Vancouver’s energy future looks cleaner, greener, and carbon-emission free

This article is a collaboration with The Georgia Straight. You can read the other half of this story here.

Late last year, American scientists demonstrated a proof-of-concept straight out of a sci-fi novel. The same process that generates energy for the sun and other stars in outer space was replicated on Earth, at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California. This method of energy generation—nuclear fusion— allowed scientists, for the first time, to generate more energy from an experiment than the amount of energy they put in. Another bonus: the process doesn’t produce any carbon emissions.

The news was received to much fanfare, but also much criticism. At the end of the day, this was an experiment, and isn’t yet proof of something that can take place at scale to meet our energy consumption needs. To cause the reaction, Livermore used building-sized lasers, which aren’t something local energy utilities exactly have access to.

As it turns out, Vancouver is a hub for ambitious green energy technology, including nuclear fusion. Out of the 13 Canadian companies included on the 2022 Global Cleantech 100 list, six are based in BC and four of those call Vancouver home. And clean energy leaders in the city aren’t only running small experiments. They’re consciously designing systems to figure out how to get green energy at scale, too. Let’s dive into what the technology in this region looks like and the work we need to do to get it to the masses in a just transition.

Nuclear fusion has a home in Richmond

Fundamentally, nuclear fusion is about smashing two atoms together to release energy and generate electricity. Atoms don’t naturally want to come together, so a number of nuclear fusion startups have come up with creative ways of solving this problem. For Richmond-based General Fusion, it’s all about proving individual components within a nuclear fusion system first, then putting the pieces together to generate carbon-emission-free energy.

First up is preparing the ingredients for a nuclear fusion reaction. General Fusion’s method involves superheating hydrogen to a state that’s conducive for fusion, called plasma. Having hydrogen in this condition isn’t very stable, but late last year, the company announced that it could hold hydrogen in this state of plasma for 10 milliseconds. This may not seem like a lot of time, but it’s just enough to take on the next step in the reaction.

Grace Peach, director of communications at General Fusion, described the venture’s envisioned energy generation protocol in a few steps. “We take the hydrogen plasma and we put it into a liquid metal cavity,” she said. “Then, we take pistons that compress the liquid metal around that plasma, squeezing it until the atoms have to fuse together [and generate energy].”

General Fusion hasn’t yet put all of these pieces together, but Peach highlights the second key milestone from last year: the compression system alone has been demonstrated to operate within five milliseconds. “So you put those things together, it shows that the plasma lifetime will last long enough to compress, and the compression will happen quick enough [to fuse the atoms and generate energy].”

Because the venture has only established a proof-of-concept for these two individual components, what does that mean for mass energy generation? Peach said the company is on course to produce large-scale energy by the early 2030s. “We're on track to creating a commercial power plant that achieves that energy at a power-plant scale,” she said. “Not just a science experiment, like what we saw [at Livermore], but actually putting more electricity onto the grid than what is required to create the reaction.”

General Fusion is an ambitious company that could be an impressive source of not only electricity, but also new jobs in the space born out of antiquated infrastructure. The venture is eyeing taking the place of existing coal facilities. “Our machine is uniquely positioned to be able to go and replace coal generation,” Peach said. In Canada, four provinces currently operate coal-fired power plants: Alberta, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. “Coal facilities would be going from operating a coal plant to operating a fusion energy plant, which is pretty exciting.”

However, the company still has a lot to prove in demonstrating the sum of its parts. For now, its 200 employees across Metro Vancouver, the U.S, and the U.K are hard at work nailing down the technology stack to prove that its method is indeed possible.

But for everything else in our city that doesn’t run on electricity, such as trucks with diesel engines, what does ambitious clean energy technology look like?

Green hydrogen as fuel for transportation

It’s widely agreed that the best energy method for reducing carbon emissions is to electrify everything. But some things currently aren’t conducive to running on electricity, such as commercial trucking fleets, which travel great distances and tow heavy loads. Here is where hydrogen—an energy carrier that can generate electricity, power, and heat in the form of a liquid or gas— can play a key role.

However, not all hydrogen is made cleanly. Hydrogen (H2) must be isolated from other substances, such as water (H2O) or methane (CH4). It takes energy to isolate hydrogen, and if the source of this energy is a fossil fuel, the production of hydrogen can’t be considered “green” and actually emits carbon emissions. However, if the source of energy is renewable, such as hydroelectric power from dams, this is known as “green hydrogen,”—the type that can best get us to net-zero carbon emissions.

Another technique to retrieve green hydrogen is through a circular-economy method of repurposing wasted assets. In other manufacturing processes, hydrogen is produced as a “waste” byproduct. This hydrogen can be captured, cleaned, and processed for fuel — a method that Delta’s Hydra Energy previously used to retrieve its hydrogen to fuel the transportation industry, before recently switching its business model early last year to produce low-carbon gas using electricity from BC Hydro.

Hydra Energy converts long-haul commercial trucking fleets from using diesel to incorporating green hydrogen in their fuel. Although electric vehicles are popular for passengers, trucking fleets are challenging to electrify. The batteries needed to power a fleet’s lengthy journey would be enormous in size, and there would need to be frequent electric charging stations along the way. “Trucking doesn’t have a lot of options to go green right now,” said Jessica Verhagen, CEO of Hydra Energy. “Even if they're interested in going green, they still have to make it economic and scalable.”

The venture provides Hydrogen-as-a-Service (HaaS) to commercial trucking fleets, paying $50,000 per engine to install its diesel-to-hydrogen-engine conversion technology at no cost to the fleet owner. In exchange, the owner signs a five-year commitment to buy green hydrogen from Hydra at the same price as diesel.

The economic incentive is a big driver for technology adoption, said Verhagen. “We have something that not only technically works—that gets the same performance as [fleet operators] would have gotten on diesel—but also that is economical for the fleet, who don't have those big margins to play with.”

It’s important to note that the conversion isn’t 100 per cent hydrogen: Hydra can currently displace up to 40 per cent of diesel with hydrogen, by measure of energy. The barrier, Hydra states, is the lack of inexpensive hydrogen supply and infrastructure.

British Columbia currently has no large-scale green hydrogen production plants, but in September 2022, Hydra broke ground on a refuelling and production station in Prince George. Nationally, the plans to build Canada’s largest renewable-energy-powered hydrogen plant in Quebec have stalled since Hydro-Quebec pulled out of the $1.2-billion project.

What it takes to scale ambitious green energy technology

In both nuclear fusion and green hydrogen technology, a change in the built environment will have to take place for mass adoption. Perhaps in Vancouver’s future, we’ll see fewer gas stations and more hydrogen refuelling hubs, or nuclear fusion power plants instead of natural gas or coal plants. Nonetheless, a change in infrastructure also comes with a change in the jobs and livelihoods associated with the evolving industries. The technology to power a green energy transition can only be as good as the workers we have to fuel it, many of whom may be coming from the fossil fuel industry.

Editors' note: This story previously read that Delta’s Hydra Energy retrieved its hydrogen as a waste product from a long-term partnership with Ontario-based Chemtrade Logistics. It has been updated to reflect that the company's business model now involves producing low-carbon gas with electricity from BC Hydro.

This article is a collaboration with The Georgia Straight. You can read the other half of this story here.