Backbone magazine_A Look at Life in 2020

2020

A look at life in

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Cleantech that works

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Thinking big with green entrepreneurs Power cut Reduce electricity use at work

June 2010 $4.95

G R E E N P R O F I T S ■ H Y P E R M I L I N G ■ W H AT ’ S I N Y O U R L A P T O P ? ■ O N L I N E W E L L N E S S

CONTENTS COVER

20 24 hours, 10 years from now

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2020: if you think gadgets, the Web and computers are running your life now. just wait a decade.

By Danny Bradbury

28 Cleantech today

Forget someday: cleaner and greener technology is here now.

By Lisa Manfield

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FROM THE EDITOR

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LETTERS

BACKSPACE

Online gambling is illegal.

Step away from the mouse!

Plus: big Olympic numbers and free e-books.

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E-TRENDS

What’s in your laptop bag?

We asked four globetrotting execs.

By Ian Harvey

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By Lisa Manfield

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AUTO FORWARD

Office energy Hold the office elevator, open the blinds and put on a sweater.

Modifications to car and driver How hypermilers and ecomodders get more kilometres for their gas money.

By Lawrence Cummer

By Mathieu Yuill

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HOW TO

BIG IDEAS

Wasted energy = wasted profits How to green yourself to a better bottom line.

By Jim Harris

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E-TRENDS

Want e-health?

Well, you can’t have it, at least not yet.

By Peter Wolchak

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TEK GADGETS

Have tech, will travel What to pack on the plane.

By Peter Wolchak

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EVENTS

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FEATURE DEPARTMENTS

JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2010

LETTERS

Young people today: few skills, fewer manners

Photo courtesy of Andrew Strasserç2008 EyeSteelFilm. All rights reserved.

Ian Harvey did a good job highlighting the problems all employers encounter with young people. (“Meet the boss,” April/ May 2010.) Their lack of task ownership, their perceived entitlement to everything without earning rights, their bad manners from table to office, and their lack of ability to see beyond today are only some of the reasons many small firms will not employ them. They have absolutely little to bring to the table and more often than not they lack a proper and rounded postsecondary education.

We are a small but national professional services company in a small rural community in Eastern Ontario. It has been our experience that the odds of finding young people with basic skills, willing to learn and contribute to our growth are slim indeed and we have lost many thousands of dollars trying.

Our solution? We no longer hire. We engage individuals under open contract who have specific skills, we pay them less, there are no benefits and if there are no projects we send them home. There is no employer-employee relationship and their 6

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work is directed by full-time managers who are professionals. And when there is an attitude problem or anything we consider unprofessional we simply tell them not to come back. And when they move on, we contract someone else with the same or better skill set.

We win, they lose.

Robert C. Cross, president Megram Consulting Services, Renfrew, On.

Girl Talk makes the laws of copyright laughable It’s been a good many years since I made what I once affectionately called “a living” from music and, truthfully, at peak I was never in any danger of losing millions of dollars in royalties, nevertheless I see a glaringly obvious flaw in the theories espoused by Brett Gaylor and his sympathisers. (“Remaking copyright for the digital age,” February/March 2010.)

Complaints about “the stranglehold copyright puts on the creative process” are thoroughly laughable when promptly followed by the admission that an alleged artist like Girl Talk “often samples more than 20 songs in a three-minute track.”

George Harrison was successfully sued for plagiarism over his song “My Sweet Lord” because it contained three sequential melodic notes also found in The Chiffons “He’s So Fine.” Harrison paid out something close to $2 million (depending on which report you read).

So ask yourself: when arguably one of the most creative musicians of the 20th century can be made to pay heavily for his subconscious and inadvertent use of a paltry three notes, why is it that a guy who goes on stage armed with a laptop (http:// bit.ly/bpdvsw) containing almost nothing but other people’s music shouldn’t expect to be equally and proportionately nailed?

Paul Mason, North Vancouver, B.C.

E-books: bad for publishers and nothing but a fad In your Editor’s Letter in the February/ March 2010 edition, you predicted e-books would truly go mainstream.

While I think offering e-books is an interesting idea, here’s why I think they will be nothing but a fad: 1. The devices are expensive (Kindle, Nook, iPhone) as are the e-books themselves.

2. You can’t lend an e-book. Okay, the Nook allows you to lend an e-book once for only 14 days. This is a draconian feature sure to drive avid readers back to paper.

3. The draconian Digital Rights Management will prompt a huge outbreak of cracked e-books, with P2P sharing of e-books increasing exponentially. This will ensure publishers and authors get

less revenue than they do currently in an environment that allows people to lend and borrow books from friends and libraries.

4. How long can you store the book?

Publishers are already talking about the possibility of a time limit on e-books.

As a device for students (e-books instead of massive text books) and for technical documentation, electronic books sound like a good choice. A better choice, in my opinion, would be using a netbook or laptop to do the same thing.

Steve O’Leary, Ottawa

B A C K S PA C E

Vancouver 2010: 14 gold medals and 65 million mobile text messages

Canadians connected with the Games in unprecedented numbers Vancouver delivered a big medal count for Canada and big numbers on almost every other measure as well.

