I was chatting the other day with Rob McMonagle, executive director of the Canadian Solar Industries Association, about the excitement building around solar deployments in Ontario, now that the province’s standard offer program is about to go into effect. He said something that I found quite interesting.

“One of the things I’m really keen on is talk of virtual solar power plants,” he said. “The utilities have a hard time putting value to a 3-kilowatt system, but if (thousands) of these systems are monitored by the Internet, you can compile them into one virtual power plant.”

It reminds me of the concept of grid computing and the ability to tap the computing power of millions of network-connected computers to solve large-scale computational problems.

Now, it’s not like individual solar PV systems on residential rooftops aren’t making their contribution to the grid. But it’s tough on an individual basis to get a good handle on the impact they’re having. By tying these systems together through an “Energy Web” (a term I first came across when reading Jeremy Rifkin’s The Hydrogen Economy), we can better measure the collective performance of solar PV in an electricity system.

McMonagle said software startup Fat Spaniel of San Jose, Calif., is interested in this virtual power plant idea and may experiment in the Ontario market. Fat Spaniel’s specialty, according to its Web site, is to help users, industry professionals and policymakers “visualize renewable energy,” with a particular focus on solar. “Our flexible solutions transform raw energy data into dynamic, easy-to-understand presentations and make them accessible from any Internet-enabled device.”

If you want to get a sense of what Fat Spaniel’s interface looks like, check out how its software is monitoring the performance of a 100-kilowatt PV system at Toronto’s historic Horse Palace.

To me, this is the smart grid coming to life. By compiling real-time data from thousands of solar PV systems around Ontario and presenting it as a virtual power plant, you’re in essence achieving the same thing as a single 10-megawatt solar farm spread out over hundreds of acres of farmland. “This would be the first time it would be done in the electricity market,” said McMonagle, talking about Fat Spaniel’s potential interest in such a project.

I say go for it…

BTW: Speaking of large, 10-megawatt solar farms, my Clean Break column for this coming Monday is about exactly that. I’ll post it here, as always.

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