While advances in cleantech are ultimately designed to be better for the planet, key to their rapid and widespread adoption is the fact that they’re also better for businesses and local economies.Getty Images
As the global transition from traditional power generation to renewable sources gains momentum, Canada is emerging as a leader in the development of some of the most promising cleantech innovations.
Each year the Cleantech Group, a San-Francisco-based sustainable research and consulting firm, gathers an international panel of experts to review 28,000 green energy companies across 147 countries and highlights the 100 most innovative. Among this year’s Global Cleantech 100 finalists, 13 were Canadian.
“It speaks to a level of innovation, but it also speaks to the support that companies are getting in this country to be able to grow and succeed in this marketplace,” says James Larsen, chief executive officer of e-Zinc, which was featured on this year’s list for the third time in a row. “We’re punching way above our weight in terms of cleantech innovation in this country.”
Founded in 2012, the Mississauga, Ont.,-based long-duration energy storage provider uses zinc to increase the longevity of battery power output, from the few hours of lead acid and lithium ion-based alternatives to multiple days.
The grid is naturally and rightfully complex, risk averse and conservative – it has to keep lights on – so we need even more intelligence.
— Josh Wong, CEO, ThinkLabs AI
In the short-term, e-Zinc aims to help large energy users save money by drawing more power during lower-rate off-peak hours and storing it for use when rates are higher. Users also have a clean and reliable energy backup system in case of emergency.
The second major horizon is remote applications for communities in northern Canada, for example, or for geographically isolated mining operations, Mr. Larsen says.
“The opportunity there is to use renewable energy, plus our technology, to eliminate diesel as a form of generation and make them 100-per-cent sustainable.”
In the longer-term future, Mr. Larsen says long-duration energy storage will be a key component of the green energy transition, allowing jurisdictions that rely on renewable sources like wind and solar to bridge the gap between times of high production and high demand.
To date, e-Zinc has secured roughly $100-million in equity and grant financing, which it used in part to build a 42,000-square-foot pilot production facility in Mississauga. The company has successfully deployed one pilot at a compressed natural gas facility in Woodstock, Ont., and recently inked partnership agreements with the California Energy Commission and Toyota Tsusho Corp. in Cambridge, Ont.
“We’ve grown massively, and there’s a lot more to come,” Mr. Larsen says. “This is our size at pilot-scale; once we go full-commercial, we’ll be a much larger company.”
While advances in this cleantech are ultimately designed to be better for the planet, key to their rapid and widespread adoption is the fact that they’re also better for businesses and local economies.
“There was a vintage of cleantech where it was, ‘pay more, do good,’” explains Bryan Watson, the managing director of CleanTech North, which supports Canada’s clean energy ecosystem. “When it’s, ‘implement cleantech, save a bucket-load of money, create a bunch of local manufacturing jobs, and save the planet,’ – that’s an equation that works.”
As time goes on, he explains, the economic case for cleantech adoption has only become stronger, especially on the heels of the recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI). The intelligent software provides an opportunity to cut both emissions and costs, he says.
Such solutions range from smarter building energy management to more efficient electric vehicles to more intelligent agricultural processes.
“Now you can scan a field to find the one square foot of pathogen that might spread, instead of spraying the whole field and praying that you hit that one thing, and both the environmental and financial savings are massive,” he says. “These are many operational efficiencies that happen to also be clean.”
As a leader in both green energy innovation and artificial intelligence, Mr. Watson is excited about Canada’s potential in this space.
“We are fundamentally merging skill sets – the power systems engineering skill set and the AI skill set – and the ability to blend the two will unlock the most value,” adds Josh Wong, the founder and CEO of ThinkLabs AI, which he founded after selling his real-time grid management system company, Opus One Solutions, to General Electric in 2022. “With AI, we are able to deliver orders of magnitude greater value from software.”
Mr. Wong explains that to achieve its sustainability targets while also meeting the country’s growing energy needs, Canada – and other nations like it – can’t simply replace or expand its existing energy grid infrastructure. Instead, it needs to use new AI to autonomously optimize the infrastructure that exists.
“The grid is naturally and rightfully complex, risk averse and conservative – it has to keep lights on – so we need even more intelligence,” he says. “To do that level of really complex automation, you need a lot of smarts, speed and scale. In other words, you need AI.”
Mr. Wong adds that Canada currently excels when it comes to power systems engineering and artificial intelligence, and it is positioned to emerge as a leader in the green energy transition. At the same time, he warns that Canadian cleantech companies face fierce competition from across the border and around the world.
“We have all this talent, we have great local startups, the question is what are we going to do with it?” he says. “Where Canada can do better is on the scale-up side, which could allow us to retain those people and create strong local companies.”
