeable future,” he says. “I think B.C. is in a great position now because the technology has matured, benefits are proven, and people understand that changes to the way we use and manage energy are needed.”

Social engineering is in fact a key component. You can’t have a smart grid without a smart meter, and the information that a smart meter provides is useless unless customers know how to use it. In effect, the days of mindlessly turning on a light switch -- or any other appliance -- are gone.

“Right now, most people don’t see energy as a commodity. They don’t know how much it costs, they don’t know what it’s worth,” Hamilton says. “They just get a bill at the end of the month, but they don’t exactly know what they did to get it to that level.”

Excerpts from the Ensuing Discussion in the Tyee’s Comment Section: “Smart Meters” posted by “telus employee” on 13 May, 2010

Smart meters are the way to posted by “frank2” on 13 May, 2010

One big problem with the introduction of so-called ‘smart meters’ is taht it only reduces demand slightly, but installing the meters is costly. The BCUC turned down Fortis application to install them due to the lack of benefits in proportion tot he cost, but now that the BCUC has been defanged, this billion dollar boondoggle won’t be an issue.

Smart meters are the way to go (and smart grids).

Electricity costs in BC are NOT LOW -- that is, at the margin. More specifically, the cost of producing extra kwh when capacity is operating at 100% is much higher than the average cost we pay on our bills.

Smart meters will (if they are properly designed and introduced) lead to major changes in consumption as folks shift to non-peak times for high demand activities, and take measures to get rid of the current waste (appliances and lights that are always on..). That’s not to say the Liberals have it right: their heritage rates for big industries, their willingness to pay high prices for power that doesn’t serve the peaks, etc. are a travesty. But the issue is to make proper use of this technology, not to ignore it.

The second problem is that with smart meters will come time of day billing, but the $60 billion + long term contracts for electricity from private power, do not pay different rates for time of day from the producers. This means Hydro could be selling power at a huge loss depending on the time of day (not to mention that most of the power is going to be sold at a huge loss anyway because of extremely generous subsidized contracts to private producers) Smart metering and the future for BC Hydro posted by “marine1941” on 13 May, 2010 BC Hydro is now required to have smart metering in place in BC by 2012...part of the deal that lets them build Site C with as little oversight as the government can manage.This will be easy in BC since there are so few accounts t o smart meter. It quite different in the UK.Smart meters will have to be in place in all locations in the UK by 2020..There its a huge problem since there are some 20 plus kinds of electrical suppliers, and legally you may switch your electrical supplier every day at no cost to you with a simple on line keystroke. There is no fixed preferred technology for smart metering within the industry and the government has declared that ALL the costs for the switch will be borne by the companies and the consumers.

Only one electricity supplier has started...they raised their rates, and picked a supplier...which is causing fear both among the multiple suppliers of electricity, and consumers

Power is too cheap in BC posted by “dave49” on 13 May, 2010 The reason it is so difficult to accomplish anything in BC is because electricity is too cheap to justify any significant actions. It’s part of our birthright to have the second cheapest power in Canada and one of the lowest in North America. Even our stepped rate saved money for a lot of people, reducing the incentive for conservation.

Europe has had high prices for years for two reasons: higher ‘fuel’ costs and the fact that after WWII, cash-strapped governments heavily taxed electricity to raise money to rebuild their war-ravaged countries. Add to that a generation of people who suffered through the privations resulting from years of war and therefore treated energy as a valuable resource. This attitude was passed on to following generations.

Is BC Ready for Smart Meters?

BC Hydro is preparing to roll out smart meters in every home. The tech industry is ready to jump on board, but are government and citizens prepared?

By Colleen Kimmett, Originally published on May 19, 2010, http://thetyee.ca/News/2010/05/19/SmartMeterReady/ The Olympics were a key moment for David Helliwell and his start-up company, Pulse Energy. Eight venues, outfitted with Pulse energy monitoring technology, allowed visitors to view online how much energy was being used at those sites at any given time. It marked the first time that any Olympic site collected and reported energy consumption data, and it attracted a considerable amount of media attention as part of Vancouver's 'Greenest Games' billing.

also communicate with home appliances, opening up opportunities for tighter demand-side management and increased conservation, especially during times of peak demand, when electricity is most expensive.

The high-profile project led to more lucrative deals for Pulse -- Helliwell says the London 2012 Olympic organizing committee is now interested in tracking energy use at its venues -- and also pushed smart meters into the public sphere.

"We need to change our behaviour and when we do, we will all save money," Campbell said.

The potential for business development around smart meter deployment is huge, says Helliwell and other industry experts. But as utilities roll out these programs around the world, they are being met with public opposition and concerns about privacy, reliability, and cost.

Smart meters are coming to B.C. – but are we ready for them? And what can we learn from those jurisdictions that are ahead of the curve?

'We need to change our behaviour': Campbell Smart meters are where consumers plug into the smart grid of the future. Smart meters relay real-time energy use data to utilities and customers, and can

In 2007, Premier Gordon Campbell told delegates at the annual convention of the Union of B.C. Municipalities that within five years, 1.7 million homes and businesses in B.C. would have a smart meter.

But the implementation never happened, and smart meters fell off the public radar -- until the Olympics, and, not long after that, the GLOBE conference on business and the environment. There BC Hydro's Bev Van Ruyven (now its executive vice president) reiterated the province's commitment to smart grid technology and announced that Hydro would be "substantially complete" its smart metering program by 2012.

Clean Energy Act 'changed the whole picture' And not long after that, the provincial government released the Clean Energy Act, in which smart meters and smart grid infrastructure were a cornerstone. Not only that, but, under the act, these and other "marquee" energy projects do not have to obtain approval from the BC Utilities Commission.

This "changed the whole picture" for the industry, says Ludo Bertsch, president of Horizon Technologies. Bertsch has spent the last two decades designing smart grid hardware and software, and now mostly does consulting work.

"The B.C. Clean Energy Act was very important in that it laid out the foundation to say we are not going to pull it, we are going to move ahead with smart meters.

"Before, we were getting the message out there that this [smart metering] is important," Bertsch says. "But leading up, we were concerned that government was going to pull it. It's a lot of money."

BC Hydro has budgeted $660 million for the entire program. That includes the smart meters, telecommunications system, data management system, in home feedback tools and conservation rates.

Smart meter carrots and sticks If a smart meter is the carrot to encourage customers to conserve energy and shift time of use, rate structuring is the stick. BC Hydro's conservation rate, also known as a tiered or graduated rate, came into effect April 1, 2010. Under this rate, residential customers get, over a two-month billing period, 1,350 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity at 6.27 cents per kWh. Every additional kWh after that costs 8.78 cents.

Some utilities have also introduced peak pricing; during times of high demand, the cost per kilowatt hour is higher to encourage people to switch activities to off-peak times.

In 2006, BC Hydro launched an experiment in peak pricing with its two-year Advanced Metering Initiative. Roughly 2,000 households in the Lower Mainland, Fort St. John and Campbell River were set up with smart meters and monitoring software.

The goal, according to one BC Hydro report, was to "determine whether customers respond to pricing sig-

nals and information on energy use and to determine the magnitude of the responses."

In one test group, participants were charged 23.5 cents more per kWh for electricity used during peak hours (8 to 11 a.m. and 4 to 9 p.m.).

According to an executive summary of the first year of the project, residents in test groups used on average 11.5 per cent less electricity during evening peak periods, compared to the control groups that had no difference in rates.

'1.7 million customers leads to a lot of business' Part of Bertsch's work has been to help manufacturers respond to demand-side management by making appliances smart grid compatible. Whirlpool recently announced it will release one million 'Smart Dryers' by next year, which will have the capacity to automatically shut off or go into no-heat mode during peak hours.

"This is huge," says Bertsch. "The industry in B.C. is starting to come to terms with the opportunities to come. There's going to be a huge industry installing [smart meters], implementing them, you'll have home automation, you'll have smart phones. . . 1.7 million customers leads to a lot of business."

Burnaby-based Clevest Solutions Inc. is supporting the deployment of more than 8 million smart meters in the US, China, Europe and Philippines.

Bill Lee, Clevest's marketing manager, says errors can happen when smart meters aren't deployed properly.

When an old meter is swapped out for a new one, the existing billing information must be recorded correctly, and the new meter must be correctly identified with the appropriate residence.

"Clevest enables field technicians to collect data and verify the installation before they leave the site," Lee wrote in an email to The Tyee. "With a single mobile handheld device powered by Clevest, a technician can perform a smart meter installation with a barcode

scanning of meters, photo capture of old meters to verify last meter readings, and collect GPS coordinates of the installed meters."

When utilities are swapping literally hundreds of meters a day -- as may be the case if BC Hydro is to achieve its smart metering goals -- there is a lot of potential for error.

Just last week, California's PG&E issued an apology to customers for poor customer service related to the installation of its smart meters. According to a report in the San Jose Business Journal, PG&E said it "would also begin posting weekly information on the number of smart meters having problems and will increase the number of "side-by-side meter tests" to 300, comparing data from old meters to new smart meters."

