Tyler Hamilton

Future Goals

Perhaps the greatest challenge facing Canada right now is to determine how we will meet our future energy requirements in an environmentally responsible fashion. The twin desires of efficiency and environmental sustainability do not always work together, but the increased push from the general population for clean energy solutions has forced politicians at all levels to address the issue with some urgency. In this politically charged atmosphere, it is often difficult for individual citizens to build their own comprehensive understanding of the potential held by different renewable energy systems, and at the same time gauge claims made by the various players in both the public and private sectors. One way to start increasing our knowledge of the issues involved is to read the columns written in the Toronto Star by Tyler Hamilton, senior energy reporter and columnist.

On a warm summer day in Toronto, but from the pleasant confines of the Toronto Star building at the south end of Yonge Street next to Lake Ontario, Tyler Hamilton gave a few moments to Canadian Interviews to discuss how he sees his role as a journalist investigating the many trends in the energy industry. There is definitely much to consider. How does he handle the reader comments posted at the bottom of his columns online? What is the potential for the development of large-scale geothermal power in Canada? How well is the Liberal government in Ontario supporting the policies that they introduced in the Green Energy Act? With a laugh, Hamilton also answers the question of whether or not his unique perspective on the energy industry might serve him well if he wished one day to enter politics!

Along with his regular column in the Toronto Star, Hamilton keeps up a blog called Clean Break that attracts an impressive international readership. It analyses in considerable depth many of the companies, technologies, and general questions that are influencing the green-energy sector today. The archived articles on the site are categorized conveniently to allow visitors to look up information on a wide range of topics including bio-fuels, carbon capture technology, nuclear energy, and solar power. Another category is labeled ‘conservation’. In the interview printed here, Hamilton discusses the importance of energy conservation with specific reference to a recent study done by engineering professors at the University of Toronto. In that case, the researchers investigated the amount of water being lost through the pipes in various municipalities across Ontario. The results of that study are illuminating.
 
CI: Regardless of the subject matter in your column, there are inevitably quite a few reader comments at the bottom. For you, as the columnist, do you appreciate that instant feedback, or do you worry sometimes that, as people read your column and then go through the reader comments, maybe the facts and the points in your article get distorted a little bit?

TH: Well, The Star encourages us to actually register and respond to comments, which I don’t do. It might sound a little bit anti-technology, but I don’t think they should allow comments on these stories. What happens is, if I’m writing something to do with climate change or some kind of technology that will lower greenhouse gas emissions, there is a small group of – call them whatever you want – ‘climate deniers’, people who think that the earth is cooling and that this whole green energy act is a scam, they just bombard the site with all these crazy comments. There is nothing stopping these people from re-registering under different names, and they make it seem like there is a larger portion of the population with that particular view. It skews things, and I do worry that the reader will go to the bottom and see that. Sometimes you get a little bit of a debate going, but it ends up becoming very shallow. There is not a lot of good discussion.

I have a blog, my own personal blog, and because it’s more specialized – it’s not geared towards just the general readership – it attracts people interested in the topic. It tends to be a much more reasoned debate back and forth, people who know what they’re talking about, so I don’t mind it for that reason. But I think that, for a general newspaper, sometimes it’s pretty hard to allow the comments to free flow. If people aren’t required to sign their name to it and can hide behind anonymity, then really what’s the value in their viewpoint if they can’t stand behind their comments?

CI: Do you find that people are coming to your blog after reading your columns in The Star, or is it part of another network that draws in more experts and people that are really knowledgeable?

TH: I’ve had the blog for four years now. I think, in the beginning, The Star linking to my blog really did help draw traffic there, but I’m sure some days I draw more people to The Star site by posting the articles that I write for the The Star on my blog, and having people from my blog go to The Star. If I break down the visitors that come to my site, I get around fifteen to twenty thousand every month and half of them are American. I get a big readership in the Silicon Valley area, Boston, and I get some good hits from London and other parts of Europe. It’s amazing how spread out it is, but really Canada is twenty-five percent of my blog readership. The way I see it is that, when I write articles for The Star - and usually any article related to green energy or green technologies I will post on my blog and link back to The Star – it’s a good way to draw in non-Toronto area readers to what’s on the Toronto Star site.

CI: Most of the time when we hear about renewable energy from the government, or even just in the general public, the focus right now is largely on wind and solar, and occasionally down on the east coast you hear about tidal power. You did an article last summer, and again recently there was one on your blog, discussing geothermal power – large-scale geothermal.

TH: Not the stuff for heating your home, but the large-scale, yeah …

CI: … and you mentioned in the column written last year that this is something that potentially Ontario could be looking at as a way to generate power and stimulate the economy. At this point, from the evidence that you’ve gathered, what is possible in that industry?        

