I just hung up during a conference called with Christian Paradis, Canada’s federal minister of Natural Resources. It was a very frustrating experience. The call was set up so the minister could talk about first-day discussions at the International Clean Energy Ministerial meetings in Washington. He mentioned a few small energy-efficiency related initiatives, but beyond that, had nothing meaningful to discuss. The bulk of the call — at least the part I listened in on — was about talking points. This means defending the oil sands, touting tailpipe emission standards, and defending the government’s “review” of clean energy and climate programs, many of which have been put on hold or killed entirely. What’s actually being accomplished at this international meeting by Canada, I’m not entirely sure. A few million dollars being spent on a handful of energy-efficiency projects amounts to very little.

Is this all we’re getting until the next ministerial meeting in 2011? I certaintly hope more will come out of these meetings, but I fear this is just another theatrical performance, and even then, Canada is playing a bit part.

My Clean Break column this week takes a critical look at the Ontario government’s decision to lower the price it pays for small ground-mount solar systems under its much-celebrated feed-in-tariff (FIT) program. The controversy centres on “microFIT’ solar projects less than 10 kilowatts in size. The program offers to pay 80.2 cents per kilowatt-hour for clean electricity from these small solar projects, whether or not they’re rooftop-based systems or systems that are mounted on the ground. However, since the program was launched last October the Ontario Power Authority has been flooded with applications — more than 16,000 in total so far — and more than 80 per cent of those applications are for ground-mount systems.

Bogged down with four times the volume than initially expected and worried that ground-mount projects were getting a far too high return on investment, the government (and by association its not-so-independent power authority) went knee-jerk. It declared earlier this month that the ground-mount microFIT rate will be cut to 58.8 cents and that 10,700 applications will be tossed out, meaning developers that still want to go ahead with ground-mount projects under the new rate will have to reapply.

Now, 58.8 cents may be fair, but as you’ll read in my column, the tariff rate is beside the point. This is about the Ontario government being an untrusted partner. This is about dozens of solar businesses that feel betrayed by a government and program that encouraged them, based on earlier tariff guarantees, to set up shop in Ontario. The entire point of a FIT program is to provide a reliable, long-term rate for electricity that gives investors the confidence they need to invest and create jobs in Ontario. This tariff “tweak,” as Energy Minister Brad Duguid called it, may be just a small part of the overall FIT program, but what it shows is that the program — the way it’s being managed — can’t provide the certainty that investors need; it can’t be relied on. The mistake the Ontario government is making is to think that it’s doing everybody a favour by creating this FIT program and that people participating in the FIT should just shut up and not complain — i.e. they should be happy they’re getting what they’re getting. That, unfortunately, is an arrogant position to take. If the government were a private business, it could be taken to the Competition Bureau for engaging in false or misleading advertising.

It may be that microFIT ground-mount solar projects are likely to get too high a return on investment based on the 80.2-cent tariff. But by agreeing to that tariff nine months ago, that’s a mistake the government made and should live with — at least for the applications received so far. Retroactively changing it is politics at its worst. As one applicant expressed to me in an e-mail, “Any future business plan or proposal by this administration is dead in the water. Who would trust these people to keep their word?” he wrote. “The whole thing reminds me of the Ally TV commercial where the slick businessman rips off innocent kids.”

Indeed, where will the government renege next? Maybe it won’t. Maybe it will. We don’t know for sure. What we do know now is that it has, demonstrating it could do it again. I’m hearing that the government is inflexible with its position. They’re likely to regret it, and what would be a shame for all.