This was only after a group of citizens in Bakersfield, California, launched a petition against and later sued the investor-owned utility, alleging they were overcharged.

Privacy, security concerns at forefront Security is also a major concern with smart meters.

According to one security analyst report, smart meter networks are open to hacking, which leaves the grid vulnerable to attack and customers vulnerable to privacy breaches.

This is where federal government regulators must come in to develop smart grid standards, says Bertsch.

Bertsch sits on a newly-formed task force, part of the Standards Council of Canada, that is looking at how to address privacy, security and other issues, and is also involved with a smart grid task force in U.S. National Institute for Standards and Technology.

"Privacy is a big one," he says. "In the states they are very concerned with privacy. It is a top issue that is being dealt with."

Although Canada has been "a little bit slow to the mark," its making progress as more smart grid technologies are deployed. As he sees it, where the U.S. goes, so goes Canada.

"Eventually, it's going to happen here," Bertsch says.

"We have common links between our electrical systems, and you can't have that kind of action going on in the states, with that kind of money, and not follow it in Canada."

Excerpts from the Ensuing Discussion in the Tyee’s Comment Section: Gimme smart meter! posted by “jnewcomb” on 19 May, 2010

the grid to reduce my net electricity expense, I’m for it. If not, I’m against it!

Yep - I’m ready for a smart meter, and to be part of the BC smart grid. About time, when so many other countries and states are way beyond us on getting smart meters installed and operating well.

Distributed versus centralized power posted by “Peter Dimitrov” on 20 May, 2010

However, does pay to be a “late adopter”, taking advantage of some mistakes made by the venturesome early adopters. Can’t wait too long - we’ve got to pull out all the stops to effectively reduce energy consumption - and to catch illegal grow-ops too!

Bring it on!

A meter that works posted by “mooney” on 19 May, 2010 B.C Hydro would have all of us believe that their millions of existing meters are all acurate beyond question. I don’t believe that and I’ve tried to get mine replaced.

Five years. And I’m still waiting I don’t need no stinkin smart meter. I just need a meter that is accurate and that can be verified by myself or a private electrician that it is accurate.

All this ‘Smart Metering’ posted by “Van Isle” on 19 May, 2010 All this ‘Smart Metering’ is about is so us Hydro customers will allow BC Hydro to pay 12 cents per KWh (wholesale price)to the run of the river operators. I just did a calculation applied to my April Hydro bill; an increase of 58%. Thanks Gordo.

Can I sell power back to the Utility? posted by “bilgladstone” on 19 May, 2010 BC is a late-bloomer when it comes to distributed power generation. If the “smart meter” will allow me to generate my own electricity and reverse-feed it to

Bilgladstone you hit the nail on the head. Unlike Germany which has a distributed power system allowing homeowners and businesses the generate power via solar or wind and net-feed it back to the power utility at rates better than BC Hydro is authorized to provide, we have a centralized power system with huge subsidies provided to heavy commercial and industrial users under the Heritage Contract provisions and huge subsidies to the IPP sector causing in excess of 30 billion debt (seth what are the latest figures on that debt now?) to BC Hydro which we as all ratepayers have to pay-back. Then the reality is that most appliances in the home are 110-115 Volts, yet BC HYdro’s drop line to each home/condo supplies 120 power- because they are using an incorrect drop line wire guage. Conclusion, put a ‘smart meter’ on Hydro, ease the subsidies under the Heritage Power contract by and provide incentives by employing smart meters for heavy commercial/industrial users, and lastly make the IPP contracts fully transparent, stop the outrageous subsidies to them, likely in violation of NAFTA, and on an experimental basis install smart meters on all the elected politicians (provincial and municipal) homes and see how they do on them; and if, in the final analysis they will be installed on all BC homes- some good legislation is needed to protect consumers. I don’t see any of this happening under Campbell, as for the NDP -your call on that.

Out With The Old Engine, In With The New How an East Vancouver start-up is transforming gas-guzzlers to pure electric.

By Christopher Pollon, Originally published on May 28, 2010, http://thetyee.ca/News/2010/05/28/NewEngine/

The Ford SUV is suspended on a hoist in Jay Giraud’s East Vancouver research facility, waiting to have its gas-guzzling core pulled out -- the first step on the road to becoming a battery-powered, 100 per cent electric truck.

“The engine, transmission, and gas tank are no longer necessary,” says Giraud, the boyish founder and CEO of Rapid Electric Vehicles Inc. (REV) peeking his head out from under the chassis of his latest conversion.

By the time Giraud and his team are finished, all vestiges of the SUV’s dirty oil past will be replaced by a modular electric drive system and transmission; from that point on, there will be no more gasoline emissions, and virtually no replacement parts or serious maintenance required.

Just two years in existence, REV is not waiting for big automakers or early-adopting consumers to bring the electric car revolution. Instead, they are focused on converting the estimated 68 million (mostly) gas-powered passenger fleet vehicles currently spewing millions of tonnes of greenhouse gases on roads across North America. The SUV on the hoist will be part of REV’s first wave of electric conversions, built to order for a utility fleet in Burlington Ontario.

“With fleets, we can really throw a lot of [electric] vehicles into a space and create a real tipping point for that region using pure electric solutions,” says

the 34-year-old Giraud, who in a past life toured the world as a professional snowboarder before discovering clean tech in the mid-2000s. “We think that this is the future of automotive electrification.”

Fleet vehicles ideal early adopters REV produces modular “plug and play” drive systems -- meaning that the company prefabricates, builds, assembles and ships the drive system to the customer.

An automotive technician at the fleet garage does not need to understand the complexities of the system: he removes the gas-dependent parts and drops in the new built-to-fit components.

Government and private-sector passenger fleets are ideal early adopters of 100 per cent electric vehicles: fleet vehicles are parked for at least 16 hours a day at a central location, making charging a snap; they drive consistent patterns, usually no more than 40 km a day; and, they repeat these same patterns over a very long life. They are also responsible for greenhouse gas emissions of mammoth proportions.

“If you consider that the average kilometres driven per year in North America are over 19,000 and the average kilometres per litre for a fleet vehicle is about 5.3, and there are at least 63 million passenger fleet vehicles in North America, you get a pretty big number of tonnes of emissions saved per year.”

Looking beyond drive systems for the fleet market, REV is focused on addressing how societies of the future will transition from fuelling cars at gas stations to charging batteries at night. REV drive systems are designed with what Giraud calls “two-way grid capability” -- meaning the electrical grid can wirelessly communicate with the battery of a plugged in REV e-vehicle, allowing the utility to draw energy off the idle battery if it needs to.

“Everyone is looking at how utilities can manage all the energy consumed by a house, but nobody is working on making cars smart,” says Giraud. “For 16 hours a day utilities could use very small amounts of energy from parked [electric] cars, and have gigawatts that they produced earlier.”

Dragons and angels Jay Giraud proved himself equal parts showman and entrepreneur last year, when he appeared on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s hit show Dragon’s Den -- where entrepreneurs pitch business ideas to a panel of high-powered venture capitalists. Usually a crusty lot, the “Dragons” were so impressed with REV’s business plan, they offered Giraud $250,000 for a 50 per cent ownership stake in the company. He said no.

A preferable fundraising approach has been to partner with BC-based GreenAngel Energy Corp., an “angel fund” that specializes in raising start-up capital for early-stage green tech companies. In February 2010, GreenAngel and REV announced an agreement to raise $5 million for the fledgling company this year.

Under the terms of that deal, B.C. investors will receive a 30 per cent refundable tax credit and be allowed to hold their shares within an RRSP or Tax Free Savings Account for further tax deductions. The GreenAngel partnership takes advantage of the B.C. government’s tax credit program established in 2008 as part of the province’s attempts to expand the cluster of companies and experts working in B.C. clean technology.

This tax credit program complements other incentives now available to some start-ups in B.C.: companies developing “prescribed clean technology” won’t pay B.C. corporate income tax on taxable income earned outside the province (up to $75 million per year) effective this September, and qualifying clean tech specialists new to Canada will not pay B.C. income tax for five years after their arrival.

Such incentives pale in comparison to those of Ontario, California and Michigan, which are determined to attract the best green tech talent and companies in the world. But B.C. remains an attractive location for other reasons.

“There’s no business advantage to being here, but B.C. offers lifestyle,” says Randy Holmquist, owner of Canadian Electric Vehicles Ltd., which has been building specialty electric vehicles for airports all over the world for 20 years. “I could be way more profitable in Los Angeles... but I want to live here.”

Giraud has a similar take: “British Columbia inspires smart, tech-savvy entrepreneurs to maintain this quality of living.”

Vancouver’s cross-over cluster What has made it possible for REV to exist in British Columbia is the large pool of technical expertise, particularly in Greater Vancouver. Three decades as a centre for the design, development and manufacture of hydrogen fuel cells has ensured that there is plenty of talent to draw on.

“Vancouver is making this neat transition from fuel cell to electric, and there’s a lot of battery specialists and chemical energy storage specialists,” says Giraud, noting that a fuel cell car is an electric vehicle, so there is a lot of knowledge cross-over from hydrogen to pure electric.