TH: There’s a new technology around geothermal called ‘enhanced geothermal’. Basically it all stems from this big MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] study that was done a couple years ago that said, obviously, the deeper you drill eventually you’re going to get the heat that you need, the ‘high-enough’ temperatures to generate power. They say that, if you go down ten kilometres, pretty well anywhere on the planet you can tap that heat, but there are other challenges involved. You’ve got to have the right rock formations that have the right porosity or cracks. The way geothermal works is that you drill a hole and then you pump water down the hole. It heats up, and then you pull it back and extract the heat from that water to create the steam that spins the turbines. The more popular geothermal projects that exist today – it’s a fairly shallow heat source, a couple kilometres, and there’s water already there, a natural reservoir underground.

With enhanced geothermal, they’re talking about drilling deeper, and also bringing water in and injecting it into the ground - and also creating the cracks that you would need, too. They call it - I don’t know the actual term – ‘geo-cracking’ or something. Basically it just sends little shockwaves, and it cracks the ground and the rocks so that the water can seep down to pick up the heat better. There is momentum in that area. We’re seeing countries like Australia and Germany try it more and more, and companies in the U.S. emerging. The thing about Canada is that we don’t even have an old conventional geo-thermal plant yet. We’re the only country - in the Pacific ring-of-fire, they call it, where there is the low-hanging fruit of geothermal - that hasn’t really developed. There is one company called Western GeoPower that’s got a plant that it hopes to get operating in the next couple years, and that would be the first in Canada, out in B.C.

The issue for Canada is that we have to walk before we run, right? The rest of the world is heading toward this enhanced geothermal. We’ve got to get a few conventional geothermal plants to help us in the areas where it is low-hanging fruit, like B.C. and Alberta. From the Ontario perspective, I think it’s worth preparing for that day when we could eventually use enhanced geothermal. We have to start studying the province for the hot spots that would be the best to tap. We’ve already got a lot of natural gas and oil data. Around Petrolia and Sarnia, the first oil well in North America was there, that’s kind of an ancient natural gas and oil region that’s already been depleted, but there’s a ton of wells there. There’s lots of data that could be collected on the heat gradients to find out where the best sources of heat are in the province. I think those preliminary studies have to take place for the day when enhanced geothermal technologies become more mature. We can hit the ground running with a couple projects. I’m not saying that enhanced geothermal is going to solve all of Ontario’s problems, but if you could get two or three projects around the province up and running, and contribute a thousand mega-watts of base-load power, that’s a nuclear reactor that you don’t have to build. People say that you could do it for just as much money, if not cheaper, because it’s a lot less complex of a technology. I just think it’s something that we need to put on the radar screen and maybe invest a little bit more R&D in so that we’re not behind the pack when the rest of the country starts pursuing this.

CI: Does the water that gets put in the ground move in a closed system, or do you have to pump water down continually?

TH: For the natural ones where the water is there, it’s an open system. If you bring in water, it’s a closed system. You might have some water losses just from steam escaping and stuff, and maybe have to replenish ten percent every now and then. … It wouldn’t be an issue from a water perspective in the sense that it would be closed loop. You wouldn’t be wasting water.

CI: Is this something that the government would really have to drive at first in this country, and then hopefully private developers would come along after?

TH: Yeah, and that’s the problem. We’ve got an association called the ‘Canadian Geothermal [Energy] Association’ that’s been trying to get funding from the federal government just to do some preliminary studies. They can’t even do that. They want ten million dollars so that they can do a bunch of studies, and the government just doesn’t seem to be interested in it. Meanwhile we’re seeing hundreds of millions, billions, being put into carbon capture and sequestration, and keeping companies like Atomic Energy of Canada afloat. It really shows where the government’s mind is where it doesn’t even want to consider these other options that other countries are seriously considering.

CI: Let me get your thoughts on a couple other points on clean energy in Ontario. When I had the opportunity to interview Peter Clibbon, the VP for RES Canada [Renewable Energy Systems Canada], he told me that, as far as he was concerned, the Green Energy Act that has been put forward here in Ontario was ‘revolutionary’, particularly because of the feed-in tariff that allows people to put up a wind tower and know that they’re going to get a certain price for the power generated. However, he cautioned that what was really needed was stability in policy in order to develop an industry over the long term. With your eye on a number of different regions, would you agree that the Green Energy Act in Ontario is a revolutionary piece of policy for North America?

