Tim Johnson is a self-described energy geek, the kind of guy who has the website of Ontario’s electricity system operator set as his home page.

If you drive in this city, you’ve probably been in one of these two situations:  One, too cheap to pay for parking, you go to a side street and take advantage of one-hour free parking. But having stayed a little longer than an hour, you find a $30 ticket on your windshield.

There was a clever headline in the satirical newspaper The Onion last week that wouldn’t be so humorous if it wasn’t true.  “300 Million Without Electricity In India After Restoration Of Power Grid,” the headline read.

Climate-change skeptics like to call environmentalists “alarmists” because of their call for urgent action to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The skeptics say the science is too uncertain, that there’s no rush to act, and those who argue otherwise are sanctimonious lefties out of touch with reality.

Tim Johnson is a self-described energy geek, the kind of guy who has the website of Ontario’s electricity system operator set as his home page.

Richard Ford doesn’t like the term smart grid.

“It means different things to different people,” says the manager of grid solutions at Toronto Hydro. “The term has become overused. It gets in the way.”

This has been in the works for a while, so I’m delighted to hear that cleantech evangelists Tom Rand and Murray McCaig have formally launched their MaRS Cleantech Fund and, after first close, have secured h