With the talent pool has developed “clusters” of electric vehicle and associated technology companies: battery experts like Vancouver’s Advanced Lithium Power, Delaware Power Systems Corp. (Richmond), and Delta Q Technologies Corp. (Burnaby), all of which rely on B.C.’s core of electrical engineering

expertise. Canadian Electric Vehicles is a pioneer that continues to operate near Parksville on Vancouver Island, while Future Vehicle Technologies designs and produces its own innovative vehicles in Maple Ridge.

Azure Dynamics -- perhaps B.C.’s biggest success story -- moved its headquarters to Detroit in 2007 to be closer to suppliers and U.S. customers, although much of its research and development still occurs in Vancouver. (Azure and Ford launched the Transit e-vehicle in February, which is being marketed to the e-fleet market.)

It will be these small, visionary companies, says John Stonier, spokesman for the Vancouver Electric Vehicle Association, that drive electric vehicles into being.

“There is an opportunity for the small start-ups like REV, because they can specialize in very specific technology applications, and fill in the holes the large companies just can’t do themselves,” he says. “[Startups] have limited resources, but they can use those resources much more effectively to get things done.”

Excerpts from the Ensuing Discussion in the Tyee’s Comment Section: Cost of conversion posted by “crackpot” on 28 May, 2010 Good article, and glad to read about GreenAngel, which sounds like a financing step in the right direction. But how much do these conversions cost?

What governments are willing to pay to appear green, and what regular joes can afford, are likely very different sums.

Governments Need to Get Out of Our Way posted by “JeffreyJ” on 28 May, 2010 Our current slate of identical, neocon regimes in BC and Ottawa have repeatedly blocked efforts by entrepreneurs to think outside the box. The ZENN was the first bold player to produce a lovely, all electric affordable car. Both Harper and Campbell did everything in their regulatory power to thwart this incredible vision, as it clearly encroaches on the oil and automotive industries. http://www.zenncars.com/ Kudos to Mr. Giraud for this initiative and for the Tyee for covering it. Consistent with industries monopolization on business and ideas, we are likely to see no coverage of this in our CanWestGlobal or David Back owned media. Sadly.

The sooner governments and industry move out of our way, the sooner we can solve some of these energy issues.

Electric cars are not the panacea... posted by “fish-counter” on 28 May, 2010 they would only work on the coast, for example. In winter, they would be uselss on the prairies. Here in coastal BC, however, they could easily fill 40% of the vehicle market, leaving more gasoline for the Hummers.

The mistake electrics made was to advertise as a universal solution; it isn’t. It might evenually work for

20% of cars in Canada. The auto manufacturers and the maintenance industry need not fear electrics or hybrids. If they were even 10% smart, they would be leading the charge, so to speak.

The after-sales market in electric vehicles is in battery replacement. We need to address the recycling of lithium batteries. The one plant in North America was in Trail, until they blew up and burned down. Again, as with all technological change, there is a huge market for the innovators.

Electric motors DO work in cold weather...... posted by “RickW” on 28 May, 2010 They just need some device to keep the batteries warmed up.

However, I digress. As Mr. Beers pointed out, electric motors are 4x+ more efficient than IC engines: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Why-We-Hate-Oil-Companies/dp/product-description/0230102085 John Hofmeister, ex-president of Shell Oil, states in his book that the internal combustion engine is now more than 100 years old. When it was first built, it’s operating efficiency was in and around 20%. A century on, the operating efficiency of the infernal combustion engine is in and around 20%.

Is this because the IC engine isn’t capable of producing greater efficiencies? Or is it because the engine manufacturers are not capable of giving a damn?

Coyoteman: The electric motor has an operating efficiency between 80% and approaching 100%. Just converting from IC to electric would mean a reduction in energy use of 75%. However, given the penchant of investors in demanding profits NOW, they would not be happy about this - a major hangup in the capitalist system.

Geothermal Just Got Hotter Kelowna firm’s tech makes it easier for old buildings to tap the Earth for heating and cooling.

By Andrew MacLeod, Originally published on June 2, 2010, http://thetyee.ca/News/2010/06/02/GeothermalGotHotter/

As Barry Milner, the marketing director for GeoTility Systems Corp., explains it, a geothermal system uses the same technology as a refrigerator, taking heat from one place and moving it somewhere else.

“It’s a good story,” said Milner. Based in Kelowna, with an office in Richmond and one planned for Vancouver Island, Geotility has been installing geothermal heating and cooling systems since 1990. “It is part of the puzzle here of what we need to do.”

As building owners and policy makers search for ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, companies like Geotility -- which has a new compact drilling platform allowing it to put systems into older buildings that would have been previously difficult to retrofit -- offer a solution.

But as the sector grows, participants and observers agree there’s a need for industry standards and for incentives to help make the systems affordable.

“It’s not rocket science,” Milner said, noting the earliest system he’s come across was built in Sweden in 1932. “It’s a very simple process of drawing heat from the ground.”

Wherever you live, the temperature a few metres below the surface is the same year round. In winter, that heat can be pulled up into a building. In the summer, the system can be reversed to cool the building by pumping heat back into the earth.

The systems use electricity to operate, but for every unit of energy they use they provide four or five units of heat. That efficiency, said Milner, is good for reducing our carbon footprint, improving air quality and decreasing our dependence on fossil fuels.

Awesome efficiency: BCSEA “The potential there is very great because it’s a very efficient source of energy,” said Tom Hackney, the policy vice chair for the B.C. Sustainable Energy Association. “In terms of energy efficiency, that’s one of the really awesome sources of energy.”

The main barrier is cost, but a ground-based heat pump will pay for itself over time, he said. “Upfront costs are a consideration, but if you can get beyond those, it’s just a super energy system.”

Geotility’s most prominent project is likely at the Hotel Georgia in downtown Vancouver. Done while the new hotel tower was under construction, a new compact drilling platform allowed them to work from the lowest level of an already constructed parkade.

It’s a system first tested in a downtown Victoria heritage building last year. It means less construction delay in new developments and increases the possibilities for retrofitting buildings, Milner said. And with Vancouver pledging to go carbon neutral by 2020, he said, there may be a lot more retrofitting work to come.

Over 20 years the company has completed projects at the Westjet headquarters in Calgary, Crofton House school in Vancouver, the South Surrey Recreation Centre and many other public and private buildings.

Milner calls Geotility the “largest comprehensive geoconstruction firm” in Canada. The company will take a project from design and engineering through installation and servicing. It also owns a utility company, so that in some cases it will maintain ownership of the system while charging consumers for the energy they use as other energy providers would. That way consumers can avoid paying the cost of the system— sometimes a barrier—up front.

Totalling up the greenhouse gas emission reductions on all the projects the company has built, 50,000 tonnes of GHG are avoided annually, Milner said.

Over 20 years that works out to a million tonnes of GHG reductions, he said.

Gaining acceptance The price for a system, in the past, has been a barrier.

For a 3,000 square foot building, a geothermal system will cost about $10,000 to $15,000 more than a highefficiency gas furnace and up-to-date air conditioner, said Milner.

Once it is in, it is cheaper to operate, and will pay for itself in about seven years, he said.

And as energy rates go up, he said, the technology is becoming more competitive and better known. “It’s not such a fringe sort of thing.”

It’s not the cheapest solution, he admitted. “We can’t compete with electric baseboards and open the window if you get hot kind of thing.” But the company is instead focussed on “quality” developments, ones where a full heating and air conditioning system are part of the attraction.

Customers include a long list of residential developments, many of them towers and projects requiring a more refined heating and cooling system.

And such a system will add to the value of the building, Milner argued. He compared the cost to a granite counter top. “People have to get their heads around is it looks or is it function?” While it might be a wiser investment, he was realistic about the looks-obsessed culture we live in. “We build crap.”

The best-suited buildings are schools, hospitals and libraries that are built to be used for 50 years or more.

After the seven years a geothermal system takes to pay for itself through energy cost savings, the investment continues to pay off, he said. Still, he added, more people are choosing it for their single family homes.

Standards needed Geotility is working with the Pacific Carbon Trust so that its systems can be recognized as providing carbon offsets. Even a small household customer who saves five tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions might anticipate a cheque of $125 from the Trust at current rates, Milner said. For bigger buildings the pay-off will be greater.

BCSEA’s Hackney said there’s a need for the government or a trade organization to set standards in the industry and make sure customers get consistent messages and treatment from contractors. “The industry is a bit in it’s infancy now,” he said. “These early installations will be the ambassadors for the installations to come.”

It might mean registering or certifying contractors, he said.

Milner said his company has been lobbying to have the geothermal industry regulated. “We would like to see stronger guidelines and regulations to ensure customers are protected.”

There are many little companies who will put in a system, but with no regulation of the industry it’s unclear how many are to standard. “It is scary,” said Milner. “I feel for customers who’ve been put in situations where they’ve trusted they were making a good

investment” only to discover later it wasn’t designed or built properly.

The pitfalls are many, he said. “They put crap in. They don’t serve them. They don’t know what they’re doing.”