TH: I’d say on paper it is, but Ontario has a habit of introducing really cool stuff, nice legislation that in practice doesn’t turn out to deliver what it promises. We saw that with the earlier version of the feed-in tariff, the renewable energy standard offer program, where it was so successful that they discontinued it. But it was only successful in the sense that they got a lot of interest and they signed a lot of contracts, but not a lot got built. Energy Minister George Smitherman a couple days ago was in Korea to collect an award from the World Wind Energy Association for the Green Energy Act. I was like, isn’t it a bit premature to start collecting awards? You just passed it! Nothing’s been implemented. The feed-in tariff program isn’t even officially launched. We haven’t put one windmill, one solar panel, on that is reflective of this program, yet you’re already collecting awards – a pat on the back! For me, we’ve got a lot of work to do to deliver on the promise of that legislation before we start patting ourselves on the back. So yes, I think it’s a great first step, but it really depends on the details, and I think there’re some major issues that are still outstanding. One is, in the current economic environment, do we really have the government support of many of these projects that are having a hard time finding capital? In the U.S. they’re providing loan guarantees for renewable energy developers who are having a hard time finding financing to get these projects going. The McGuinty government doesn’t feel that that’s necessary - well, that could prevent a lot of projects from getting up and running.

There is also a lot of talk of the government giving with one hand and taking with the other. Yes, the feed-in tariff gives you a fixed price for the amount of power that you produce from a wind farm or a solar farm, but they are imposing many barriers such as where you can develop, what kind of setbacks a turbine must have from a residence. A lot of the developers are saying that these rules, these behind-the-scenes rules, ruin the economics of projects. It doesn’t matter if you’re prepared to pay me so much per kilowatt-hour. If I’ve got so many restrictions and hoops to jump through before I can even get a project going, then it’s never going to get going. The other thing is that they’ve put limitations on the size of farms for solar, for example. The solar companies are arguing that the rooftop stuff is fine, but you need to have these big farms in order to create the volume that would lure the investment and the manufacturers to the province to create the jobs that the government says that they want to create. I don’t know if it’s something that just needs to be ironed out. Certainly I give the government credit for moving quickly. The question is, are they maybe moving a little bit too quickly to the point where they’re going to get programs in place that aren’t really designed well and don’t achieve the objectives they mean to achieve?

CI: Back in May you wrote a column that I thought was excellent called ‘For and Against Wind Power’ in which you ran down the issues involved. With the evidence that you have heard, what do you make of the claims that wind power is uneconomical, unreliable, and potentially a genuine threat to human health?

TH: First I’ll say that the groups in Ontario that are opposed to wind turbines have complained to the Ontario Press Council for those two articles that I wrote claiming that they were biased and that I’m a shill for the industry. So it depends on who you speak to when you say that you thought that they were excellent! It depends what side of the fence you’re on. I thought that they were good and objective, but I guess they didn’t.

The one thing that bothers me is that people will look at things very narrowly: ‘Wind turbines don’t blow as much in the summer. They only blow at night and not when you need the energy’. Well, that’s true to a certain extent, but there’s also things that you can do within the electricity system to manage that. One is to use natural gas plants. They say that it’s going to create more need for natural gas and then create more emissions. … The more wind you add, the less natural gas you’re going to use. They’re saying the more wind you add, the more natural gas you use – it just doesn’t make sense.  They twist the facts.

The other thing is that the province is looking at creating pump storage facilities where you could, overnight when you’ve got wind generation and you don’t really need it, actually save it up behind these hydro reservoirs and then use it during peak time. There are plenty of different options that we have on the table over the next five years that take advantage of that wind and better manage the intermittency of that wind power. But these groups don’t see that potential. They just look at it through a narrow lens. They also don’t see the potential of other storage technologies emerging. They don’t see that the sound issues from turbines are improving over time. They don’t see that the efficiency is improving or that new types of turbines are being built with the ability to access lower wind speeds. I just think it’s shortsighted to rule out wind because of some of its challenges compared to the other types of power. Now, I think it’s going to require us to change the way that we manage the electricity system, but I’ve talked to the regulator here. They say that we can have up to twenty percent of wind penetration here in Ontario, and it’s really not that much of a problem to manage. We’re not even close to that! We’re not even at five percent. A lot of the concerns that these groups raise about wind and the impact on the reliability and stability of the grid are based on scenarios that we’re ten years away from reaching. And once we get to that point, the technology is going to change, the cost of it is going to change, and we may be able to push beyond twenty percent based on the state of technology at that time.