I was away camping so just caught wind of this encouraging column in the National Post, which was published on Thursday. Jonathan Kay, a managing editor at Canada’s conservative/libertarian paper, takes a shot at “impressionable conservatives” who cling to every bit of “fringe opinion” or “any stray piece of junk science” that comes from the extremes of climate-change denialism. Kay warns that this is hurting the conservative movement by painting conservatives (which Kay most certainly is himself) as conspiricists and cranks who are unwilling to accept what 97 per cent of climate scientists believe: that the planet is warming and we’re partly responsible. Why are many conservatives inclined to behave this way? “Too many of us treat science as subjective — something we customize to reduce cognitive dissonance between what we think and how we live,” writes Kay. “In the case of global warming, this dissonance is especially traumatic for many conservatives, because they have based their whole worldview on the idea that unfettered capitalism — and the asphalt-paved, gas-guzzling consumer culture it has spawned — is synonymous with both personal fulfillment and human advancement. The global-warming hypothesis challenges that fundamental dogma, perhaps fatally.”

He goes on to write that “rants and slogans” help some conservatives deal with this cognitive dissonance. It’s an impulse that must be fought, he adds, “if conservatism is to prosper in a century when environmental issues will assume an ever greater profile on this increasingly hot, parched, crowded planet.” Kay, it should be pointed out, is also critical of fellow Post columnists (without naming them) for their “fine-sounding” but ultimately “nonesense” rhetoric. He refers to one conservative columnist, a woman, who became a skeptic by listening to testimonials from author Michael Crichton. I wonder who that might be?

Really, you should just read Kay’s commentary in full. He does a commendable job, and I applaud him for getting this view in a paper that has gathered favour in climate-denier/skeptic circles. It’s refreshing.

UPDATE: On another note, Neil Reynolds over at the Globe and Mail just wrote one of the most ludicrous columns I’ve ever read on the topic, based on the theoretical bumblings of Stanford U physicist Robert Laughlin. He seems to equate the earth’s ability to handle climate change with the ability of humanity to cope. Yes Mr. Laughlin, the earth will be just fine with what we throw at it. Humans, on the other hand, won’t do so well.

My Clean Break column today revisits Toronto-based Regen Energy, which I first wrote about a couple of years ago. The company has developed a wireless device that uses “swarm logic” to manage the operation of large energy-consuming appliances. Some energy management systems are based on a central control model that tells individual devices when to turn on and off. Swarm logic, on the other hand, relies on these individual devices to work it out themselves. This collective negotiation process achieves a superior outcome, and much cheaper than using a complex command-control system. Hell, it works for bees, right?

Regen has since realized that its devices could be ideal as a way to manage the charging of electric cars. The fear utilities have is that a number of people in a neighbourhood will plug in their cars at the same time and overwhelm a transformer, causing a community to brown out. Affluent communities in California, where homeowners are most likely to adopt the first generation of electric cars, are particularly vulnerable. Regen is in talks with one California utility and several engineering colleges to test out its swarm logic devices as part of a pilot project, to see how good the devices are at managing EV charging. I look forward to seeing the results.

I was in Vancouver last week, where the weather was perfect, so I dodged most of the hot, humid heatwave stuff that kept air conditioners blasting in the northeast. But I was watching Ontario’s power demand from afar and was happy to see that the electricity system handled the hot weather quite well. It was, in fact, the first time we got a sense of how well Ontario’s demand-response programs work. Last summer just wasn’t hot enough to give it a proper test run, but we found out last week that demand-response has an important role to play in the province. According to figures from the Independent Electricity System Operator, DR programs were able to reduce electricity use during the four-day heat wave by 3,000 megawatt-hours. Since we’re talking roughly 100 hours, that averages out to about 30 megawatts of capacity spared during the entire period. That’s a misleading figure, however, because the programs would only kick in during peak times. For example, at the height of the heat wave last Tuesday as much as 350 megawatts of load were reduced – the equivalent of a small coal-fired power plant. About 150 megawatts of that came from our Peaksaver program, which allows utilities to slightly reduce air conditioning load from participating customers. Another 200 megawatts came from the DR 3 program, which consists of industrial/commercial electricity users and aggregators that have agreed to reduce load when asked.

The cleanest megawatt is the one not used, and not using it is a hell of a lot cheaper than paying a natural gas peaker plant for peak supply.