1. CEO says BlackBerry
▶to stay in Canada
BlackBerry chief executive John
Chen says, “I don’t have
any plans to move out
of Canada.” On Friday,
BlackBerry Ltd. posted
a fourth-quarter loss of
$423 million US or 80
cents per share, compared
with a profit of $98 million
or 19 cents per diluted share
a year ago. However, exclud-
ing several one-time items, BlackBerry
says it reported an adjusted loss from
continuing operations of $42 million or
eight cents per share for the quarter.
The average analyst estimate com-
piled by Thomson Reuters had been
for a loss of 55 cents per share for the
quarter. Revenue fell to $976 million
for the three months ended March 1
compared with $2.68 billion a year ago.
Analysts had expected about $1.1 bil-
lion for the latest quarter.
Loblaw closes $12.4B
▶deal to buy Shoppers
Loblaw Companies Ltd. said Friday it has
closed its $12.4-billion cash-and-stock
deal to buy Shoppers Drug Mart Corp.,
eight months after the takeover was
first announced. Under the agreement,
which limited the amount of cash avail-
able, Shoppers Drug Mart shareholders
who chose to receive cash will be paid
$49.22 in cash and 0.2592 Loblaw shares
for each share. Shoppers Drug Mart
shareholders who did not make a choice
will receive $26.53 in cash and 0.7363
Loblaw shares for each share. Loblaw
received approval last week from the
Competition Bureau for the takeover,
subject to several conditions including
the sale of 18 stores and nine Loblaw-
run pharmacies to an independent
operator. The combined company has
roughly 2,300 corporate, franchised and
associate-owned stores across Canada
and nearly 1,800 pharmacies.
Meat groups lose
▶labelling rules case
North American meat producers lost a
bid to suspend new country-of-origin la-
belling rules as a U.S. appeals court said
the regulations don’t violate free speech
rights or exceed regulators’ authority.
The U.S. Court of Appeals in Wash-
ington in a decision Friday said
the groups seeking to delay
the rule until a lower court
could decide the merits
of the case were unlikely
to succeed in either their
free speech arguments or
their claim the U.S. Depart-
ment of Agriculture had gone
too far with its labelling rules.
The regulations, which were adopted in
May and took full effect in November,
require producers to specify the country
or countries where an animal was born,
raised and slaughtered. Retail packages
can’t mix muscle cuts from different
countries under a general label. Canada
and Mexico are challenging the labelling
before the World Trade Organization.
Chicken plant told
▶to make $1M upgrade
One of the country’s biggest chicken pro-
ducers will have to spend at least $1 mil-
lion over three years to ensure compliance
with federal rules after an Ontario judge
convicted it of causing undue suffering
to the birds. In a case closely watched by
animal-rights groups, Ontario Superior
Court Justice Nancy Kastner also fined
Maple Lodge Farms $80,000 on two of
20 counts of failing to transport chickens
humanely. Kastner placed the company
based in Brampton, Ont., on three years
probation, suspending the other 18
counts for the duration.
E
BUSINESSBCSATURDAY, MARCH 29 | 2014 | 604.605.2520 | SUNBUSINESS@VANCOUVERSUN.COM
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Dow Jones
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DERRICK PENNER
VANCOUVER SUN
They called it the grizzly den, a
curtained-off space at the back of
Globe 2014’s trade show where the
proponents of some 36 clean-tech
start-ups got on stage to pitch their
innovations to some of the 400 ven-
ture investors invited to the forum.
In seven-minute increments, the
developers of phytochemical pro-
ducers or high-efficiency laser pro-
jectors or natural fertilizers had a
chance to sell their ideas.
Then each company had its own
stand outside the theatre in the Pow-
erHaus Pavilion for longer meet-
and-greet sessions.
“We have been insanely busy over
the last few days,” said Joel Atwater,
chief technology officer of Vancou-
ver-based HydroRun Technologies,
developers of a hydrokinetic electric-
ity generator called the HydroKite.
The device, which looks a bit like
an airplane on its side, gets tethered
to a station in a river and generates
electricity as it “flies” across a stream
in the current below the surface —
serving as a clean, reliable and con-
stant source of power without hav-
ing to dam or divert a stream.
The company will test the 40-kilo-
watt generator, which is capable of
producing enough electricity for
40 homes, in the Fraser River near
Agassiz later this year.
Generating more electricity means
setting up arrays of the HydroKites
at the rate of about one megawatt
per kilometre of stream.
Atwater said they came to Globe
looking for the exposure in their
bid to find early-adopter custom-
ers as they roll out into the commer-
cialization phase of their business.
