Progress Assessment: A Vignette Ontario Smart Grid Forum Ontario Smart Grid Forum Ontario Smart Grid Progress Assessment: A Vignette 1 Ontario Smart Grid Progress Assessment: A Vignette

“Why is the Smart Grid Important?” The promise of the smart grid’s potential benefits coupled with Ontario’s extensive efforts to realize those benefits over the past five years is a development that will ultimately affect all Ontarians. Efficiency, customer value, security, privacy, safety, economic development, environmental benefits and reliability are just a few of the official smart grid-related objectives that have been expressly identified by the Ontario government, detailed by the provincial regulator, and pursued by public utilities and the private sector. The very nature of these objectives underscores the importance of the smart grid as a means to realize them. How Ontario came to target these objectives and why so much effort has already been expended in pursuing them is an important story that threads its way through this paper. Perhaps an even more important question however, is whether or not the smart grid will actually live up to the promises often associated with it. Getting to an exacting definition of “smart grid ” is a challenge in itself, given its broad reach. Over the past five years, Ontario has become one of a small number of jurisdictions around the world that has gon