On the health issue, all I can say is that I just look at what are the alternatives. The alternatives are more coal, nuclear, other things that, on a larger scale, contribute to other sicknesses, carcinogens in the air, asthma, and stuff like that. It’s really a matter of balancing risk. While I feel bad that there are a handful of people that live on farms that say that the noise is annoying them to the extent where they become stressed and this sparks some kind of illness, I don’t know what to say to them other than thanks for taking a hit on behalf of everyone else that wants clean air! I don’t know. There are some people that you just can’t please. I’m not entirely dismissive of their concerns, but at the same time, I think that there are larger concerns to deal with.

You had another question about the economics of wind. I’ve seen these reports, and in the story that you cited, there is this energy company called Navigant. They calculate, based on wind and natural gas combined – if you’re starting from a clean slate and you wanted two thousand megawatts of natural gas and wind that would give you the equivalent of base-load power by balancing the natural gas against the wind, versus a two thousand megawatt nuclear power plant, the wind and natural gas option would be less expensive and less risky. The wind and natural gas one would release emissions because you get some emissions from the natural gas, but it wouldn’t be a huge amount. I think that claims by the nuclear industry that there are no emissions from what they do are wrong. There are massive emissions for the concrete used to make those plants and the transportation used to build those things. They’re very complex structures. The employees – you don’t have to send a bunch of employees to a wind farm to operate it, and a natural gas plant has maybe three people running the thing. And you could say that this is getting carried away, but you’ve got five hundred people driving everyday to go run a nuclear plant. People do not consider the gasoline and the fuel that’s used to get to and from those plants every day of the week. You have to look at things as part of a life-cycle analysis.

CI: Let me give you one other comment that I heard recently. I did an interview with Andrea Horwath, the new leader of the NDP in Ontario, and she was talking about nuclear power in Ontario and her concern that the McGuinty government is going to put an enormous amount of money into developing a new nuclear plant. She said, “we know very clearly that, when those nukes are up and running, there will be no need because the power will be abundant, there will be no need and no focus at all on renewables or conservation.” Does that strike you as an accurate assessment in the event that the province ends up making this massive investment in nuclear power?

TH: I think it is a huge threat. We saw back in the eighties, when the government decided to do some new builds on nuclear, we ended up having more power than we needed, and then all the conservation programs that we had in place just got abandoned. There’s a precedent for the government – or I guess at the time it was Ontario Hydro – for abandoning these other programs because we had ample power. We’re already seeing it right now where in this province, without building new nuclear, and because of the economic downturn, we’re seeing a reduction in electricity use among industry. There are several hours of every day - some days full days - when we have surplus base-load power; we have more energy than we need. Already I’m starting to see comments from people and emails saying ‘why are we being asked to conserve energy and stuff when we’re being told on the other hand that there’s more power and we have to give it away to industry and export it to the U.S. for negative prices?’ It’s a good question, but at the same time it’s very short term thinking. It’s those kinds of issues that arise that make political parties have kneejerk reactions.

The other thing is that the McGuinty Liberals won’t be in power forever, and the big fear is that, if the Conservatives ever get in, this will all be just cancelled. I think that there is an effort by the McGuinty government to try to get the legislation in place, to try to get the renewable programs in place so that they’re so far into it that it’s hard to dismantle by a new party that comes in. I commend them on that. The problem that the NDP has is that there’s only so much energy that you need, right? If you’re trying to ramp up renewables, but you’re leaving the nuclear side of your plan fixed, obviously there’s going to be more energy, surplus energy. Plus, underlying all this, there’s a conservation program that’s going to reduce demand even more.

My hunch is that the government realizes that it doesn’t really have to move as fast as it once thought it had to on the nuclear file. We’ve already seen that they’ve delayed the decision that was supposed to take place this month on the new nuke. They keep delaying the decision on refurbishing Pickering B. I think that they will probably come out and delay the new build announcement for another year claiming that the downturn has taken some of the heat off our demand, and we have some time. I think it’s a real possibility that the government might decide not to refurbish Pickering B, or replace it with a new plant, and argue that they think that renewables and conservation together can make up for that lost supply. But for the government to come out and say that is very politically contentious. I think they’re holding their cards close and waiting for the right time when it makes absolute sense. But I agree with Horwath that that’s a major concern. Environmentalists are right: history dictates that, when you’ve got more power than you need, you cut back on programs that are considered non-essential. They might not cut back on conservation and renewables as much because we’re in a different age than the eighties where climate change is a much bigger concern. It would be much more contentious for a government to pull back on those programs. There would be a lot more push for them to keep them from the population. There’s always risk. I guess you just want to eliminate that risk.

