Ontario launches Grid Innovation Fund

The Ontario government is investing $9.5 million through its Grid Innovation Fund to support new projects designed to make the province’s electricity system more efficient with a focus on two sectors: heating and cooling; and transportation.

Our government is building the grid of the future with a $9.5 million investment through the Grid Innovation Fund.

We’re leveraging new technologies to keep bills down and to ensure we can continue to power the new homes we are building, an electrifying economy and new jobs! pic.twitter.com/Het7T3xsYZ

— Todd Smith (@ToddSmithPC) April 9, 2024

“As the electrification of transportation, industry and heating changes the way Ontario’s electricity system operates, we’re leveraging new technologies to make our grid more efficient,” said Todd Smith, Minister of Energy in a media release. “This new investment of $9.5 million will support the next generation of innovative projects to help lower costs for consumers and support Ontario’s reliable, affordable and clean grid.”

The funding will support space and water heating and cooling projects that would demonstrate how thermal storage and new control technologies can help manage demand from heating and cooling on the grid and lower emissions.

This stream has three subcategories:

• Small to medium-scale heating and thermal storage: Demonstrate innovative management and control solutions that integrate heat pumps and thermal storage, or manage existing space/water heating systems to better manage their demand and reduce GHG emissions.
• Large-scale heating and thermal storage: Implement novel large-scale heat pump systems with thermal storage, to support space or process heating needs of large customers.
• Aggregation of Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning loads: Explore new automated approaches to aggregate and manage non-residential HVAC controllable loads to support the distribution network and bulk electricity system.

The objective of this stream to better understand how best to optimize space and water heating electrification through controls, hybridization and thermal storage. A secondary objective is to explore new approaches for aggregations of non-residential HVAC to support the grid.

The Grid Innovation Fund will be administered by the Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO), which is opening applications for funding in May 2024.

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Last year the IESO  commissioned an independent third-party evaluation of the Grid Innovation Fund (GIF) investment of eight completed projects funded by the GIF in 2017 and 2018. One of those eight projects included a study by The Atmospheric Fund that evaluated the performance of heat pumps within the context of deep energy retrofits and developed best practice metrics to advance their adoption across the electrically heated multi-unit residential building (EMURB) sector in Ontario.