The industry is professionalizing itself and colleges are beginning to offer apprenticeship programs, but government regulation is needed to protect consumers, he said. “I can’t stress enough how difficult it is to fix a system that hasn’t been designed properly.”

He also argued for offering more incentives to help people put systems into older buildings, as well as for other green energy projects.

The billions of dollars B.C. is planning to spend on the Site C hydroelectric project on the Peace River would have a greater impact if it were directed to green technologies like geothermal, wind and tidal energy, he said. “I see great economic opportunities being set back by this major investment in 1950s technology.”

Through B.C.’s LiveSmart program the provincial government will give people up to $1,250 to install a ground or water source heat pump certified by the Canadian GeoExchange Coalition.

Excerpts from the Ensuing Discussion in the Tyee’s Comment Section: heatpumps posted by “scarpes” on 2 June, 2010 In the residential market and many commercial applications, AIR/Air heatpumps are a cost effective alternative, especially in the lower mainland or the island. (Absorbes heat out of the air, rather than the ground.) As a bonus, you get air-conditioning for those once a year heat-waves. Regardless, heatpumps are definately the way to go in this day and age. buyer beware posted by “Sylvain Herbert” on 2 June, 2010 On a residential note: The geothermal industry is relatively new, unregulated and some installers don’t really know what they’re doing or are learning on the fly. We had a 4 ton system installed to service our 1400 sq/ft house in Revelstoke by a company called “The Geothermal Guys” from Salmon Arm and our system is basically not working. It has been a complete disaster and it has been nearly impossible to find remedial help...

My point is, if you are considering getting a geothermal system for your home, do your research and be very careful as to which contractor you hire. A system properly installed is efficient, quiet and makes sense.

But a deficient/improperly designed system will cost grief and money... nuclear electricity posted by “seth” on 2 June, 2010 Is trending towards the 1 cent a kwh level.

At that price plain old electric heat/air conditioning is a lot more economical than gas heat or new/retrofit ground source heat pumps.

One needs to be careful with payback times in most places outside of BC Unfortunately with the double whammy of our BC and Ottawa corrupt fascist governments bought and

paid for by Big Oil and dirty little not so green stockbroker power schemes, it is likely power rates will triple before BCHydro is allowed to go nuclear.

Makes ground source heat pumps in BC, a good bet for the near future.

Cost posted by “cfvua” on 2 June, 2010 Sometimes doing the right thing might cost a bit more. The system we recently installed in a small office building(8 tonne) capacity worked great this last winter. The only real additional cost was drilling(grouting) and piping in the wells. The Canadian made heat pumps cost about the same as a furnace and boiler might. I will be monitoring the electrical consumption of the units this year. It might take a while to pay off and even without the benefit of carbon credit trading and all the BS red tape for any government incentive it makes sense. And we are on our way to being mor self sufficient. Think about how nice it will be one day to not get a utility bill, which you do get whether you use gas, fuel or line supplied electricity. It is indeed time for people to re-evaluate the cost of gas and line power. Governments should incent people(not global corporations who say they are free enterprise, but love subsidies) to use LED lighting and self generated power with wind mills and solar panels. Battery storage, with inverter systems.

Not cheap but right. Remember that many of the situatons we are in right now are because somebody wouldn’t spend the money to do it right.

Turning Waste Wood into Gas-Fueled Energy Nexterra claims its UBC and Victoria projects mark the cutting edge against climate change. Not everyone measures the benefits the same.

By Andrew MacLeod, Originally published on June 25, 2010, http://thetyee.ca/News/2010/06/25/WasteWoodIntoEnergy/

Nexterra Corporation CEO Jonathan Rhone says his company is reducing carbon emissions and helping fight global warming, and some green tech experts are fans.

But a critic says the company's process offers a marginal environmental improvement at best and has some serious drawbacks.

Nexterra builds plants that turn wood waste into a gas that can be used for heating or, soon, for generating electricity. Its highest profile project is in Victoria's Dockside Green development, one of seven completed projects outlined on the company's website. Another plant is under construction at the University of British Columbia.

"A centralized biomass system solidifies Dockside Green's reputation as a global leader in sustainable design and garners significant international attention given the rising concerns over climate change," boasts the website for Dockside, a LEED platinum development close to downtown Victoria.

According to Dockside Green's website, gasification produces no smoke but does emit "clean, odourless flue gases" while making green energy. Those gases do include carbon dioxide, by the way, a contributor to global warming.

Rhone said any time an energy source can be switched from a fossil fuel to a locally sourced biofuel, it's

positive for the planet. If the question is what to do with scrap wood, gassification is better than combustion, he said. "Our technology provides a significant reduction in emissions compared to traditional woodfired plants."

The president of the B.C. Sustainable Energy Association, Guy Dauncey, says he is "a complete supporter" of Nexterra's approach, calling it "an extremely intelligent thing to do with wood waste" and a climate friendly substitute for burning fossil fuels.

But Ben West, a campaigner with the Western Canada Wilderness Committee, has looked closely at the gasification process and says he has serious concerns.

"It's just continuing down a road we need to get off," he said. "Burning more stuff... just seems to me to be a fool's errand."

GHG positive Dockside Green's website describes the gasification process. It takes wood waste and burns it with water in a low-air environment. The process leaves an ash and creates a synthetic gas that can be scrubbed, cleaned, then burned to heat a water boiler.

The system is used to provide heat and hot water to residences at Dockside, and "heat will also be sold to off-site customers displacing natural gas use." According to Dockside, the climate change math works to the development's advantage: "The net result is

that Dockside Green is expected to be greenhouse gas positive from a building energy perspective."

The system cuts greenhouse gas emissions from the development by 3,460 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent a year, a Dockside publication says. That's the equivalent of taking 850 cars off the road each year.

It also saves the development as much as $600,000 a year, plus another $100,000 a year on British Columbia's carbon tax.

Nexterra's website makes similar claims for its other projects. A United States department of energy system in Tennessee is said to save up to $7 million a year and 20,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions. The UBC project will reduce the campus's natural gas consumption by 12 per cent and cut 4,500 tonnes a year of greenhouse gases. A system built for Kruger Products paper company's mill in New Westminster cuts 22,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases a year.

Plenty of wood waste At Dockside, Rhone said, the fuel source will be urban wood waste like tree trimmings and the debris from clearing land. It's the sort of material that in the past would have gone to the landfill, where it would have rotted and released its carbon, much in the form of methane, a gas that has a much stronger greenhouse effect than carbon dioxide does.

Some 30 million tonnes of urban wood go to landfills every year, Rhone said, enough to power millions of homes. "We're really talking about a low value waste," he said. "There are enormous volumes of woody biomass all over North America that are currently underperforming."

Waste companies and local governments are starting to realize all that wood waste can be better used outside the landfill, said Rhone. "They're starting to divert it, grind it up and supply it to companies like Nexterra."

At times, Dockside's plant has been run on natural gas, he acknowledged, but it's running on wood now and the plan is to continue running it that way. It is also set to begin supplying the nearby Delta Hotel with heat.

VanCity's director of business performance, James Miller, said Dockside has built out around 20 per cent of its final 1,450 units. Supplying the Delta will allow Dockside to run the biomass system at something approaching its eventual load and will help Dockside be carbon positive, he said.

Displacing Hydro at UBC? Other Nexterra projects also use local sources of fuel, Rhone said. The company's first project at a Tolko plywood mill in Kamloops uses bark that would otherwise be waste. Tolko makes a synthetic gas that it uses instead of natural gas to dry the veneer on its plywood.

A project at the University of Northern British Columbia chose a Nexterra gasification system over wood fired boilers, not wanting to contribute to Prince George's air quality problems.

At UBC in Vancouver, however, the recently announced project will displace energy the institution buys from B.C. Hydro. The Crown corporation gets the bulk of its energy from hydroelectric projects, making its energy very low in greenhouse gas emissions.

Asked if the UBC project is actually displacing hydro, Rhone said, "B.C. Hydro is buying more power, so this would be a renewable source of power... My understanding is they need to buy more power over the next 10 years to stop buying power from neighbouring states and provinces." The energy B.C. Hydro buys from other jurisdictions tends to be from sources like coal that generate many more greenhouse gases.

Rhone also said projects like the UBC one allow Nexterra to demonstrate its technology so it can be sold elsewhere. "The big market for us is the export

market," he said. The company already has offices in Brazil and the eastern United States, plus plans to open one soon in Europe.

Besides the environmental argument, there's an energy security case to be made, he said. While people are increasingly concerned about relying on oil and gas imports, many communities have sources of biomass handy that could be used to reduce the need for fossil fuels in at least some situations.

'Carbon intense process' The benefits are not, however, as clear as the promoters would have you believe, says WCWC's West.

"My primary concern's around the way the carbon calculation is done," he said. "It really doesn't hold up to basic math."

Bell has suggested British Columbia should, towards feeding gasification projects, West said. There are better energy choices if the goal is to benefit the environment, he added. "It seems to me burning stuff should be bottom of the list."