According to the Vancouver Organizing Committee, 615 medals were awarded among 2,632 registered athletes. The worldwide television audience was estimated at 3.5 billion viewers, while six thousand hours of coverage were delivered worldwide on mobile platforms.

The www.vancouver2010.com site saw 275 million visitors, blowing past the 105 million visitors the Beijing 2008 Games site drew. The Twitter feed at Twitter.com/2010Tweets had 14,000 followers and the Games generated 1.1 million Facebook fans, nearly four times the total amount for Beijing at the conclusion of the 2008 Games.

More than 3.3 million pairs of Vancouver 2010 red mittens were sold.

To sell more print books, give away the e-book

From Bell Canada, the Games’ telecom partner, come these stats: one trillion packets of data traversed the Olympic network 90 million minutes of mobile voice traffic were generated n 30 million megabytes of mobile data were created n 65 million mobile text messages were sent and received n 750,000 calls were made from 6,000 landline VoIP phones n 4.9 billion bytes of data were delivered to the Internet on behalf of the Games n n

PROJECTS ARE BACK ON

CONSUMERS BUYING LOTS OF PCS Overall Q4 2009 Canadian client PC unit volume rose 8.2 per cent compared to the same period last year, according to IDC. Portable PCs performed slightly better than was forecasted, growing 28.1 per cent year over year.

“The strength of the Canadian client PC market is clearly beginning to return,” said Tim Brunt, senior analyst at IDC Canada.

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A recent study concluded that technology executives are ready to commit funding for projects stalled by the economic downturn.

Nearly one-third of CIOs said they plan to implement software and hardware upgrades, others will go with virtualization projects (16 per cent) and Web site design initiatives (11 per cent).

“Many companies are looking to take advantage of the economic rebound... to improve efficiency and manage costs,” said Megan Slabinski, president of Robert Half Technology’s Canadian operations.

Bringam Young University has found that giving away an e-book title tends to boost sales of the same title in print. University researchers tracked the success of 41 print books before and after the release of the title as a free e-book.

While the sales bump was not huge, the study stated there is a “moderate correlation between free digital books being made permanently available and short-term print sale increases.” However, the effect is not an automatic correlation; free e-books don’t always equal better print sales. “Although the authors believe that free digital book distribution tends to increase print sales, this is not a universal law. The results we found cannot necessarily be generalized to other books, nor be construed to suggest causation. The timing of a free e-book’s release, the promotion it received and other factors cannot be fully accounted for.

Nevertheless, we believe that this data indicates that when free e-books are offered for a relatively long period of time without requiring registration, print sales will increase.”

The ambiguous results are consistent with opinions expressed in a copyright article in the February/March issue of Backbone (http://bit. ly/9SuUH7): some authors seem to benefit by giving away books but others, after engaging in free-book experiments, see no sales bump.

The Bringam Young study is at http://bit.ly/dn7Flk.

All content is also on our Web site: www.backbonemag.com/magazine

HOW TO

Help the Earth from your office You can cut power use at work Most of us want to be good people, and reducing power use at work is one way to achieve that. But being a good person can also be a hassle, and we’re all busy.

Experts, however, say it can be fairly easy to reduce office use of electricity. The trick is to start with the low-hanging fruit.

Monitors, for example, hog power, so turn them off when they’re not in use. The same is true of computers in general. Stats from Toronto Hydro suggest computers are actually in use only one-tenth of the time they are on.

A lot of the methods for cutting energy costs are pretty tried and true, said Tanya Bruckmueller, spokesperson for Toronto Hydro, so you can be sure that whatever effort is required will actually pay off.

Illustration: Christopher Theed

Out with the old

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In 2007, telecommunications giant Telus opened a new silver LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certified facility in Ottawa. The company has since received numerous awards, including being named one of the top 100 sustainable companies in the world in 2009 and 2010 by Corporate Knights.

Megan Fielding admits that while not every company can build or move to a LEED building, implementing those same best practices can still save money and the environment.

“Don’t try to do it all at once, but chip away over time to determine the best practices for your workplace,” said Fielding, a media relations rep at Telus. She said the company trimmed about 10 per cent of its electricity usage in its existing buildings by upgrading lighting equipment and building control systems.

“Doing those small steps can make a huge difference in energy savings.”

And consider replacing equipment that is five to 10 years old with more energy-

efficient options, advised Ontario Hydro.

The savings from energy efficiency should provide you with a short payback period on the replacement.

Replacing stand-alone air conditioning units with energy-efficient models can reduce the energy costs from air conditioning by 30 per cent.

Cut the fat Like cleaning out a closet, get rid of the excess you can live without. Last year cashstrapped businesses strived to eliminate all excess power use, notes Kristine MacPhee, principle in Deloitte’s national

Definitions LEED: The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design system was developed by the U.S. Green Building Council. It is a set of standards for the environmentally sustainable design, construction and operation of buildings and neighbourhoods.

sustainability and climate change practice.

