A funny thing happened on the way to buy more fossil fuels last week. The winner wasn’t gas. It was batteries.

Ontario held one of those arcane energy procurement processes that only the nerdiest of energy nerds can love. They might be hugely consequential but these auctions are impenetrably complex, packed with cryptic jargon, mystifying units of measurement and judged on baffling criteria.

Designed, in other words, for incumbent industries and the chummy network that rotates between their ranks and those of the government departments, commissions and agencies that purportedly regulate them.

The fact that gas plants lost in the latest auction was particularly notable because the “rated criteria” were stacked in favour of them, effectively awarding extra points to fossil fuel projects.

“Batteries won anyway,” said Keith Brooks, programs director at Environmental Defence.

“Batteries went head-to-head with gas plants in a competitive auction and won, proving they are a long-run reliability solution and less expensive than new gas capacity,” said Brooks.

When we think about batteries, we usually picture the little things powering our phones and gizmos. More recently, the larger ones packed inside electric cars or buses. But projects offering grid-scale battery storage won contracts to provide hundreds of megawatts of capacity in Ontario, outcompeting new gas generation while setting records for low prices. All the winning proposals were led by First Nations equity partners, who will now own at least 50 per cent of the projects and whose investment and effort got them across the finish line.

Most of us don’t give the grid much thought, but it is a true marvel of ingenuity. The control centres are as complex as spaceflight, an ever spinning dance of forecasts, judgement and computation synchronized so that electromagnetic waves arrive at almost the speed of light, right when you flip on the switch or the coffee pot. Ever since we built them, electric grids have........

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