If the sector becomes much larger, it will be very difficult to grow enough trees to feed it, he said. As communities become reliant on these systems, they will need ongoing sources of fuel. It might make sense to use trees killed by pine beetles for now, he said, but "where do we go 15 years from now when we've burned all those trees?"

As a green business, he said, many of the projects may be more 'business' than 'green'. "You've got to understand which interest is driving the agenda."

Worthy of carbon offsets?

Biomass projects are considered carbon neutral because converting wood into a gas then burning it releases exactly the same amount of carbon as would be released if the material were left to rot. If the carbon is going to be released anyway, the argument goes, you might as well make use of the energy that's released.

The UBC project is a partnership with the General Electric company. Nexterra's majority owner is Calgary's ARC Financial Corporation, a company that manages $2.7 billion in projects that include oil and gas exploration and production. It also invests in oilsands and unconventional gas projects.

"What's missing from that is the time span," said West. While it might take 20 years or more for a tree to decompose -- a process that would return some of the carbon to the next generation of plants if it occurred in a forest -- gasification releases the carbon immediately.

Gasification projects like Nexterra's should be ineligible to be used as carbon offsets, West said. "I do have a really serious concern about giving carbon offsets to these projects," he said. "To call it carbon neutral and give it carbon offsets is a disservice."

It's a carbon intense process, he said.

Nexterra's Rhone said gassification does reduce reliance on fossil fuels and cut greenhouse gas emissions.

There are, however, some situations where gasification might make sense, West allowed. If there's a steady source of waste wood that has been treated, for example, gasification could be used to separate the toxins from the material. It would do it in a more controlled way than putting treated wood into a landfill, he said.

There is much wood around that will either rot on the forest floor or in a landfill, said Dauncey of the B.C. Sustainable Energy Association. "The question is what do you do with wood waste," he said.

On balance, though, it would be a bad idea to structure the province's forest industry, as Minister Pat

At this point, B.C. isn't growing trees specifically to feed biogas plants like Nexterra's, he said, adding that

"To me this is an extremely intelligent thing to do with wood waste, so I'm a complete supporter."

the future of bioenergy in B.C. is complex and full of uncertainty. There are questions around what to do with material thinned from forests, trees killed by pine beetles and used building materials. "Houses are demolished, there is waste wood, what do you do with it?"

And if the question is how to heat buildings, biogas is a step forward, he said. The process releases carbon from waste wood that is part of a natural short-term carbon cycle. If it helps keep the carbon from fossil fuels stored underground, where it's been for millions of years, that's positive, he said.

'Real changes in the marketplace' Wood waste gasification is part of a move towards cleaner energy, Rhone said. "I think we have the largest cluster of clean tech companies in B.C.," he said.

"Essentially what's driving demand for all these technologies is real changes in the market place."

The company may soon also be able to gassify biosolids, by the way. In the past the waste from sewage treatment has been used in agriculture, but many jurisdictions are changing their rules. "Biosolids are a huge problem in North America," said Rhone. The company has done an initial study on converting biosolids to energy and hopes to have a commercial solution available by the end of the year, he said.

Nexterra is also working with General Electric to use synthetic gas in an internal combustion engine to produce electricity.

Excerpts from the Ensuing Discussion in the Tyee’s Comment Section: What will we do? posted by “dave49” on 26 June, 2010 As much as I consider myself progressive, I find it frustrating when people and/or groups decry our dependency on fossil fuels, then aggressively attack almost every alternative. Nexterra’s technology is used outside BC. They have several plants at US universities, turning local wood waste into heat and displacing non-renewable fossil fuels.

I’ll concede the carbon emmission arguement may be legitimate, but maybe when we use a technology like this for 25% or more of our woodwaste.

For now, I have little trouble with the concept that the process is carbon-neutral as it is using a biomass, renewable fuel. Offsets are a sticky question and subject to abuse depending on the trading system.

If we need to remake our society from an energy standpoint, let’s get on with it!

Hey folks, posted by “westerneye” on 26 June, 2010 Hey folks, there were a couple key points that I think need to be included in this discussion. First of all the overall GHG emissions from burning biomass are more carbon intensive than coal fired power. Biomass is not an efficient source of energy. Given the need to decarbonize our economy in the next few decades why would we invest in any carbon intensive technology? The idea that claims of carbon neutrality come from the idea that we will capture the carbon released by planting new trees. This simply is not based in reality. We are clearing the forests on our planet a the rate of a hectare a second. That’s 2 American football fields every second. We are not increasing carbon capture we are reducing it.

Also even if we planted enough trees it takes about 100 years to capture the carbon released. The earths trees cannot capture carbon at a rate anywhere close

to fast enough. We need to be carbon neutral by 2050 at the latest not 2110. We would need to start a massive tree planting project world wide and protect most of the worlds remaining forests. We simply are not near doing that.

Also as was highlighted by someone else trees are part of the web of life. Decompossing trees become nurse logs and are the source of soil fertility. Forest left alone are truely carbon neutral. Wood from construction and urban clipping are only enough fuel for niche applications.

As much as using other sources of biomass rather than trees makes better sense we still are left with the carbon issue. just because you grow hemp quickly doesn’t mean we can afford to release more and more carbon. Biomass is low grade fuel, that’s all there is to it. There are a lot of practical uses for hemp fiber but it’s not an energy solution given our current reality.

Burning stuff for energy must be a thing of the past if we are to address the climate crisis. We are in overshoot as a civilization we need absolute reductions in carbon emissions starting immediately.

Ben West Wilderness Committee more detail posted by “North of Hope” on 28 June, 2010 Interesting article but I would like more detail about the amount of energy produced when wood is burned, how the wood is prepared for burning and what the products are that result from the burning.

The provincial government has said that they support using biomass for fuel. And they say that it is good to leave the dead wood in the forests as it provides fertilizer for plants and maybe more trees. It seems to depend on who they are talking to or what program (or lack there of) they are trying to defend.

King of Poop Power A farmer in Abbotsford will turn manure, lots of it, into a natural gas substitute. It’s a first in BC, and the pioneer smells Canada-wide success.

By Colleen Kimmett Originally published on July 7, 2010, http://thetyee.ca/News/2010/07/07/KingOfPoopPower/

The Bush family farm isn't like the other pastoral properties on this rural road in Abbotsford. For one thing, there are no animals, at least not yet, and the most prominent feature visible upon approach is not a barn but a large, round building with a roof like a giant nipple, pointing up towards the sky.

A dozen men in steel-toed boots are working around the property, which is criss-crossed with trenches.

As far as construction sites go, this one is quiet but busy. The job deadline is less than a month away, and there's still a lot of pipe to be laid.

All that pipe will soon deliver biogas, captured from manure, to Terasen customers in the Lower Mainland.

That low, round building with the nipple-like roof is the anaerobic digester, the technology that allows this conversion to take place. The project is the first of its kind in British Columbia, and hopefully, the first of more to come.

Anaerobic digestion has been used for decades in Europe to convert poop (both human and animal) into power. It's being touted as not only a source of renewable energy, but for farmers, a source of additional revenue and a better way to deal with waste while reducing one's carbon footprint. It's become increasingly popular as well in the United States, where researchers recently found it would make good sense to use anaerobic digestion to help meet the enormous power needs of Google and Microsoft data centres.

It's a universal truth that shit happens. Why not, ask proponents of this technology, make something good of it?

The man behind this project, Christopher Bush, first got the idea to build an anaerobic digester in the Fraser Valley five years ago, after reading an article about the technology in Scientific American. He left his job in telecommunications and created a company, Catalyst Power, then bought a property in Abbotsford and started, as he puts it, surrounding himself with "really smart guys" in the field.

"I didn't think it would be easy," he says. "But I didn't expect it would take so long. Being first is a big challenge. We're setting the course for everyone."

Catch that 'fugitive' methane Bush's facility will produce 500 cubic metres of gas per hour, using feedstock that is a mixture of manure, from 130 cattle that will soon live on the property, and waste, mostly fats and oil, from a nearby chicken processing plant.

The whole process produces three products: the fuel itself, bedding material for livestock, and concentrated liquid fertilizer.

Step one is removing the woody mass, bits of hay and straw, from the cow manure. "That stuff that the cow couldn't digest -- I can't digest it either," says Bush.

It's turned into a bedding material that can be sold to nearby farms.

In the meantime, he calls this method an "interim solution to sustainability."

Then the manure and chicken waste is combined in the anaerobic digester, where it sits for about 40 days.

The digester acts essentially like the belly of a cow, where, under controlled conditions bacteria thrive and multiply, eating the waste and producing biofuel that is a mixture of 40 per cent carbon dioxide and 60 per cent methane.

Creating a substitute for natural gas

Finally, the remaining liquid waste is a concentrated fertilizer that is diluted and spread on fields.

Compared to conventional methods of managing agricultural waste, anaerobic digestion is environmentally advantageous, says Anthony Lau, an associate professor of chemical and biological engineering at the University of British Columbia. Typically, manure is spread directly on fields or held in large ponds, where it releases greenhouse gases anyway, and often leaches into nearby aquifers or waterways.