“If that was their triggering event that’s great,” MacPhee said. “What we can hope for is that they have developed a culture of asking: do we need this? How can we do this more efficiently?”

To that end, Deloitte has developed an internal wiki around efficiency, where all employees can point out potential power savings and drains (like PC workstations, rather than higher-efficiency laptops) that should ultimately be discarded like yesteryear’s bad fashions.

Sometimes it’s as easy as getting the facts straight about what’s unnecessary.

Simply turning off equipment doesn’t stop their drain on power. When an electric device is turned off there remains a draw of standby power, sometimes called vampire continued on page ??

E-TRENDS

Lint, mints, cables,

next year’s budget:

Photo: Steve Uhraney

what’s in your laptop bag?

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Flights and destinations may change, get cancelled or diverted, but road warriors know they can rely on their laptop bags to be there and ready for business.

These ubiquitous “go bags” come in all shapes and sizes, and carry all kinds of equipment, starting with business-class notebooks, which are now more compact and robust, and feature encrypted hard drives and better access security with biometric devices to scan fingerprints and faces.

And because we are so mobile now, manufacturers are jostling to extend battery life while also cutting weight.

Windows 7 has been a game changer, according to Chet Joshi, brand manager at Lenovo Canada. “We now have a dedicated CPU chip which controls power to the battery, both to extend the charge and the overall life of the battery.”

And then there are connectivity options like onboard WiMax and/or cellular.

“With an internal antenna, you also get much better coverage than with a hand-held cell,” said Hewlett Packard product manager Phil Smith.

Windows 7 also supports singlebutton access to Outlook’s calendar and e-mail without having to boot up the entire operating system.

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With the move to mobility, Joshi said screen size seems to be settling to a sweet spot of 13 to 14 inches, especially as most users now have large flat-screen monitors at their desks and are willing to trade onthe-go screen real estate for weight.

Execs are also increasingly asking themselves if they need to lug a full notebook or can simply get by with a netbook.

Both Lenovo and HP, for example, sell business-class netbooks. The HP 5102 is based on the Intel Atom processor and runs XP Home or Win 7 Starter, while Lenovo’s x100 runs Win 7 Pro on an AMD Neo processor. Both have full keyboards and are small enough (with 10.1- and 11.6inch screens, respectively) to work in those torturous spaces between airline seats.

Of course, smaller machines also leave more room in that laptop bag for other gear.

Aside from magazines, noise suppression headphones, cameras, etc., some, like New York Times technology writer David Pogue, pack a $20 bill, “because you never know.” Others pack mints, movies to play en route or other distractions.

The point is everyone’s go bag is different, so we asked some Canadian execs “What’s in your laptop bag?”

Mike Coates has been president and CEO of media relations giant Hill & Knowlton Canada since 1995, boasting clients like Loblaws, Bell, HP and Motorola.

He logs hours between his home in Ottawa and seven other offices in Canada, as well as travelling internationally. Riffling through his bag he finds “my HP laptop and charger. Let’s see, there’s last month’s financials, my credit cards, cables for my cellphone, an umbrella, business cards and spare glasses. Oh, and a letter I wrote to myself at a course recently, reminding me to listen to my clients first before rushing to a solution.”

He’s also usually packing some reading material, most recently Jared Diamond’s 2005 tome Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive.

Robert Reaume, vice-president of policy and research at the Association of Canadian Advertisers, is on the road at least once a month, heading to a Canadian, U.S. or European country.

“I’ve got a top-loader Mancini bag, so I put my laptop in sideways and I really like it that way,” he said, adding it’s easier to retrieve the laptop in tight places. “But I am a pack rat.”

Clockwise from top left: Doug Cooper, Intel Canada; Mike Coates, Hill & Knowlton; Robert Reaume, Association of Canadian Advertisers B A C K B O N E

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2020

a day in the life B Y D A N N Y B R A D B U R Y I L L U S T R A T I O N S : J O N B E R K E L E Y

Technology change is accelerating. So what will life be like in 2020?

Ten years is a long time in technology, and the pace of development is getting faster. In a decade, it will affect our daily lives in innovative and exciting ways on both a personal and a professional basis. See how our fictional character, Sheila Robinson, might navigate her day in 2020.

11:30 p.m.

Digital anxiety

Tomorrow’s world will force us to reinvent ourselves.

10:00 p.m.

An augmented reality

Forget rose-tinted glasses— prepare yourself for electronic ones with heads-up displays instead.

8:00 p.m. Date night

Technology can help arrange social events, and transportation will be more environmentally friendly.

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7:00 a.m.

Say goodbye to privacy, and hello to convenience A dozen online services—and her house—know enormous amounts about Sheila and her day.

9:00 a.m.

An automated life

8:00 a.m.

A freelance world

Tomorrow’s worker will create and dismantle virtual teams on a daily basis.

Personal electronic assistants carry out a variety of tasks for us automatically.

Noon The cashless lunch

All hail the ‘lectronic Loonie: cash and possibly retail assistants are increasingly virtual.

