Smart Grid Needed For Green Power

This tally excludes the much larger wind farms that are already in operation across the province, and the many proposed projects underway and to come as the province prepares to issue its next round of renewable-requests-for proposal. Momentum is building for renewable power in Ontario, but there's one thing that could hold us back: the grid. We need to connect all of these projects into Ontario's electricity system, and while there's been much talk of generating cleaner power, there's hardly been any mention of how we plan to modernize the grid – transmission and distribution – so that we can accommodate as much renewable energy as possible. "It's an area that, relatively speaking, has been underestimated in any talk of renewables," says Revis James, an expert in new energy technologies at the U.S. Electric Power Research Institute, which considers investment in so-called smart grid infrastructure a top priority. A vision of how we want the Ontario grid to operate over the coming decades is sorely lacking, adds energy consultant Marion Fraser, president of Fraser & Co. in Toronto and former senior adviser to the minister of energy. The Ontario grid, traditionally composed of big nuclear, fossil fuel and hydroelectric plants, wasn't built to accommodate hundreds, potentially thousands of smaller power plants – ranging from individual solar rooftops to multi-megawatt wind farms. Managing the power coming from a dozen or so massive plants is relatively easy compared to a "distributed generation" model that essentially involves thousands of mini power plants contributing electricity to the grid at different times of the day. ... http://www.thestar.com/article/304448

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