Some participants in the Oklahoma pilot achieved a 57 per cent reduction in energy use during peak periods compared to a control group, while the average reduction was 33 per cent during highest-price periods. Widening the TOU price range in Ontario is crucial to realizing the benefits of smart meters and to enabling competitive services from third-party retailers, including storage services.

I asked demographer David Foot, author of the well-known book Boom, Bust and Echo, and he confirmed there is a strong tension between the wants and needs and concerns of baby boomers and the kinds of energy policies and program we so desperately need. But, as he said, boomers occupy the largest voting block, they tend to vote more often than generations after them, and this means politicians can’t ignore their concerns and need to design programs carefully and equitably. As you’ll read in my column, as people age they tend to use more energy per capita. Our aging bodies, quite simply, need to be kept cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter. If energy prices are rising and a greater per cent of the population will be spending their days at home, how will this impact the silver tsunami and attempts to get a handle of greenhouse gas emissions?

Not to generalize. There are plenty of folks in this demographic willing to make the sacrifice, even if it affects them more than others. But those wanting equal treatment have a point and they should be heard. Food for thought.

NOTE: I see the folks over at Wind Concerns Ontario have seized on the column and misinterpreted its message, suggesting that I am “eagerly awaiting boomers to die off.” They’re a venomous, very angry bunch over there – at least those who do the postings and comments – but this only undermines their own efforts. There’s no room for mature debate or constructive comment over there. Either you support their view or you’re an idiot, a word they frequently label on me. And people want them to be taken seriously?

Of course, my column is actually pointing out the legitimate concerns that baby boomers have and how current policies are failing to appreciate them. I actually wrote the piece because of concerns my mother, who is a retired first wave boomer on a pension, expressed regarding the difficulty of paying rising power prices. The message of the column is that blanket programs can miss the mark and more care must be taken to craft them.

By positioning smart meters as more of an infrastructure play the cost of deployment can be simply incorporated into annual capital budgets and households are more resigned to the fact that getting the new device is mandatory. Let’s face it, initially smart meters are about helping utilities manage their networks better — i.e. they can pinpoint problems and do more detailed analysis of individual household, neighbourhood, and community power consumption, improving system planning and maintenance operations and preparing utilities for increased distributed generation in their service territories.

By making this seem like some gift to consumers, as has been done, utilities open themselves up to consumers expecting certain results and wanting the option of getting or not getting the smart meter. I witness this every day in the e-mails I get and conversations I have with disgruntled Toronto Hydro customers. Later, once the smart meter infrastructure is in place, the utility can begin deploying the in-home monitors and Web applications that allow customers, on an optional basis, to better take advantage of time-of-use pricing and demand-response programs. This, of course, needs to be preceded by gradual price hikes that are blamed on the rising cost of new generation and grid renewal so that consumers more clearly see smart-meter-enabled applications as a way to offset those inevitable increases (which are simply the reality of our times, not the cause of smart meters).

So how, as my subject line hints, does time-of-use pricing potentially undermine programs that promote the uptake of domestic solar hot-water systems? I have one of these systems on my roof, and I like it. It works well. I’m not sure I use enough water every month to justify the payback (disclosure: I’m part of a pilot program, so when I say “payback” I’m referring to the typical installed cost of these systems), but it’s nice to know the hot water we use for our dishwasher, showers, and occasionally our laundry can come from the sun, not natural gas. But here’s the problem with time-of-use pricing. If I want to run the laundry or dishwasher when the hot water in my house is completely heated by the sun, I must do it during what are typically peak times under time-of-use schedules. It means I pay double for the electricity so I can save on the natural gas. Alternatively, I can do the laundry during off-peak hours when power is cheap, but the sun is down and my water tank relies more on natural gas.

So, it seems, this is a classic case of the law of unintended consequences — two programs aimed at reducing our use of non-renewable energy that end up undermining their respective objectives. This is a good argument against mandatory time-of-use pricing. At the very least, it’s a good argument for retail electricity providers such as Direct Energy, Bullfrog Power, and others who offer fixed-rate pricing. Using green-energy retailer Bullfrog Power, for example, is a nice complement to solar thermal because you pay the same rate for green electricity at any time of the day so are not penalized for running your dishwasher or laundry machine in the afternoon on a sunny day.

NOTE: My story in the Toronto Star.