1:00 p.m.

Personal finances

Money management is always difficult, but online services are there to help.

3:00 p.m.

A new approach to health Personal genomics will make medicine more targeted in tomorrow’s clinics.

5:00 p.m. Higher learning New interfaces and electronic textbooks will make education more enjoyable and effective.

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C OVER

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Our past may be analogue, but it is littered with binary visions of the future. Science fiction movies paint pictures that are either unrealistically euphoric—humans wear silver suits and robots do all the work—or dystopian, in which we’re reduced to banging rocks together in a world ravaged by nuclear war. What will life really be like in 2020? Our history is more nuanced than these scenarios predicted, which suggests that our future will be, too.

We know that today’s problems will be tomorrow’s crises. A trashed economy burdened by ballooning public debt won’t be able to sustain the health-care system that retiring boomers are about to stretch. We’re running out of energy as well as money, and can’t seem to stop poisoning the air with oil and coal. Large parts of the developing world are short on water, but are acquiring the high-tech skills that North America is hemorrhaging.

We’ll be busy enough using technology to solve these problems without mulling the possibilities of nuclear-powered flying cars.

But here’s the problem with predicting the future: it’s arriving at an accelerated pace. The computer changed the world far more quickly than the car did.

The Internet quicker still. Now, with the development of genetic engineering and personal genomics, the rate of world change will speed up even more.

Exponential development carries implications for our future predictions, according to Stuart Feldman, vice-president of engineering at Google and the former president of the Association of Computing Machinery.

“Everybody overestimates what an exponential [change] will look like in the short run, and most people completely miss how big an exponential is when it gets going,” he said. “Where you are on the timescale matters. And so 10 years is interesting, because that means a whole bunch of things that are exponentiating will be important, but they won’t be dominating yet.”

In an uncertain future, we can at least rely on Moore’s law to tell us what we have to work with. It states the complexity of minimum component costs doubles every two years. In 2020, that will give us 32 times the available computing power that we have today, at the same cost and size. The same goes for storage, and all of this assumes that the quantum leaps promised by molecular computing and nanotechnology haven’t yet materialized.

That should mean we can process information more quickly, and in new ways. It is significant because information and our ability to search for it will shape our responses to all other challenges. “Our brain does only one thing: it brings in information and processes it through pattern matching, and compares patterns to previous ones,” said David Evans, chief technologist and innovations lead in the Internet Business

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2020, a day in 7:00 a.m. Say goodbye to privacy, and hello to convenience Forty-year-old divor-

cee Sheila Robinson is awoken by the gentle beeping of her bedside clock. As she rises, her clock, connected to a cloud-based service with an intimate understanding of her daily lifestyle, reminds her of her schedule and warns that the rent and utility payments are due today. The smart meter connected to her house sees she has been using more energy in the daytime, because she’s been working at home while her son Mark was off sick from school. Her alarm clock asks if she would like to turn down her air conditioner by two degrees to compensate. She tells it not to, because Mark is back at school today.

Sheila gave up worrying about privacy around five years ago, when she realized the amount of information about her in the cloud was enough to create these kinds of profiles. Like most others, she surrendered. She sends Mark off to school. The bus operates on biodiesel to minimize carbon emissions; it is part of a pilot project where buses are driven semi-automatically.

Geoff Shmigelsky, associate founder at the Singularity University in Silicon Valley, said we’ll see this technology piloted by 2015. “By 2020, they may even actually come to market, as limited AI enables you to get from point A to point B”.

8:00 a.m. A freelance world Rather than working a 9-to-5 job for a single full-time employer, Sheila works for herself as a virtual personal assistant. She walks to a telecottage— a local workspace occupied by other freelance professionals—as a means of separating her working life from her personal one.

Sebastien Ruest, vice-president for services and technology research at IDC, predicts the devolution of the business landscape into a series of synaptic corporations, in which technology has enabled everyone to work for themselves in constantly reforming virtual teams.

“In 2020, we will be at the point where I can create and dismantle a corporation in a very short time, because I can break out business, infrastructure and application layers,” Ruest said. “These can create the same types of services that you get from a physical corporation today.”

9:00 a.m. An automated life Sheila uses a variety of cloud-based online services to get her job done. A client in France initiates a video con-

the life, in depth

5:00 p.m. Higher learning At home again,

ference with her (only 10 per cent of the people she deals with use audio only any more) and asks her to book a conference call with his associates. She uses intelligent agent software to query all of their diaries and arrange the call automatically. None of this happens on a PC. People still use them, but most services are now cloud-based.

Organic LED displays embedded directly into any surface make it possible to access your data wherever you are.

“Those displays will be cheap and prevalent. Walls can be computer displays,” said Michael Liebhold, a distinguished fellow at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, Calif. “Our mobile devices over time will be equipped with the high-power short-range wireless capability to wirelessly communicate with a receiver in that display.”

