Cremation is popular these days for those who have kicked the bucket. In Canada, only 3 per cent of the population got cremated 50 years ago, while today that number has ballooned to more than 55 per cent. But here’s a shocker for the conservation-minded: The amount of natural gas and electricity used to cremate one body is the equivalent of driving a car from coast to coast. When your body goes up in flames, it also emits a lot of nasty stuff: greenhouse gases, smog-causing gases, particulates, and mercury vapour if you’ve got a few of those old tooth fillings.

Given this post-humus environmental footprint — and given our concern about climate change — innovation in this area is on the rise. In Denmark and Sweden, some municipalities are taking the waste heat from their local crematoriums and using it as part of their district heating systems. In North America, there’s a new technology called Resomation — generically, biocremation — that avoids incineration by chemically breaking down the body. A Toronto-based company called Transition Science Inc. has licensed the technology and recently signed up its first customer, cemetery and crematorium operator Park Lawn Trust, which plans to have its first Resomation system up and running in Toronto next spring. I’ve got an article on this company and the technology in today’s Toronto Star. You can read the article for a detailed description of how it works. It’s kind of yucky — basically the body is loaded into a metal chamber that’s filled with an alkali-based solution that, under heat and pressure, turns the non-skeleton portion of the body into a soapy soup that’s simply flushed down the drain (apparently it’s benign and gets treated in our wastewater treatment system just like what we flush down the toilet). The process uses a fraction of the energy required for cremation.

Sure, sounds gross, but since we’re always talking about the need for cradle-to-grave energy analyses, it makes sense that we leave the world in the most energy-efficient way possible. The interesting thing about biocremation is that plastic and metal devices left in the body — knee and hip replacements, pacemakers, stents, etc. — are retrieved in perfect condition and can be recycled. Alternatively, if you’ve got land to spare, you could always have a good old-fashioned burial.

My good friend Ann Cavoukian, Ontario’s privacy commissioner, has co-authored a new report that highlights the potential privacy breaches that could result as we move toward a smart grid infrastructure, one that will certainly have dozens of applications layered on top with the capability of capturing information about how and when we use electricity. It might seem like benign information gathering, but Cavoukian says there is room for abuse and efforts must be made during early design of the smart grid to build in privacy protection. “Electric utilities and other providers may have access to information about what customers are using, when they are using it, and what devices are involved. An electricity usage profile could become a source of behavioural information on a granular level,” according to the report, which gives examples of types of information that could also reveal when a person is away from home and if an alarm system is on or off. The benefits such smart electricity services and applications can provide shouldn’t come at the expense of personal privacy. “Much in the same way that we do not expect the postman to look inside our windows when he is deliverying the mail or the cable person to monitor the TV shows we watch after he has completed the cable installation, so too do customers not expect there to be any surreptitious profiling of their in-home energy-related behavioural patterns.”

Are we being paranoid? Maybe — but then again, the privacy erosion that came rapidly with the Internet caught many consumers and businesses off guard. Certainly, it’s worth learning from past mistakes and thinking about these privacy issues before, rather than after, the infrastructure and supporting applications for the smart grid are rolled out. Read the rest of this entry »

Scrap all road taxes. Scrap all vehicle taxes. Instead, charge people for every kilometre they drive, when the drive, and where they drive. That’s what the Dutch are promising to have in place by 2012. Of course, the idea of road tolling and congestion charging isn’t entirely new. We’ve seen it on a smaller scale in cities such as London and Stockholm, and in smaller countries such as Singapore. But the Netherlands, if it follows through, would be the first nation to develop a system that spread across the entire country.

Those of you who regularly read this blog know that I’m a big fan of congestion charging and distance-based transport charging scheme. It’s the best way to manage the growing problem of congestion in large cities and to get more people taking public transit (not to mention the best way to raise funds for public transit expansion projects). It’s just silly that in Canada our property taxes go toward road infrastructure, even if you’re a household that doesn’t drive much and uses mostly public transit. Makes sense that the more road you use the more you pay to maintain that road. At the same time, there’s no way Canada could embrace a cross-country charging scheme, given our immense size, but certainly large cities such as Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver should be seriously looking at this option.

NOTE: Here’s a recent article in the Globe and Mail about pay-as-you-drive road charging schemes, in this case discussing a pilot test of technology developed by Toronto-based Skymeter Corp.

Hi everyone, sorry for being so quiet on the posts. I’m on a fellowship to New Mexico to learn about energy issues here, and time has been short. I’ll be back and posting more on Monday. Cheers.

I have to be honest, up until last week I’d heard a lot about the potential of metal-air batteries — i.e. zinc-air, lithium-air, etc… — but really didn’t know much about the batteries, how they were made, why they are be potentially better, and what challenges need to be overcome for them to unseat the current king of batteries, lithium-ion technology.  Then I was put onto an Arizona-based company called Fluidic Energy, which recently received $5.13 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy as part of the recently announced first-phase of ARPA-E awards. Fluidic, a spin-off of Arizona State University, will use this money over the next few years to achieve its mission: a metal-air battery that’s up to 11 times more energy dense than the best lithium-ion battery today, and potentially half or even a third of the cost.

Certainly a big mission, but after chatting with Cody Friesen, Arizona State professor and founder of Fluidic, I quickly realized it’s not mission impossible. And it gave me great hope that five or 10 years from now, whether it’s Fluidic or EEStor or Premium Power or some other company, the big breakthrough we’re looking for will happen. And that, my friends, is an exciting thing.

I urge you to read this story on MIT Technology Review, posted today, which explains what Fluidic is doing and why it may overcome many of the challenges that have dogged the commercial, mass-market introduction of rechargeable metal-air batteries.