Chinese political and business officials who recently toured Alberta in search of ways to help meet their country's burgeoning energy demand weren't looking at the province's oilsands operations, coal seams or even coalbed methane potential.
Instead, the delegation came to check out a largely overlooked Alberta resource that is beginning to power up international interest - wind energy technology.
"I don't think we should be surprised by their interest in our wind technology," says Mike Carten, president and CEO of Calgary's Sustainable Energy Technologies, the company the Chinese delegates came to visit. "China is growing and they have the ability to take technologies and make them into commercial products.
"They have a huge commitment to renewable energy because they have such an energy shortage" that fossil fuels alone cannot meet, he adds.
Sustainable Energy announced last week that it signed a memorandum of understanding with the Chinese to advance the development and commercialization of the company's wind turbine for use in China and other markets around the world.
Guo Shuyan, vice-chairman of the financial and economic committee of the National People's Congress, who earlier this month led the team of experts through Alberta, says the group was particularly interested in Sustainable Energy's vertical-axis wind turbine design.
"The horizontal axis has been well developed, but the vertical-axis turbines have been less developed, so that's where we see the potential here," Guo said through an interpreter during an interview.
The vertical-axis turbines - which have a squat, eggbeater appearance, relying on long aluminum blades rather than the propeller-type design of the horizontal machines - are known for being less expensive to erect and easier to repair and maintain than their horizontal counterparts, making them better suited for use in more remote areas.
China currently consumes 190 million tonnes of coal per year, accounting for roughly 70 per cent of the total power produced in the country. To fuel the expanding economy - which in 15 years is expected to need twice the amount of energy it uses today - the country is looking to other sources such as nuclear, hydro and wind, Guo said. "Wind energy has not yet been well deployed in the country," he noted.
During an Internet search for energy alternatives, Guo's team came across Sustainable Energy's Chinook 250 vertical-axis machine on the company's website.
"They contacted us several months ago and said they'd like to see our design because they'd heard about us," Carten says. "They called us - it really came out of the blue."
Sustainable Energy, which was formed in 1999 to develop and market a 250-kilowatt vertical-axis turbine, had shelved the technology (a few dormant machines remain perched next to the Oldman Dam near Pincher Creek) after it came up with its patented pulse step power-inverter platform, which can be adapted to any alternative energy technology including fuel cells, solar power, small-wind, hydro and new battery technologies.
The company's first inverter, a five-kilowatt fuel-cell product, has already been sold into the North American, European and Japanese markets.
"(The wind turbine) could provide us some revenue growth as well, but to build a prototype like that cost us $800,000 to $900,000; to build a prototype for an inverter costs us just $10,000," Carten says.
The vertical-axis turbine was first patented in 1931 by a French engineer named Georges Darrieus (the vertical concept is therefore sometimes known as the Darrieus wind turbine), and later reworked by two Canadian scientists with the National Research Council. Carten bought and further refined the technology.
Carol-Ann Brown, a director with Climate Change Central, an Alberta public-private non-profit agency that promotes the development of solutions to global climate change, says generating power from the wind is nothing new to the Chinese, because the country has been using horizontal-axis wind turbines for years.
Brown, who coincidentally did her PhD on wind energy in China, said Sustainable Energy's technology holds certain advantages for the Asian giant.
"You have different levels of economic development activity going on in different parts of the country, so on the eastern coastline you might have very large cranes and equipment that could put in very large horizontal-axis turbines.
"But when you get to certain parts of the country, transportation of equipment and turbines gets more complicated. So one of the advantages of this technology is you can actually source all of the equipment locally and you can put it up just about anywhere."
China currently has about 800 megawatts of windpower connected to the grid, more than Canada although both Ontario and Quebec have put in requests to boost their wind- power output, which would allow Canada to eclipse the Chinese. But the country also has the largest production and use of small, non-grid-connected wind turbines in the world, Brown points out.
"You see (windpower) in small settlements, but also among nomads," Brown says. "You have different minority groups that move with herds in the summertime, and they actually have small turbines that they take with them. Their small non-grid-connected turbine use is in the order of 40 megawatts, which is very large - the largest in the world."
The interest in Sustainable Energy's machine shown by the Chinese underscores another issue, says Carten, namely that Canada has dropped the ball by demonstrating a lack of will to become a leader in wind-energy technologies.
While he says he supports any move toward wind-generated power, Canada's reliance on the Danish-built horizontal-axis machines has deflated the value-added potential of the home-grown vertical design.
"I hope it sends a message to the governments of our country that there are companies that have technologies and they should be supported," Carten says. "And I hope it sends a message that we should be making products, not buying them."