Sheila helps Mark with his homework. He brings up his personal working space on the multi-touch kitchen table surface, while Sheila works on supper. He is struggling with a math problem. Sheila drags two elements together to create a quadratic equation. Mark’s face lights up as the table shows him that 10 students in his social network got the same result.

“Downloading texts to a specific device or using the Internet to update educational information regularly is something that we must look at,” said Erik Kruse, strategic marketing manager at Ericsson.

Noon The cashless lunch For lunch, Sheila

8:00 p.m. Date night Sheila’s date, John,

drops into the local Subway, which dismissed 90 per cent of its staff two years ago. She verbally asks the computer for a foot-long egg salad sandwich (there are practically no tuna left). The near-field communication chip in her phone debits her account as the sandwich lands in the tray.

picks her up for a night out. John used voice search technology while en route to help plan a romantic, cultured evening. The weatheraware search engine booked them into a French restaurant followed by an open-air performance of The Tempest.

He picks Sheila up in a fully electric community car rented by the hour. When plugged into a charging point, it also serves as a battery, storing energy and feeding it to the grid when energy demands peak.

1:00 p.m. Personal finances Sheila needs a new washer-dryer, but doesn’t know if she can afford it. She shops online and her automated online banking agent tells her how far her budget can stretch.

Intelligent agents will play a bigger part in helping us to manage our budgets, said Rob Burbach, senior analyst for the financial insights and buyer behaviour practice at IDC. “You [will be able to] hit a button that says ‘Can I afford this, and are there any better deals anywhere else?’”

She can buy it, the agent replies, but she should cut back on some other luxuries, such as foregoing the Subway lunch and packing her own.

3:00 p.m. A new approach to health It’s time for Sheila’s medical appointment. Advances in personal genomics are rapidly changing the way we look after ourselves. In 2020, the technology already exists to create personally tailored medicines that will directly target cancers. However, slow regulatory processes prevent their approval. In 2035, when Sheila shows the first signs of Alzheimer’s disease, her doctor will be able to create a pill to eradicate it from her system. Like many others, Sheila will live past 100, which will create its own social problems.

10:00 p.m. An augmented reality John and Sheila watch the Bard’s story unfold.

Sheila’s augmented reality glasses recognize not only the speech in the play but also the actors, thanks to infrared symbols built into their clothing. As she watches, useful text springs up in front of her reminding her which character is which, and how the plot is unfolding.

11:30 p.m. Digital anxiety Just as she turns in, her client in France videos her. This is a downside of Sheila’s brave new world: work/ life balance is harder to maintain. The conference call he was trying to arrange that morning has fallen through, and he needs to organize it for later that day.

She directs the automated scheduling service to rebook everyone for a call at 3:00 p.m. central European time. As she struggles to sleep, she knows that the client could have done this himself.

She worries about how much of her job is being automated, and wonders how she will reinvent herself to stay ahead. First search for her intelligent agent tomorrow: retraining opportunities.

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Practical

“We need to green everything.”

—Troy Angrignon, emerging technologies entrepreneur

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C l e an e r techn o l o g i e s m a ke u s feel g o o d a b o ut o ur s el ve s , b ut i n t h e re a l worl d t h e y s u ccee d on l y w h e n t h e m arke t pl ace a d o pt s t h e m . Can a d i an i n n ovator s s ee m to un d e r s t an d t h at

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cleantech he said. “Most people think of renewable power as cleantech, but I think we need to green everything. We need to think bigger.”

Not that the cleantech sector isn’t big. According to Rick Whittaker, vice-president of investment and CTO at Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC), a non-profit foundation that finances the development and demonstration of clean technologies, it’s a $4 trillion global industry. But that’s because Whittaker said it’s not a separate sector. “It started as environmental technology, but cleantech has come to mean ‘good for business.’ It’s been branded as a separate sector, but essentially we’re bringing an efficiency component to existing sectors. It really is embedded in good business.”

Good, clean business There’s no question it has become good for business to offer greener alternatives—particularly with high-emissions products like automotives. Cleantech hit the big time in the transportation sector years ago when hybrid vehicles first took to the streets. “In this part of the world we have a history in alternative vehicle propulsion, and there is a quiet revolution going on in personal transportation,” Washington said. “We have hybrid electric vehicles and fuel cell-based vehicles and advanced alternative energies.”

The problem is none of these alternatives have found critical mass in terms of uptake. But according to Whittaker, that’s about to change. “The next two years are going to be big transition years,” he said. “Canada has companies doing advanced powertrain design for hybrid-electric vehicles and we’ll see low-volume experimental innovations go mainstream—hitting model-year designs on a large scale by 2013.”

Renewable fuel sources like ethanol, biodiesel, synthetic fuels and natural gas are another area of focus for cleantech in transportation—particularly when it comes to trucks, which “put out B A C K B O N E

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Photos: Simon Collins www. penlightplus.com

In a year marked by the warmest and driest winter on Environment Canada’s records, it’s not difficult to see why Canada’s cleantech sector is churning out innovative solutions to today’s environmental crises.

