Tim Johnson is a self-described energy geek, the kind of guy who has the website of Ontario’s electricity system operator set as his home page.

While the rest of us are busy on Twitter reading about Avril Lavigne’s engagement to Nickelback front man Chad Kroeger, Johnson is combing through hourly data on the operation of the province’s grid.

How much electricity are we using? What types of generation are meeting demand? Is there enough supply? How much are we importing and exporting?

People who are passionate about the industry — myself included — live and breathe this stuff. We tend, however, to assume that the general public has the same level of interest or knowledge.

“But the complexity has outpaced the level of communication that industry is providing to consumers,” said Johnson. “It’s a shame, because we really have an interesting story here in Ontario.”

We are all “gridizens” in one way or another, he said, and we’re all connected to a provincial electricity system going through a major transition. The power mix is changing. Electricity is being delivered in different ways. Electric cars are coming. Houses and buildings are getting smarter.

This modernization of the grid is going to be costly, and we are all going to pay for it. For this reason, it’s in our interest to understand what we’re getting, how it operates, and the impacts of our individual actions.

After years in the energy-industry trenches, Johnson decided to tackle the challenge of energy illiteracy head on. Last June, the Ottawa resident founded a company called EnergyMobile Studios, which is “devoted to building smart, functional, beautiful apps that simplify and save energy.”

I first learned of EnergyMobile last week after searching Apple’s App Store for energy-related iPhone applications. A free app called Gridwatch, which the company had just released, quickly caught my eye. What it offers is a clear and simple snapshot of how Ontario’s power system is performing on an hourly basis.

It tells you how many megawatts of power are being generated (it also defines a megawatt for you) and whether this is considered low, high or average for the time of day and day of the year. It then breaks down the different electricity sources that are contributing to the mix.

At 6 a.m. on Thursday, for example, it told me power generation was at 14,550 megawatts and that nuclear power represented 70.8 per cent of the mix. Hydro was at 16.1 per cent, natural gas at 9.7 per cent, wind at 1.7 per cent and coal just 0.5 per cent. Click on each source and you get even more detail: a list of each power plant in the fleet, what they’re capable of generating and how much they actually are generating during that hour.

“You can see all this information online already,” explained Johnson, pointing to the various reports and charts available on the website of Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator. But it’s not easy to find and mostly geared to energy geeks like him.

Gridwatch is designed to be anti-geek in this respect. It also goes a step further, offering information that even the government or the system operator has neglected to make publicly available, despite calls to do so from the province’s environmental commissioner.

The app tells you how many tonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent (CO2e) emissions are being produced from the electricity system on an hourly basis, and compares this to the numbers of cars on the road or how many trees it would take to absorb these emissions.

To do this, EnergyMobile partnered up with Niagara College and carbon management software firm e3 Solutions, which spent 18 months working on a formula to accurately calculate power generation emissions in Ontario.

They basically analyzed the carbon intensity of every single power plant in the province. “It’s going further than anybody we’ve seen so far in the marketplace,” said Johnson, who feels that giving the public this information could spur meaningful behavioural changes.

“Let’s face it, people don’t have to change,” he said. “Electricity is still relatively cheap compared to other markets worldwide, and it’s reliable. Right now, you’re likely paying more for your cellphone than your power. So people have to want to change.

“But if you do want to change, you need to be dissatisfied with the way things are, and understand that if you make personal changes what the impact will be. That’s why energy literacy is so important.”

Gridwatch isn’t the company’s first app. In April, it launched a tool called Powercents (currently free, but has been priced at $1.99) that helps electricity users keep track of different time-of-use rates and when they kick in. The app can even been set to alert you when, for example, off-peak prices are in effect.

On top of that, the app offers a variety of energy saving tips and will tell you how much you can save by using certain appliances during off-peak hours instead of on-peak or mid-peak. It’s a tremendously handy tool that I can see teachers embracing as a way to educate students about energy conservation. Likewise for Gridwatch.

Johnson called both apps “passion projects” that aren’t currently money-makers for his five-person company. His hope is that the energy minister, system operator, power authority or some of the province’s utilities see the value of the tools and offer to partner up.

“We’re working right now to galvanize some deals with utilities,” he said. “We think it’s a good fit, and we’d love to be offering this on their behalf.”

EnergyMobile is working on its next two apps: Heatcents, focused on energy conservation around home heating, and Watercents, focused on water conservation. Over time, and if deals start flowing in Ontario, Johnson plans to enter new geographic markets. Some U.S. jurisdictions are already showing interest, as well as a utility in Helsinki.

