The Ontario Smart Grid Forum, a group led by the province’s Independent Electricity System Operator, released today its latest report on smart grid development. The report, titled “Modernizing Ontario’s Electricity System: Next Steps,” documents progress that has been made since the Forum’s first report two years ago and the many smart grid-related activities currently underway. It also makes several recommendations that will help build on the current momentum of development.

The report touches on electric vehicles and related infrastructure, emergence of the smart home, importance of privacy protection, integration of energy storage, challenges of managing an expected deluge of what I like to call “gridformation”, and the overall importance of industry standards. It also attempts to quantify the expected annual investment in smart grid technologies, systems and training over the next five years.

Disclosure: I was contracted by the IESO to prepare this report so am reserving comment. That said, for anyone interested in Ontario’s smart grid activities this report offers a great sense of where the province is coming from, where it’s at, and where it is going on all things related to the smart grid.

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.

Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator says it will launch a centralized wind forecasting service in 2010, relieving individual wind-farm operators of the administrative burden and improving the accuracy of wind forecasting in the province. (See draft paper on centralized forecasting released in February). As jurisdictions like Ontario increase their penetration of wind, centralized forecasting is becoming a must. System operators in Germany, New York, California, Texas, the Midwest and Alberta are considering or have already launched centralized wind forecasting services, which are proven to reduce forecasting errors by as much as 5 per cent or more. Unclear is how exactly wind operators will be charged for this service and whether it will be mandatory or voluntary. As part of the Ontario launch, the system operator will be making available a Web-based “Wind Tracker” app that graphically displays hourly wind output from the province’s large-scale wind farms.