While the sector is known mainly for its more obvious aspects—solar panels, compact fluorescent light bulbs and hybrid cars—Canada’s cleantech industry is a highly complex sector that encompasses energy generation, storage and infrastructure, water management, land use, transportation, construction, and clean products and production.

And while most people would be forgiven for not knowing a fuel cell from a biofuel, even cleantech experts have a tough time agreeing on what exactly constitutes a clean technology. “Some people don’t consider it clean unless it’s completely sustainable,” said Kirk Washington, a partner with Yaletown Venture Partners in Vancouver who invests in the clean diesel sector, among others.

Washington doesn’t consider himself a purist when it comes to cleantech, and diesel fuel is a prime example. Although diesel isn’t exactly sustainable, he said, “if I can make it better—and cleaner than gasoline—then I will.”

More commonly associated with cleantech are innovations like wind turbines and solar panels, even though they are only now starting to emerge as viable contenders in the renewable energy space. But it’s that viability that is key to cleantech. If it can’t succeed in the marketplace, it won’t be produced and adopted on a large scale. And without large-scale dissemination, cleantech can’t have the intended effect: to benefit both the environment and the bottom line.

That’s why Troy Angrignon, an emerging technologies entrepreneur currently working with the BC Innovation Council, feels it’s critical to take a broad approach to clean technology. “I tend to define it as any technology that can be made more sustainable,”

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half of all vehicle emissions,” Whittaker said. “Alternative power trains are being scaled up, along with alternative technologies that don’t require any diesel.”

Whittaker said biodiesel alternatives are also emerging, but they are still about three to five years down the line.

Outside the transportation sector, other renewable energy sources like solar and wind power are also coming to the fore.

“Renewables have now become competitive,” Washington said.

“Solar power has emerged in the last 10 years to become a $30 billion industry. In fact, the production of solar panels now consumes more silicon annually than the entire microprocessor industry. Renewables will grow to about 20 per cent of the energy mix and in the U.S. there will be a renaissance of nuclear power and some people will embrace nuclear as clean burning.”

Despite the growth, renewable energy sources still constitute only seven per cent of the North American power mix, with oil, natural gas, coal and hydroelectric making up the bulk of our energy production, consumption and export. “Solar is only one per cent of that, or 0.07 per cent of the North American energy mix, so there is a lot of room to scale up,” Angrignon said.

And Canada is scaling up across the board when it comes to cleantech, Whittaker said. SDTC has funded 183 projects since 2001, allocating $464 million to the sector. “Canada has very specific areas of specialization. For example, we’ve taken our longstanding metallurgical experience and put it to use creating solar materials, as opposed to solar panels. We also do inductive design for wind turbines, creating breakthrough efficiencies.”

Innovations in storage and dissemination of energy are also set to create efficiencies. “Currently the grid generates a fixed amount of energy, no matter what,” Angrignon said. “We need to fix that so we can add in bursty energy sources like wind and solar.”

To that end, smart technologies are being developed to more

Globally, cleantech is a $4 trillion industry. “We’re bringing an efficiency component to existing sectors. It really is embedded in good business.”

—Rick Whittaker

intelligently measure and monitor energy flow according to demand. “There’s no question that rising energy prices, climate action policy and stimulus funding are causing communities to start taking a leadership role,” said Victoria Smith, manager, aboriginal and sustainable communities sector in the customer care group at BC Hydro.

Plans are now underway to develop electric vehicle infrastructure. “As we start to see the adoption of electric vehicles, and the City of Vancouver has been hugely progressive in this area, we are looking at the deployment of smart grids and meters,” Smith said.

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Raul Pacheco-Vega: “The government is starting to wake up to the notion that we don’t have as much water as we think.”

Another key area of focus for resource management is water.

“It’s the next oil,” Whittaker said.

Raul Pacheco-Vega, an environmental politics and policy instructor at the University of British Columbia agreed, but said it’s also an area mired in government policy. “In 2010, the government is starting to wake up to the notion that we don’t have as much water as we think. But the adoption of cleantech often depends on the policy side—the government regulations.”

Pacheco-Vega said two areas where technology is having an impact on water conservation and management are metering and consumption reduction. “One of the biggest problems is water metering. We don’t actually know how much water we have in aquifers, but now we are starting to see more accurate methods of metering water.”

On the other end of the spectrum, he said, are the multitudes of water-saving devices that are helping consumers reduce water consumption. “We’re seeing water-saving devices at the industrial and household levels,” Pacheco-Vega said. “In green building, people have started to take a more integrated approach.”

Building green Considering how much time we spend indoors, there’s no question building green efficiencies make good business sense. “North America is one of the most wasteful places in the world when it comes to buildings,” Washington said.

According to Helen Goodland, executive director of the Lighthouse Sustainable Building Centre in Vancouver, buildings contribute 54 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions in B.C.—and

Photo: Simon Collins www. penlightplus.com

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Photo: Simon Collins www. penlightplus.com

it’s a similar percentage for most urban areas. In addition, 12 per cent of the world’s water goes into buildings and 35 to 40 per cent of all the waste that goes into landfills is from building construction.