“We believe Ontario is a complicated market,” he said. “If we can cut our teeth here, it really positions us to do well in other deregulated markets.”

Tyler Hamilton, author of Mad Like Tesla, writes weekly about green energy and clean technologies.

There’s much talk these days about the sorry state of Canada’s aging electricity infrastructure, as well as the need to invest in the smart grid and add more renewable-energy sources to the power mix.

Tyler Hamilton

It’s taken longer than expected, but the McGuinty government has finally given a much-needed financial boost to some important smart grid initiatives in the province.

The money is coming from a new Smart Grid Fund announced in the 2009 budget, which allocated $50 million to support the demonstration of new technologies that make the power grid more intelligent, efficient and robust.

The fund wasn’t formally launched until spring 2011, and at the time there was an expectation that money would start flowing by August of that year.

That date came and went. It was only this week that the first 13 projects were announced under the umbrella of the fund, representing half of the originally committed $50 million. Whether the full amount will be awarded remains an open question, but at least the ball is finally rolling.

In all, about 740 jobs are expected to be created from the 13 projects, which touch on a range of technology areas including in-building energy management, grid automation, energy data analytics, and virtual power delivery.

Toronto’s Ecobee, for example, will be installing its intelligent in-office displays in 300 buildings to show how its web-based energy management system can help businesses reduce energy use and costs.

Energate of Ottawa is getting $2.9 million to demonstrate how its own in-home displays can interact with smart meters to help grid operators run the system more efficiently.

Some big industry names, such as Siemens, IBM and GE, are also dipping into the fund. GE is getting $7.9 million that will go toward its new $40-million Grid IQ research collaboration centre in Markham. The company will collect and analyze Ontario’s smart meter data – really, massive amounts of information—to figure out ways to boost energy conservation and shift more electricity use to off-peak times.

That initiative alone is expected to create 370 jobs.

One of the more interesting projects is being led by Toronto-based Enbala Power Networks, which is receiving $1.8 million to demonstrate the potential of what it calls “process storage.”

The idea is that there are “loads” on the system – major pieces of equipment like pumps, compressors, fans, etc. – that don’t necessarily have to operate under a rigid schedule or always at full power.

Enbala’s secret sauce is software that can tap into and control these loads. Simple enough, right?

In many ways, it’s kind of like the demand-response services that kick into effect when the grid is stressed. For example, on two hours of notice companies such as EnerNOC can reduce large blocks of energy consumptions for several hours on those occasional days in the summer when power use is unusually high and straining the system.

The difference with Enbala – and it’s a major distinction – is that it acts faster and is working all the time, not just on hot summer days. It can control power demands on the grid on a minute-by-minute basis, making it unique in its ability to provide what’s called a “regulatory” service.

Regulation is the ability to constantly keep supply and demand on the grid in balance. Demand is constantly changing. Supply, with the addition of wind power, is also increasingly a moving target.

Currently, many of Ontario’s hydroelectric facilities and natural gas plants are used to achieve that sensitive balance. When demand suddenly drops (or the wind picks up in some regions) grid operators can rapidly turn down hydro or gas supply. When demand suddenly increases (or the wind dies down), supply can quickly be ramped up.

Enbala flips this model on its head. Instead of regulating the grid by controlling supply, it focuses on controlling the equipment that creates the demand. By being able to control hundreds – even thousands – of loads across the network, it brings a potentially low-cost to way to keep the system in balance.

That’s what the smart grid is all about, and it becomes more important as the portion of wind energy on the electricity system grows.

“That flexibility of large loads is what we’re essentially capturing,” said Ron Dizy, chief executive of Enbala. “There’s a bunch of flexibility in the minute timescale on our grid right now that’s being wasted.”

Dizy figured there is between 500 and 1,000 megawatts of potential process storage to tap into, which in a way represent a virtual power plant for the province.

The funding for Enbala’s project will go toward connecting 90 different commercial and industrial loads to its network. “We don’t have them all signed up yet, but we just started and already have about 10,” Dizy said. “The 90 goal is what we hope to get by the end of the project, and I think we’ll easily get that.”

Water and wastewater treatment plants, which operate huge pumps, are ideal candidates. So are universities, hospitals, cold-storage facilities and district cooling operations, such as Enwave.

“The supply side, that’s largely a done deal in this province,” added Dizy. “But on the demand side, there’s this huge opportunity. It’s a great story to tell, and we’re beating the world with a lot of this stuff.”

Tyler Hamilton, author of Mad Like Tesla, writes weekly about green energy and clean technologies.