Anaerobic digestion mitigates greenhouse gas emissions by producing a fuel that can displace fossil fuels, and capturing "fugitive" methane that would have escaped as a result of simply spreading manure over a field.

The biofuel that results from anaerobic digestion still produces carbon dioxide, but because the plants that fed the cows that produced the methane to burn, absorbed carbon dioxide in their growing cycle not so long ago, it is considered biogenic, as opposed to anthropogenic.

"For the time being, they are burning methane that is not from fossil fuel, but from recycling waste. Biogenic is better than anthropogenic," says Lau. "But the long-term solution is not burning methane, but hydrogen."

Lau says this is feasible -- to manipulate microbacteria in the anaerobic digestion process so that they their byproduct from waste is not methane by hydrogen -but we're not there yet.

Bush is convinced that anaerobic digestion is "necessary" from an environmental point of view. Making a business case for it was more difficult.

Burning the biogas directly to produce heat and electricity is the least expensive route, and the route that many of these facilities in Europe take.

Here in B.C., says Bush, "there was no business case for producing electricity. Instead, he partnered with a firm called Greenlane, which specializes in the scrubbing technology that makes raw biogas into a pipeline-quality fuel that can be delivered and used the same way natural gas is.

Greelane provided the financing so Bush could afford the million-dollar scrubber, and Terasen, the company that supplies most of the natural gas in the province, agreed to buy Bush's biofuel for an undisclosed price.

And, if a recent submission to the B.C. Utilities Commission is successful, Terasen will offer customers the choice of including a 10 per cent biofuel in their gas mix for a premium of about $4 per month.

"As one of the first utility companies in Canada to include alternative energy solutions as part of its regulated energy service offerings, we are committed to making long term energy investments that will help address B.C.'s climate change goals," Doug Stout, vice president of marketing and business development recently announced. "Delivering biomethane through our distribution system makes good sense and is a natural extension of the energy services we've provided customers for more than a century."

A program in Vermont known as Cow Power, has proven successful, and Terasen's bid to launch a similar renewable energy program is the latest move in a larger effort to boost this type of activity in B.C.

Farming energy Matt Dickson has witnessed this evolution over the past five years, first as an employee of the ministry of agriculture, and now as the program manager of the newly-formed Renewable Agri-Energy Initiative, which is funded by industry, government and the BC Agriculture Council.

"We were looking at ways to help farms diversify their revenue streams, deal with nutrient issues, ways to help them become more sustainable," says Dickson.

"This initiative came along as a vehicle to drive that forward."

Dickson says that economics is one of the biggest barriers to making on-farm anaerobic digestion more widespread. He estimates (unofficially, based on what he's heard) that Bush's biofuel would fetch between four and 10 dollars per gigajoule.

If Bush was to forego the scrubbing technology and simply sell electricity to the grid the most he could net from BC Hydro is 8.6 cents per kilowatt hour.

"It's just not enough," says Dickson. In order to make anaerobic digestion economically feasible for farmers, electricity generated from this technology would have to be worth between 14 to 16 cents per kilowatt hour.

"While the province is certainly supportive of renewable energy, it wants to buy the cheapest renewable energy it can," says Dickson. "Valuing all technology the same, that's kind of unfair... we need to start differentiating between technologies. With anaerobic digestion, you get clean energy, but also more sustainable farming and other additional benefits."

Critics hold their noses Anaerobic digestion is not without its environmental critics, especially in the U.S., where this technology is being subsidized for large factory farms as a way to primarily deal with the odour and leakage from huge waste holding ponds.

It begs the question of whether or not it's a technological fix to the wrong question, when we should be asking if this kind of large-scale meat production should exist at all.

"We're not here to drive agriculture to factory farms," says Bush. "We want to support a centralized model."

He sees his facility as a way to make the maximum use of waste, providing additional revenue streams for farms that might not otherwise be able to survive.

There are currently five nearby farms nearby that will contribute feedstock to his facility, allowing them, he says, to be "virtual big businesses." He notes that his facility's footprint is about an acre and a half, and the boiler that runs his digesters and scrubbers is the most efficient model he could find.

"We're running at 93 per cent efficiency," Bush says.

"If we can capture this gas, harvest it, clean it upgrade it, we can replace petroleum-based fuels."

And this is just the beginning, says Bush. He intends to build 125 copies of his facility across Canada.

"We're doing the right thing, at the right time, for the right reason," Bush says. "Most great things in life are a little hard. I would say I'm blessed to be first."

Excerpts from the Ensuing Discussion in the Tyee’s Comment Section: Congratulations on opening pandora’s box of recycling. posted by “NicS” on 7 July, 2010 Wonderful to hear of those much needed projects that will make our life on Earth more sustainable.

Now we just have to convince everyone else to start recycling all of their shit, and not just the aromatic stuff.

The sludge may be green... posted by “Yeoman” on 7 July, 2010 but don’t assume that the facility is. There are several realities with this type of facility that can offset the apparent benefits. For example, double trucking (emitting diesal exhaust)of the bulky and heavy waste. Then, what do you do with the vast quantities of effluent during the winter? If dewatering is to be done it creates an industrial wastewater discharge point in an already overloaded area of the Sumas.

On farm facilities that only deal with their own (and maybe the neighbour’s by pipeline) and then burn their own product are probably a better alternative.

Feedback from the source... posted by “CatalystPower” on 7 July, 2010 Thank you all for the comments, the points are valid.

I would like to address a couple of the concerns. First on the transportation question we selected the size and the location of the facility carefully to fit inside a 5km radius. The simple economics of dairy manure is that the energy required to move it 5km in a truck is equal to the energy it will produce in the digester.

The furthest dairy farm is 2.9km. We are reviewing pipe options, and will indeed be trucking in the mean time. We eliminate the double trucking by delivering digestate fertilizer to the partner farms on the same trip as we pick up the raw manure. We actually reduce transportation rather significantly as one of the farms currently transports the manure over 300km, and returns with bedding. With our bedding production this becomes a 4km round trip for a new 600km per day

improvement.

Sask Resident, I agree nothing here is “new”, but gas to pipeline is distinct. Of the over 12000 digesters of scale in the world, we are number 126 NOT converting to electricity.

Beyond that, this facility will be a full integrated resource recovery facility, with goals of zero “waste” through value chains.

On the effluent question, we have a contract with an organic fertilizer company to relocate all nutrients beyond the plant need on the partner farms. This also is a net gain on several fronts as the NPK present in the valley already is upgraded for new applications, and reduces or eliminated the thousands of tonnes currently imported commercial fertilizer components.

We have proposed, and are pursuing an Agricultural Center Of Excellence so we can partner with the local Universities. There is tremendous opportunity for technology integration for the betterment of all. We want to do what we can to help.

Chris

Green You Can Use, at Vancouver’s Olympic Village We scoured the billion dollar project for practical solutions ready for wider use in an era of global warming.

By Christopher Pollon Originally published on July 14, 2010, http://thetyee.ca/News/2010/07/14/GreenVillage/

Vancouver's Olympic Village draws together more green building innovations than perhaps any other residential development -- which is why real estate mogul Bob Rennie is marketing it as the "greenest neighbourhood on the planet."

On a Saturday in May, about 15,000 Vancouverites lined up to tour what is now called "Millennium Water," the former home for 3,000 Olympic athletes since morphed into a model green residential community.

Years in the planning by the City of Vancouver, the developer and a small army of consultant engineers and architects, every building on this former brownfield has earned the Canadian Green Home Building Council's LEED Gold rating, with two buildings earning LEED Platinum.

Yet none of the innovations that the public saw that day -- including solar-powered garbage cans and a neighbourhood energy utility that recovers heat from sewer lines -- exist there because homebuyers demanded it or mainstream developers dreamed big.

The City of Vancouver mandated the extraordinary sustainability features from above, at a cost ultimately guaranteed by the public.

A billion dollars later, most Vancouverites are still light years away from living in "green homes" like those at South East False Creek (SEFC). So what is the value of this ultra-green community that most of us cannot own?

Are there affordable green building features here that mainstream consumers will value enough to pay for, and that developers and architects might create sooner rather than later?

From the outset, SEFC design manager Roger Bayley was adamant that the development would be more than a posh green playground for the affluent.

"One of my aspirations is to significantly influence the development industry in Vancouver relative to the acceptance of sustainable design and green-building techniques," he said back in 2007, just as the project was breaking ground.

Flash forward to June 2010: Bayley has agreed to take The Tyee on a private tour. He pulls up to the Vancouver Salt Company heritage building in a forestgreen Jaguar, appearing equal parts boomer hipster and wacky professor: curly Einstein hair and greying goatee, Versace shirt and ripped blazer. Last-minute tradesmen race about the site just ahead of real estate agents giving private showings of homes ranging in cost from $600,000 to $4.7 million.

The first stop is a Platinum LEED building that will soon be home to 60 senior citizens, a building with triple-glazed windows, ultra energy efficient walls/ roofing, and LED lighting. A stairwell leads to a verdant courtyard bisected by a long water feature -an aesthetically pleasing design element that is much more practical than it appears.