“Green buildings are making sustainability visible for so many policy makers,” she said. “Solar panels, green roofs, microhydro and micro-wind are at the sexy end of the tech spectrum.”

But it’s the less visible aspects of buildings where Goodland said a lot of the innovation is actually taking place. “The building system—the structure, fabric and envelope of a building—has been around for thousands of years. But now we’re seeing innovative advances in how windows perform, how walls are insulated and how designers interact in order to optimize the benefits of the technological advances.”

One example of a much-needed innovation, she said, is a window system that optimizes thermal value. “3M has developed window films that calibrate heat and reflect daylight,” she said. “There has been tremendous innovation in the window sector.”

Retrofits are also the order of the day because buildings need to be efficient before you can add alternate energy sources like solar panels, Goodland said. To that end, there is a “wealth of rethinking going on in the industry, and designers are finding

Kirk Washington: solar power is a $30 billion industry, consuming more silicon than the entire microprocessor industry.

Victoria Smith in one of BC Hydro ‘s electric cars

new ways to work together using sophisticated modelling software systems.”

BC Hydro has been active in promoting and incenting retrofits. “We’re looking at end-use technology,” Smith said. “Once energy is delivered, how is it used in houses? We’re looking at energy modelling and providing technical support.”

Goodland believes this is the single biggest step forward in construction in recent history. “Software is allowing us to understand the impact of buildings,” she said.

New buildings, such as those developed for the Winter Olympics’ athletes’ village in Vancouver, are being equipped with energy-monitoring systems to provide real-time information on building performance.

But Smith said it’s not just the monitoring but also the use of on-site renewable energies that make the athletes’ village an excellent showcase for the kind of efficiencies achievable through green building technologies. “Seventy per cent of the heat requirements were met through capturing waste heat through the sewer system.”

Passive buildings also gained exposure during the Games.

Passive design emphasizes the performance of the building envelope, maximizing free energy from the sun, wind and shade.

“There are passive houses in Germany that do not need any active technology to heat them,” Goodland said.

And North America’s first passive house is now in B.C., thanks to the Olympics. Acting as the Austrian pavilion in Whistler during the Games, the house uses a combination of insulation and high-efficiency heating to make use of natural heat sources. “It requires an investment in the fabric of the house, which is much more long-lasting than, say, a furnace, which lasts a maximum of 25 years,” Goodland said.

While passive houses many not be practical for everyone, BC Hydro is working with the City of Vancouver to pilot the development of a smart neighbourhood to demonstrate the integration of smart-grid infrastructure with distributed energy, smart metering, sustainable transportation such as electric vehicle and transit infrastructure, and prioritized deployment of conservation measures. “With all the new technology coming to marcontinued on page ??

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A U T O F O R WA R D

Meet the hypermilers and the ecomodders

WANT WAY MORE KILOMETRES OUT OF YOUR TANK OF GAS? READ ON

Manuel Santos, a Winnipeg-based hypermiler and moderator at www.cleanmpg.com

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Spread across the country is a community of people who aren’t impressed with the fuel economy of today’s most efficient hybrids.

Fuel-sipping Smart cars are a good start, but who wants to sacrifice back seats and suitable storage room when their Volvo can beat Environment Canada’s EnerGuide published figures with a few simple modifications and habit changes?

Enter the world of hypermilers and ecomodders. At the core of this community are drivers who are committed to using as little fuel as possible for altruistic reasons: save the environment by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But when the price at the pump jumps, this village swells to include those just looking to save a few bucks.

Hypermiling—maximizing gas mileage by making fuelconserving adjustments to a vehicle and to driving techniques— was coined after the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center.

Wayne Gerdes put together a toolkit of driving techniques designed to lessen North America’s reliance on foreign oil. And while perusing forum posts on hypermiling Web sites will still 32

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net a few people who extol the virtues for geopolitical reasons, environmental and economic benefits now motivate the majority.

“I was raised in Portugal. Vehicles are very small over there but they aren’t green per se,” said Manuel Santos, a Winnipegbased hypermiler and moderator at Gerdes’ Web site, www. cleanmpg.com. “But there is a difference in what is believed to be adequate fuel economy over there versus here. In Europe a family sedan would probably be a compact here.”

Common hypermiling techniques involve driving no more than 80 km/h on the highway while never exceeding the speed limit elsewhere, coasting toward stoplights in the hope they will turn green before having to come to a complete stop and keeping the vehicle’s RPMs to a minimum.

The way society views automobiles needs to shift fundamentally, Santos said, although he understands actual hypermiling isn’t for everybody. “We (typically) look at automobiles from an ‘is it powerful?’ point of view…but that is not a sustainable way to look at the auto industry. Instead of thinking in a zero-to-60-

Carl Chaboyer (in Electra Van), Tom Gifford and Kelly Keith Hebert in his latest Smartcar

Darin Cosgrove with his 1998 Pontiac Firefly, which he modified for efficiency Testing of this prototype removable aerodynamic tail resulted in 15 per cent better fuel economy at highway speeds

miles-per-hour way we need to start thinking in a 60-miles-pergallon way.”