CI: One last question for you, and it relates to conservation. When I first heard the word, I thought, well, how much power can we really conserve? Most people think of insulating their homes, light bulbs, all those sorts of things, but you had a piece in your blog recently in which you mentioned a study done by engineering professors at the University of Toronto investigating the amount of water that is being lost through the pipes in various municipalities. It was anywhere between ten and fifty percent of the total water that was being lost. Now, it is one thing to lose the water, but it’s another thing when you think of all the energy that’s being used to move that water around. When we heard earlier this year about all this stimulus funding for shovel-ready projects, I do not recall a lot of emphasis on improving the water infrastructure, but it seems that if $750 million annually in taxpayer money is being put toward moving water that doesn’t get where it’s supposed to go, that’s something that our government should probably be looking at.

TH: When Stephané Dion was running for Prime Minister, one of the things that he used to say is that, we might have a surplus – this was before the downturn – but we have a huge infrastructure deficit. It’s not fair to keep cutting taxes and taking money away from programs so that we can look like we have positive numbers in the budget, but all the water systems and the schools and stuff are failing. It’s a huge point. The problem with an infrastructure deficit is that you do get these inefficiencies emerging. We’ve got an electricity system that is fifty to seventy years old and it’s well past its life. Many of the sewers and water pipes underneath the cities are old and they’re basically keeping them together with band-aid solutions. That’s a huge inefficiency. Just by renewing our infrastructure you’re automatically improving the efficiency by using the latest technologies and approaches that will save us energy. I think that infrastructure spending is hugely important, and those are the areas that they should be targeting.

Really, when you analyze every sector of society, whether it’s infrastructure, big office buildings, or residential, there’s so much waste. We’re sitting in the The Star cafeteria, and I’m looking out the window across at this factory here, the former Redpath Sugar plant, and they’re generating a lot of waste heat out of their smokestack. I know that they’re considering a plan to capture it. It’s really just energy going up into the atmosphere. You multiply that by hundreds and hundreds and you can capture a lot of energy that we’re just blowing into the air. I think that conservation could be a huge, huge part of this Green Energy Act. Whenever you’re retrofitting your home because maybe you’re thinking of putting renewables on your house, the first thing that they tell you is to insulate it and try to lower your energy use as much as possible. The reason why is, what is the point of spending an extra ten grand on a larger solar system when you can get a smaller solar system and just put up some insulation and caulk your floors and windows a bit better? You save a lot of money in the end. I think that’s what the province has to do. We have to reduce our energy use so that wind farms, solar farms, and other renewables that we put in place can cover more of the percentage of the energy that this province consumes. People often overlook it. They think that conservation is just some kind of – you know, you hear the Tories talk about ‘oh, conservation, putting in light bulbs isn’t going to save the planet, we still need to run our auto factories.’ But we get speakers coming into Toronto from Europe, and I remember going to the Royal York Hotel, and Nicholas Stern, the British economist that wrote The Stern Report, which is on the cost of avoiding action on climate change, when he was talking I remember looking up in the main ballroom at the Royal York and counting the number of incandescent light bulbs that were there. I counted, and there were about seventy of them, right? When you get these people coming in from Europe, and walking into buildings like that in North America, you can almost see their faces drop going ‘wow, they still do this?’ In Europe they don’t do that. All the rooms have motion detectors. They’re all using the most efficient lighting technologies. There’s a reason why you go to a major European metropolis and their per capita energy use is a third of ours. Imagine if we could even just cut half of our energy use, become that efficient, how much supply we wouldn’t need!

CI: In your job obviously you are, out of necessity, keeping up-to-date with what is happening in a lot of different industries and trying to see the big picture. It seems to me that that is a skill set that some political parties would find extremely helpful. Have you ever given any thought or consideration to, later in life maybe, putting your name on a ballot and trying to influence things at that level?

TH: You know, I’ve actually thought of it, not as something that I would do immediately, but maybe down the road. Maybe. As a reporter I kind of enjoy the flexibility of my hours and my freedom of exploring topics that I want to explore. Journalists by nature tend to be lone wolfs, and politicians by nature have to be social people, kissing babies and whatever else. To be honest, I think that, probably right now at least, I would have more impact just in writing and getting these ideas out there so that the public is more educated, and they can demand more of the politicians, than to be a single person out there trying to make change within a much larger machine where it is difficult to make change. Is it better for me to just be one vote on the inside, or is it better for me to influence perhaps hundreds of votes on the inside through writing and the pressure that’s put on these politicians by Toronto Star readers? I think right now it’s better to stick with the media. The written word truly is powerful. If it’s used correctly, it can really influence policy for the better.

Date of Interview: 06/26/2009
Location: Toronto Star Building, One Yonge Street, Toronto, ON
Link: www.cleanbreak.ca