Most of the homes at SEFC have been clustered around open courtyards like this, with water at the centre; the units that surround the babbling "creek" have been designed to maximize cross ventilation which is then cooled as it sweeps off the surface of the water.

Such "passive design" elements were among the first considerations when the community was designed, under the guidance of mechanical engineer Vladimir Mikler, who looked for ways to improve "thermal comfort" and minimize building energy consumption.

"If we can make really smart decisions on the building architecture, it doesn't really have to cost more, and it saves the demand on the energy of the building in the first place," says Mikler, a principle at Vancouver's Cobalt Engineering. "It's typical for the industry to just dive in straight away for appealing and high-tech solutions without really addressing the fundamentals."

The fundamentals in this case are designing a building envelope to high energy efficiency standards, something that Mikler says is not the norm in North America. Insulation is key, as is the need to resist the mainstream penchant for designing high-rise glass towers with floor-to-ceiling windows.

"Buildings with a high per centage of glazing [windows] behave like large greenhouses, so every time it's sunny, the sun's solar radiation penetrates through these exposed facades, triggering significant cooling requirements, which consume energy," he says.

Towers have been designed with less window surface, and where windows do exist, they can be opened.

South and west facing balconies, which catch afternoon sun during the hottest times of the day, extend outward to shade the building from the sun. Many windows are fitted with exterior shades -- a simple solution to solar gain that is not usually applied because it affects the aesthetic look of the building.

Even at SEFC, says Mikler, there was concern about the exterior aesthetics of such blinds, but the passive design element won out because the City of Vancouver had mandated uncommonly high energy efficien-

cies in its official development plan. In most developments, the marketing imperative of appearance over function would win out hands down.

Water, water everywhere A walk along a cobbled concrete street -- designed to drain storm water into an artificial wetland on the site periphery -- leads to a building allotted for "social housing," a component of the development reduced from one-third to 20 per cent by the NPA-led city council in 2006.

Bayley points to the roofs that have been designed to capture and divert rainwater into large underground cisterns, providing "recycled" water for use in irrigation and toilet flushing.

Considering that Vancouver receives an average of about 1,100 millimetres (about 44 inches) of annual rainfall, it seems like common sense to flush our toilets and water our plants with it. However, most British Columbians will continue to use potable water to do just that, which constitutes more than 50 per cent of total water household use (flushing toilets alone accounts for more than a third of total household water use).

At SEFC, rainwater capture was originally intended only for irrigation, but given the vast quantities of water harvestable between October and June, it was decided to extend water recycling to toilets too.

(SEFC toilets can still access potable city water, for use during the drier months.)

"Doing this was not a big deal," says Peter Kreuk, president of landscape architecture firm Durante Kreuk, which oversaw many of the exterior design elements. He says water run-off on all high-rise roofs is piped to a single location before exiting a building, so in this case, the water was channelled into a cistern located in the underground parking.

Capturing and banking rainwater made even more sense on a brownfield site like SEFC because they already had to "over-excavate" to remove bad soil; instead of filling those areas with structural soil as per

usual, they left a void which was later used to store water.

The system necessitated the running of a parallel plumbing system to feed both the toilets and irrigation system, which needed its own pumps -- unlike the water delivered from the city, the banked rainwater is not pressurized.

Perhaps the biggest challenge here -- and anywhere else wanting to harvest rainwater -- is that it is currently illegal to use rainwater to flush toilets in the City of Vancouver. The design team had to earn "equivalencies" from the city by demonstrating that the system would be safe. The plan was eventually approved, but the developer was forced to post a sign in every bathroom warning residents that it is not safe to drink the toilet water.

The harvest and banking of rainwater at SEFC cuts household water use by about 40 per cent, adding an additional $400 to the cost of each unit. "Which isn't that big," says Kreuk, "but in developer-speak, that's still $400."

The Green Revolution is coming... somewhere else first The tour is drawing to a close, as Bayley must get home to pack his bags -- he is flying to Shanghai to talk about Millennium Water at a "sustainable design" conference. It is in Asia, he says, where the Olympic Village innovations will have the biggest impact on how people live.

"The experience gathered here in Vancouver can influence the situation in the world very broadly," says Bayley. "What we've done here [in terms of green building] is a drop in the bucket compared to Asia, where they recreate our population every 20 years."

China will adopt "green building" sooner than Canada because it has no choice: the need to conserve energy, cut pollution and protect fresh water is dire. He adds that an authoritarian government can also move much quicker with green building changes once it decides to act.

As for Vancouver, there are promising signs of change on the horizon: the city has adopted guidelines for passive design in the form of toolkits, authored by none other than Vladimir Mikler. Even though these guidelines are voluntary "best practices," Bayley says this is the SEFC green innovation that society will see soonest.

"Younger architects will look for more passive design features, where architecture will reduce energy demands," he says. "It's the first thing that will happen."

In step with SEFC's focus on energy efficient buildings, Vancouver also recently required new homes to undergo an EnerGuide audit, a process that generates a number similar to what you see on an EnergyStar appliance, providing a snapshot of home energy performance relative to other houses. Tools like this are the necessary first step towards educating regular consumers about the value of green building features: the better EnerGuide rating, the better the monthly savings and resale value.

In the longer term, Vancouver has announced its intent for all new construction in the city to be "carbon neutral" by 2020, and to improve the efficiency of existing buildings by 20 per cent in that same futuristic timeframe.

But in the shorter term, as our energy and water continue to be relatively cheap and undervalued, most of us will be forced to watch what nature writer David Oates calls the "new green urbanism" unfold as bystanders -- "a gleaming playground for the rich, yet (in theory) also an answer to the calls for environmental justice and social equity."

Such is not the case in Australia, already the driest inhabited continent on earth, where catastrophic droughts have pushed the harvesting and banking of rainwater into the mainstream. Or in Germany, where high energy costs have made it common today to find buildings with an annual "energy use intensity" of less than 60 kilowatt hours/square metre; the typical North American building consumes anywhere between 300 to 400 kWh by that same measure.

"Everybody is trying to increase the capacity of the building industry here," says Bayley, who dismisses critics who say it's too expensive to build green buildings like at SEFC. "Is there a sense of urgency in the marketplace? Not yet."

Excerpts from the Ensuing Discussion in the Tyee’s Comment Section: Learning curve posted by “Vancouver9” on 14 July, 2010 I’m glad to see continued stories about Olympic Village - there is so much sustainable development thinking incorporated there that it will take some time for the public to both learn about what has been done - and for us to adjudicate the costs and benefits as the community is inhabited and the buildings are in full operation. A couple more points on this story: the work on Olympic Village trained a significant number of building professionals and tradespeople in alternative technologies and ways of thinking - this is an important legacy in an industry where “we’ve always done it this way” creates a lot of inertia against change. It also exposed many City departments and employees to alternatives, and most importantly (as this story mentions) to integrating as many innovations at once. This has spawned all sorts of policy change and next-wave projects. We will benefit from this development, even if the costs of these ultrahip downtown waterfront suites are out of most of our reach (is there anything the could have built on that high-profile site that would have been “affordable”?). For a lot more detail about the story of this development, readers should check out The Challenge Series, a book chapter series chronicling the work in the words of planners, architects and builders. www. thechallengeseries.ca. Thanks - keep the stories coming.

Design cues are nothing new posted by “nikolas” on 14 July, 2010 In 1967, Moshe Safdie designed “Habitat 67” for Expo ‘67 in Montreal. The theme of the structure was centred around sustainability and affordability.

He utilized many innovative passive design cues to make his structure livable and sustainable. Habitat (at 2600, Pierre Dupuy Avenue in Montreal, Quebec) was designed by Safdie as a series of interlocking concrete structures. These individual structures had considerable overhang which not only created an interesting architectural affect, but it was also a unique solution to solar gain as the overhanging terraces had their

own garden/green space thus shading the apartments below and cooling them considerably. Safdie’s design also addressed the issue of livable design within the realities of existing urban density. The design was also to address affordability in urban housing.

Forty-three years later and we are still debating the same issues.

Roger Bayley mentions the use open courtyards with water features used in the Millenium project as a mitigating factor to solar gain. This design cue goes back to, at least, the era of the Venetians. When Mr. Bayley mentions that exterior shades were purposely included in the design, he is echoing the (even more innovative) design cues of Safdie’s Habitat 67.

The design of “greener” and more efficient urban structures are going to be realized through a cooperation between developers, governments, architects, and the people who are going to live in those structures.

Governments will have to create or adapt current bylaws to be consistent with these new construction directions (Europeans have been using grey water systems for years!) Some legislation will also have to be realized.

Current home-owners can use existing and decidedly low-tech solutions such as rain barrels ($89.99 - $229.99), composters ($25.00 - $159.99), and micro greenhouses ($199.00 - $399.00). To install many of these environmentally responsible cues into new construction will, at first, increase the cost of the construction but the overall resource savings will warrant the cost of construction. Unfortunately, contrary to conventional economic models, the cost of integrating these environmentally responsible cues will not decrease as the technology develops as it will be offset by the ever-growing demand for urban housing.

