Ontario introduced the Green Energy Act late last month that includes provisioning for a smart grid.  Residents of the province are quickly becoming familiar with the technology since Hydro One is well underway with a project that will blanket Ontario with smart meters.

Canada as a whole is prime development territory for a smart grid.  The country needs to upgrade its infrastructure just as other countries do but the manner in which the country’s population is concentrated at the southern border presents another challenge.  Much of the plentiful hydroelectric power is located in very remote areas to the north.

Ontario is home to several firms that are developing smart grid technology.  One of these is Ruggedcom that specialises in building networking equipment that will function under the harshest conditions – such as those within a power substation.  Ordinary networking hardware would be rendered useless from a power surge and in a smart grid information needs to be shared from the point of generation to the point of consumption, including power substations.

Overall Ontario, along with the state of California, is leading the way in smart grid technology development in North America.  Hydro One spearheaded an effort to convince Industry Canada, the Canadian government entity responsible for business development, to dedicate a wireless communications spectrum for use by utilities to monitor their power grids.  This forward-thinking move creates a standard throughout Canada.  Standardisation is crucial for developers to have a development framework.

Utilities in Canada, and throughout the north-eastern United States, point to the summer 2003 blackout as the ultimate rallying cry for smart grid technology.  The catastrophic power outage put that part of the United States, and most of Ontario, in the dark.  It all began with a minor incident in Ohio, but because grid operators were unable to isolate the problem it quickly spread to a huge area.

“The smart grid might have actually prevented anything happening outside the Cincinnati area,” said Duncan Stewart, director of research for technology, media and telecommunications, life sciences and green technology for consulting firm Deloitte Canada.  “This is truly a technology whose time has come,” he added as he spoke at a conference on smart grid technology the day after the Green Energy Act was announced.

Ontario passed legislation that every home there must have a smart meter installed by next year.  Other provinces have followed its lead including British Columbia and Alberta.  Consumers will be able to make informed decisions regarding their energy consumption once the devices are in place.  

By viewing the information provided from the meter, consumers will decide to turn off appliances when power rates are high.  Once the whole province, and then all of Canada is doing this significant costs are saved for consumers and for the environment.  
Utilities are also able to use the information gleaned from smart meters to better forecast for demand.  That way they don’t have to generate excess capacity like they do today to ensure power is available.  In the long run, Canada won’t need to build as many power plants as power is transmitted much more efficiently from point of generation to point of consumption.

Canada won’t stop with smart meters either.  Canada seeks to install a full-blown smart grid that will allow for homeowners to generate power on site and feed excess power back into the grid, along with plug-in hybrid vehicle integration, among numerous other services.

Hydro One
185 Clegg Rd.
Markham, Ontario L6G 1B7
http://www.hydroone.com

Deloitte
1633 Broadway
New York, NY 10019-6754
http://www.deloitte.com/dtt
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