They weren’t looking for money per
se, but if a strategic investor came
along capable of offering more than
just cash, he added that they were
definitely interested.
Besides the prospect of money,
PowerHaus gave participants a
larger audience of like-minded busi-
ness people interested in sustain-
able businesses, according to Pat-
rick Dodd, vice-president of the firm
Mantra Energy Alternatives.
Meeting those kinds of people “is
often a difficult thing to do outside
of venues like this.”
Dodd said the most important
thing for Mantra was to talk to big-
ger companies that might be inter-
ested in the 10-employee startup’s
technology. Mantra’s concept is
to use electrochemical processes
to take the carbon dioxide emitted
from stationary sources — cement
plants or power stations — and con-
vert it to other useful chemicals.
“We’ve had a lot of great meet-
ings and made a lot of connections,”
Dodd said.
That was music to the ears of ven-
ture investor Mike Volker, somewhat
of an impresario for PowerHaus. “It’s
all about helping startups, especially
in the green-tech space,” he said.
The PowerHaus pavilion got its
start out of a bit of Volker’s own
networking. He runs a regular
startup event, the PowerHaus Net-
work, which invites new companies
to lunch to meet with investors or
potential partners.
Then-Globe Group chairman John
Wiebe serves on the board of Volk-
er’s GreenAngel Energy, a TSX Ven-
ture Exchange-listed tech invest-
ment fund, and between them came
up with the idea of a pavilion.
Volker and his team put together
a roster of more than 30 companies,
then sent out invitations to potential
venture investors. He said 400 said
they would come. Deloitte signed on
as a major sponsor and Volker’s team
enlisted help from a wide range of his
contacts to put the program together.
“All the companies are telling me
that they got better results than
they expected,” Volker said.
depenner@vancouversun.com
Twitter.com/derrickpenner
GLOBE 2014
Caps defender inspired by tragic story of U.S. patriot » E11
WHAT FUELS
BEITASHOUR?
JON BENJAMIN PHOTOGRAPHY
Adrien Emery, left foreground, a prototype engineer for Vancouver-based startup HydroRun Technologies, explains his company’s HydroKite, which
produces electricity from the flow of water, with an interested attendee of the Globe 2014 trade show on Friday.
Green startups capitalize
on conference exposure
Companies pitch ideas to captive audience of 400 venture investors
IN SPORTS
Discussion between the pipeline
executive and the clean energy
advocate on a panel at Globe 2014
remained polite until the end,
when sparks flew over a question
of the potential of renewables to
fulfil demand.
Enbridge CEO Al Monaco made the
case that it is still tough to integrate
wind and solar power into electric
grids beyond 20 per cent because
of their intermittent nature, to
which Jules Kortenhorst, CEO of the
pro-renewables Rocky Mountain
Institute, countered“baloney.”
“This is the single most consistent
fairy tale that is spread around,”
said Kortenhorst. He contended
technologies exist to address the
intermittency of power sources and
cited examples such as Denmark,
which has integrated 45-per-cent
renewable power.
Panelists on the discussion,
titled The Global Energy Mix:
Opportunities and Realities, were
in diplomatic agreement about the
need to get off fossil fuels.
The friction was around how quickly
the world gets there given rising
demand for energy and innovations
in production, such as hydraulic
fracturing in oil and gas industry.
Those developments have moved
the world from energy“scarcity to
abundance,”in Monaco’s words.
He pointed to B.C.’s coast, where
proponents are looking to export
28 billion cubic feet per day of
natural gas in the form of liquefied
natural gas as an example.
Petroleum-industry representatives
on the panel, Monaco and Ken
Lueers, president of ConocoPhillips
Canada, said they are decreasing
their carbon footprint.
Lueers noted that ConocoPhillips
has developed oilsands extrac-
tion methods that reduce the
process’s carbon footprint by 30
per cent and has set targets for its
own greenhouse-gas emissions.
Monaco added that his company
also has greenhouse-gas reduction
targets and began amassing its
own portfolio of renewable energy
production — 1,800 megawatts
worth of generation — through $3
billion in investments.
However, looking at an energy
demand curve rising by 35 to 40
per cent by 2040, Monaco argued
that filling it by renewables alone is
impractical.
Kortenhorst countered that the
projections for fossil-fuel demand
might not hold given rapid chang-
es in energy dynamics. He noted
that in China, where government
is under massive social pressure
to reduce air pollution, renewable
energy production is rising faster
than fossil fuel energy.
Kortenhorst said the future genera-
tion of decision makers is more
interested in the opposite side of
the equation about how to reduce
carbon emissions.
Derrick Penner, Vancouver Sun
Delegates parry over promise of renewables to fill future energy needs
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