Breeding Trees to Be Better Biofuel Thanks to a gene mapping breakthrough, producing ethanol is going to be cheaper and easier in BC.

By Christopher Pollon Originally published on August 4, 2010, http://thetyee.ca/News/2010/08/04/BreedingTrees/ Standing in an experimental poplar forest at the University of British Columbia's Totem Field test farm, the future of biofuel grows all around botanist Carl Douglas.

The 500 trees in this artificial grove are the progeny of just 20 parent black cottonwoods (also known as poplars) gathered from all over western North America by the B.C. Ministry of Forests more than a decade ago, for use in their pulp and paper plantation breeding programs.

But today, Douglas is finding new ways to work with the same old poplars. Armed with novel genomic tools, the Washington-born botany professor sees a future where trees are bred into the ideal feedstock for biofuel production -- fast-growing, cellulose-dense plantations created using traditional breeding techniques to fuel the demand for ethanol from non-food sources (see sidebar).

"It's probably 10 to 15 years before one will see a large-scale planting of optimized genotypes [traits for biofuel] on the landscape," says Douglas, who was part of an international team that sequenced the poplar genome in 2006 -- a first for a tree species.

"Within a year, breeders could start incorporating the information we're generating here in their breeding programs."

Responding to the need for new biofuels Douglas says wood is the ideal feedstock for a future ethanol industry in B.C: most of the province is forested, beetle-killed pine abounds, and fast-growing native black cottonwoods are already grown in plantations across their coastal B.C. range.

The immediate challenge is the high cost of producing ethanol from trees, compared to corn and wheat -- it is expensive to separate the cellulose (the part you want) from the lignin which gives wood its rigidity. Douglas' solution is to make it easier (and cheaper) to extract the fermentable sugars from the wood by breeding poplars to grow faster in high rotation plantations, denser in volume, and with more cellulose and less lignin.

The demand for such non-food sources of ethanol is being spurred by concerns about agricultural lands being displaced to produce fuel, and revelations that the environmental benefits of ethanol from corn have been overstated.

"Renewable fuel standards" are also stimulating demand: enacted by many governments around the world, such standards require that a certain percentage of biofuel must be blended with gasoline and diesel.

In British Columbia, for instance, the BC Bioenergy Strategy of 2008 called for a provincial average of

five per cent renewable content in gasoline by the end of 2010; diesel too must be blended with increasing quantities of biodiesel, up to five percent by 2012. The strategy also stated that B.C. biofuel production must meet 50 per cent or more of the province's renewable fuel requirements by 2020 -- but there are no legal teeth to ensure this latter target is met.

Policy changes in the U.S. will also ramp up the supply of non-food sourced ethanol: the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has increased the amount of renewables required in transportation fuel from 34 billion litres in 2008 to 136 billion in 2022. By that futuristic date, only 40 per cent of that ethanol can come from corn. Companies in B.C. and around the world are responding by developing new technologies to derive ethanol from non-food biomass, such as agricultural waste (for example, corn cobs instead of corn), consumer food waste, and trees. In B.C., this means there is a new shine on using up what is left of the beetle-killed lodge pole pine in the interior, and closer to Douglas' interest, growing poplar plantations optimized to meet future demand.

What is Dr. Douglas doing?

Poplars and other commercially-valuable trees have been cross-bred for decades to optimize certain traits, using the same methods historically employed by agricultural plant breeders (note that this is not the same as "genetic modification"). Parents are selected for certain traits and then crossed with each other; among the many progeny of this cross, trees with the desired traits (fast growth rate, wood quality, disease resistance) are selected in field trials for further evaluation.

Eventually a small number of the best are selected for planting.

But the successful genomic sequencing of a single black cottonwood tree taken from the banks of Washington State's Nisqually River in 2006 -- which for the first time located and identified all 45,000 genes across its 19 chromosomes -- has created new tools for Douglas to work with.

Using the information from that single poplar genome, it is now much cheaper and faster to sequence genomes of other poplar individuals. At Totem Field,

Douglas is doing just that, "resequencing" the genes that are actively involved in wood formation for each of the 20 individuals represented in his test forest, comparing them both to the original Nisqually genome and to each other. He is then able to identify the "gene variants" (also called "genotypes") in this population of trees at Totem Field that underlie the traits needed for optimal biofuel production.

"You can use these genetic markers in breeding and use that info to increase the value of the tree," he says.

The knowledge unleashed from the genome breakthrough has also made it easier to genetically modify poplars for biofuel production and a range of other uses (disease-resistant transgenic poplars are already grown in plantations in China today), but Douglas says this technology is not coming to B.C. any time soon.

"It seems unlikely to me that there's going to be public acceptance of large-scale transgenic tree plantations."

New sources, new production?

The use of B.C. trees as an ethanol feedstock took a leap forward in June, when Burnaby-based ethanol maker Lignol signed a deal with Danish enzyme manufacturer Novozymes to pioneer an ethanolmaking process using wood and forestry waste. The companies say they will aim to produce ethanol from wood for $2/gallon -- a price competitive with gasoline and corn ethanol. Lignol did not return calls from The Tyee.

During the same month, major investment bank UBS mentioned Novozymes by name, as one of the biggest potential beneficiaries of the coming adoption and commercialization of second-generation biofuels.

Other beneficiaries, they predict, will be the agricultural sector and big forestry companies like Weyerhaeuser.

For forest companies in B.C. and the Pacific northwest generally, biofuel is a promising potential revenue-stream at a time when a lot of traditional markets have dried up. Take the example of the aforemen-

tioned Weyerhaeuser, which has formed a joint venture with Chevron (called Catchlight Energy), which will see the forestry giant deliver feedstocks to Chevron, which in turn possesses the required capacity in product engineering, fuel manufacturing and distribution.

"There is a growing recognition by the [forest] industry that they've got to rely on more than one or two revenue streams to keep them going," says Michael Weedon, executive director of the BC Bioenergy Network. "They've got to look at this bioenergy piece as something that gives them some stability."

But it is still early days for so-called "second generation" biofuels. For the time being, most of the global ethanol supply -- nearly 74 billion litres produced in 2009 -- was made from corn, sugarcane, and wheat.

This said, three large-scale "non-food" source production plants are expected to come into production this year in different corners of the world, and sustained high oil prices will only bring more.

"I don't think it will take 15 to 20 years [for wood to be a predominant feedstock], because energy pricing is already at a certain level now," says Weedon. "You start to have an energy revolution at anywhere above $100 a barrel of oil, and I'm a believer it will be higher than that in the not-too-distant future."

Excerpts from the Ensuing Discussion in the Tyee’s Comment Section: more cottonwood? posted by “Iwannajob” on 4 Aug, 2010 The island is dotted with cottonwood plantations that not only did not grow at rates expected but they took away a generation of douglas fir forests that actually would have real value in terms of lumber and waste products for pulp and power production. Once again the forest companies are looking for a quick income stream without actually creating any jobs. The jobs per cubic meter ratio will drop even further in this province as we cover our best forest growing sites with unproven genetically modified weed trees. Better to find a way to produce fuel from the waste of the mills than grow low value wood for an industry that might not exist by the time the trees are harvestable.

Biofuel is NOT Carbon Neutral and IS Environmental Destruction posted by YCSTS on 4 Aug, 2010 For those who want to learn the real facts about Biomass Energy, read this article: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6758 Wood burning has been around for a long time. And using waste wood from manufacturing, especially in a local factory CHP generator makes good sense. Harvesting Wood for Energy is INEXCUSABLE STUPIDITY and will release more CO2 than it saves.

The biggest consumer Wood Usage is as building material for the home. You would have to burn over 2 homes worth of wood every year, just to keep that home warm, in avg Canadian location, including the energy cost of processing harvested wood. “...At the end of the 13th century, Europe’s forest coverage, as historic data sources show and isotopic analyses of sediments confirm, was as low as approximately 10% of its total land mass. Today, 38% of the EU countries’ surface is covered with forests, up from 25% only 50 years ago. At the same time, today’s population in the EU-27 countries stands at

close to 500 million, whereas at the peak in medieval times (between the years 1300 and 1350), Europe was inhabited by 70-100 million people.

Back then, the continent was reaching its biophysical limits for supporting humans in a biomass-based economy, and after the last marginal spots of land were put to use for farming, there was little that could provide any more sources for food, fire and construction wood for a thriving and quickly growing society.

The discovery of fossil fuels and the New World were still things of the future. A few poor harvests led to famines in the 14th century all across Europe, and when an already undernourished and thus weakened population was exposed to the black plague, Europe’s population shrank by 35-50% (depending on sources) within less than a century...”

Wood Pellets ARE Better posted by “cboo44” on 4 Aug, 2010 Wood pellets for heating and power generation are BETTER. We could begin to supply a PAYING MARKET for bug-kill pine. The interior of BC has a GAZILLION square miles of bug-kill. A paying market would put people back to work, harvesting, hauling, processing the wood. The stumpage would pay for reforestation of the now tinder-dry forests. Limbs, bark, roots are worked back into the forest floor to create more soil. Return to a TRULY “renewable resource”. Not one dependent on taxpayer handouts.