He adds that the savings to your wallet can be just as exciting as driving fast and braking hard. The EnerGuide rating for a Toyota Prius is 3.7 L/100 km city and 4 L/100 km highway.

Santos said getting 2.5 L/100 km is normal for him. To put this in perspective, a tank of gas driving Santos’ way would take a Prius 1,800km while the EnerGuide rating nets just a little more than 1,200km. At $1 per litre, that’s a savings of $15.

Carl Chaboyer, an employee at Gifford Automotive in Ottawa, said some customers are turning to hypermiling as a way of both saving money and “enjoying a hobby that doesn’t involve killing off the last 10 dodos.

“I don’t think the future is in the (Ford) F-150,” he said. “It’s only a very small number of our customers who have no regard for the ecology.” Hypermiling, he said, can be done in any vehicle, but unless there’s a pressing need to own a truck, it makes more sense to start with a vehicle that’s already fuel efficient.

My week as a hypermiler I’m not a particularly aggressive driver. I don’t gun the engine from red lights and I’m not usually found in the fast lane. But after speaking with a dozen hypermilers and ecomodders I wondered if it was really as easy as it sounded or if this is better left to obsessive compulsives.

Manuel Santos told me hypermiling is like a diet. You start out with some simple techniques—like not eating fast food—and then move into more advanced techniques, like monitoring fibre intake and exercising more.

I decided to abandon fast food for a week behind the wheel of a 2010 Honda Ridgeline. Previously I averaged 14.6 L/100 km of mostly city driving, about a half litre over the EnerGuide rating.

The next week I implemented three techniques: I crept up to stop signs, accelerated from stops slowly to minimize engine RPMs, and I looked well ahead at lights and slowed if the red might turn green before I had to stop. I felt like I was being a safer driver and others didn’t seem to get annoyed at me.

And at the end of the week my efforts paid off. Final fuel usage: 9.5 L/100 km.

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TEK GADGETS

Travel tech

The stuff to pack to make your trip more enjoyable

BY PETER WOLCHAK

1 Bluetooth luxury Nokia BH-905 From Nokia comes a stereo Bluetooth headset for those who really like mobile music and really hate headset cords. The build, finish, look, noise cancellation and sound quality of the BH-905 are excellent, and stereo Bluetooth support means you can leave the cord behind. Nokia also throws in a range of audio connectors for devices that don’t support stereo Bluetooth.

It also handles phone calls well, pausing and then resuming tunes around a conversation.

Downsides: these are larger and heavier than standard corded mobile headsets, and they are not cheap: $300 after some comparison shopping.

But you can’t quibble with the sound quality and comfort.

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2 Bump up your videocon hardware Microsoft LifeCam HD-6000 for Notebooks Notebook webcams are great for conferencing with clients and staff but image quality is often poor. And this is especially problematic when you want to read your kid a story from a far-flung hotel room.

For a better-quality video experience, try the LifeCam HD-6000 from Microsoft. It offers TrueColour exposuretuning technology, 720p high-def widescreen video and auto focus, and it only costs about $70 retail. A desktop version (the HD5000) retails for $55.

The difference between these and your old Web cam will be noticeable.

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3 Get through security faster Tom Bihn Checkpoint Flyer What’s the worst part of air travel? It’s neither the food nor the cramped seats, it’s the increasingly invasive and complex security check. From Tom Bihn comes the Checkpoint Flyer, a TSA-approved laptop bag that gives security personnel a clear view of the computer while it is still inside the bag.

Like all Tom Bihn bags, the Flyer’s design, build quality and durability are top flight. US$220, directly form the company.

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4 Do you share financials with the whole plane?

3M BlackBerry and iPhone Privacy Filters If you have any private information on your BlackBerry or iPhone (and everyone does) consider the people sitting nearby the next time you use your device on an airplane.

3M privacy filters are a common laptop accessory now available for BlackBerrys and arriving for iPhones in June. At around $12 they are the cheapest privacy feature you can get.

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5 Pack a 55-inch screen in your carry-on Vuzix Wrap 310 Here’s the promise: “the world’s first sunglass-style portable video eyewear,” the Wrap 310 “features twin high-resolution LCD widescreen displays, 2D and 3D capabilities and video projection equivalent to a 55-inch screen viewed at 10-feet. It works with any iPod, laptop, DVD player or smartphone.”

And some people get that cinematic on-the-go experience: although the image quality does not equal a true HD TV, testers became pleasurably immersed in the viewing experience. Others, however, noticed a distracting shadowing between the left and right images which detracted from the experience.

The Wrap 310 costs $260 at Amazon.ca and elsewhere and will be money well spent for many frequent travellers, but read the store’s return policy before you purchase.

WEB GEAR

3M Microsoft Nokia Tom Bihn Vuzix

www.3m.com/ca www.microsoft.ca www.nokia.ca www.tombihn.com www.vuzix.com

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