Ontario Smart Grid Fund makes a comeback/remains moribund

For a third time the Ontario government has announced the same funding for something called smarter.

The article is posted first respecting readers who visit for news, and not rants
The backgrounder is a rant that will put the proper context on the article - which is contempt

Ontario Smart Grid Fund makes a comeback | Ottawa Citizen:

OTTAWA — Ontario’s Liberal government attempted to reignite interest behind its flailing $50-million Smart Grid Fund on Tuesday by reopening calls for applications from businesses and educators interested in developing technologies to help the province’s electrical grid in the future.
Ontario Minister of Energy and Ottawa West-Nepean MPP Bob Chiarelli made the announcement Tuesday, calling it the fund’s “second round” of calling for applications and encouraging businesses to examine their eligibility for the program.
The fund was initially introduced as part of the 2009 provincial budget. However, numerous false starts pushed out its official opening until 2011. In June 2012 the province announced 13 projects from companies making Smart Grid technologies that would receive funding, accounting for around $25 million of the fund. Only nine of those actually ended up getting money. Those companies accounted for around $14.1 million of the fund’s total amount, according to Chiarelli.
The energy minister applauded companies that did get funding from the province. Those companies included Energate Inc., an Ottawa software maker focusing on home energy
management, Ecobee, a Toronto thermostat maker, IBM Corp. and General Electric (GE).
...
“It’s awful. It’s embarrassing. It’s an absolute admission that the entire Liberal energy plan is an abject failure in Ontario,” Fedeli said.
...
Chiarelli defended the fund, saying that not only has it helped to create new technology that can be sold by Ontario firms all over the world, but it has also helped to create 600, both direct and indirect, jobs in the province.

Background:

In 2004, a relatively new Premier wanted smart meters forced upon all and by 2011 they were - which was about the time they realized there was no plan to do anything useful with them
A technically ignorant government shaped an equally inept bureaucracy that doesn't understand the most fundamental design aspects of data architecture - like ownership, responsiblity, and portability/communication standards
Recently another charge was added to Ontarians' bills for a data repository it was felt the increasingly suspect IESO should manage - according to the IESO's 2012 Annual Report (note 10) their approach has been to run up a debt primarily by contracting out to consultants - Substantially to IBM

It has also been over a year since the government announced a group of people they perceived as smart constituted a "Clean Energy Task Force" (see "Green is the Old White") to:

facilitate collaboration within Ontario’s clean energy industry to identify export markets, marketing opportunities and approaches to demonstrate Ontario’s advanced clean energy systems.

There's been no report from the clean as your brightest whites team - we don't even know if they have yet selected an American firm  to outsource their task to.