PART 2 IN OUR SERIES ON THE ENERGY INNOVATION CHALLENGE – SEE PART 1 HERE
By David Dodge, GreenEnergyFutures.ca
The future is electric, and grids worldwide are preparing for the integration of millions of electric vehicles, solar and wind power systems, batteries, and new electric appliances like heat pumps.
As we wrote in part 1, these new decentralized energy resources could be a really big challenge for grids, or if integrated well, they could also help us make much more efficient use of our 20th-century electricity grids and bring zero emissions, and affordable power to consumers.
The challenge, run by Decentralized Energy Canada (DEC) and the City of Medicine Hat, received 36 entries from companies ready to build the low-carbon grid of the future.
As you may recall from our previous story, the winners of the Energy Innovation Challenge will get to pilot their solutions in Medicine Hat’s microgrid, one of the largest of its kind in Canada.
“The winners will receive up to 50% funding for a project that pilots their innovation on a real-world distribution network,” says Anouk Kendall, president of DEC.
The winners were announced by DEC and Medicine Hat at the Decentralised Energy Forum at Whistlers in B.C., where industry folks gather to share the latest innovations in building the decentralized grid of the future.
Medicine Hat owns and operates all of its own utilities and is in the unique position of being able to craft its own pricing and other policies, which makes it a great place to pilot new innovative solutions.
According to Grayson Mauch, the Director of Utility Distribution in Medicine Hat, they had some goals in mind: “Relieving grid congestion, both at a premise scale and a distribution scale, brings in room for distributed energy resources, and it really helps optimize or enable energy transition coming onto the grid while minimizing capital investments required to enable that.”
Winners of the Energy Innovation Challenge
“The first winner of the Energy Innovation Challenge is Edgecom,” says Grayson Mauch.
“So what we’re proposing to do is a full-scale rollout of really granular energy monitoring across 10 facilities in Medicine Hat,” says Behdad Bahrami, CEO of Edgecom.
“And the reason why we participated in this program is because we believe there’s a lot of untapped potential on the smaller commercial facilities when it comes to demand-side management and energy efficiency gains. And we want to prove that out with the city basically as a case study,” says Bahrami, who is very confident in the outcomes.
Edgecom is already monitoring 120 facilities in Canada, and this data intelligence has helped their clients save $300 million.
It’s a two-way street; such monitoring can help building owners save money, but it can also help free up space on the grid and lead to grid policies that monetize the ability to reduce demand or move it around as a service to the grid.
Getting ready for energy storage
The second winner of the challenge is Arcus Power, based in Calgary, Alberta.
“So what we’re going to develop is a distributed energy simulation model for the City of Medicine Hat’s electric grid,” says Dan Erhardt, CEO of Arcus Power.
“We’re going to identify locations where they can position primarily battery assets in their system that will solve for resiliency, reliability, cost, and sustainability-based objectives in their system,” says Erhardt.
For now, Medicine Hat is interested in evaluating how much value energy storage could bring to Medicine Hat’s microgrid. But this could also help them integrate other distributed energy resources as well.
“They could be rooftop solar, they could be battery devices, they could be wind or other low-carbon intensity devices that are generating energy and putting them onto the distribution grid rather than large-scale power generators,” says Mauch.
Medicine Hat already has a 6-megawatt wind farm right in the City from which they have purchased the energy through a long-term power purchase agreement (PPA).
Medicine Hat is looking to acquire a 325-megawatt solar farm within the city limits. This is a photo of part of the Strathmore 41-megawatt solar farm. Photo David Dodge, GreenEnergyFutures.ca
But they are already looking at purchasing a 325-megawatt solar farm already approved for development in the City.
Erhardt says this is just the beginning of this work. “The tomorrow state looks like how you operate these assets, how they interface with the Alberta Electric System and their local network.”
Arcus also has plenty of experience. They’ve already helped 120 big customers save $225,000 from energy efficiency and 100,000 tons of CO2 as well.
And recently, they built the optimization model for a first-of-its-kind solar-energy storage project in Alberta.
“It’s a vanadium flow battery that’s paired with a solar array. And we built the energy arbitrage and optimization model to indicate when it should be charging and discharging the grid to maximize its revenues,” says Erhardt.
Setting the stage for energy transition
“This really sets the stage in that it’s using the most modern technologies available to us to optimize our grid. And by optimizing our grid, it allows us to invite all these DERs into our system in a sustainable and fiscally responsible manner,” says Mauch.
“The residential sector is really far behind,” says Bahrami. But there are going to be some changes. And at my house, I have my EV – I’m looking at solar and I’m looking at energy storage,” says Bahrami.
These are the baby steps necessary to get the grid ready for a flood of cheap renewable energy, EVs, and heat pumps. But more importantly, it also sets the stage for grid operators to turn these decentralized energy resources into powerful assets, allowing us to time-shift solar energy, shave peak energy demand, and move to a decarbonized future.
Once all of the software and hardware are in place, electric vehicles could essentially be a massive energy storage device not paid for by ratepayers of the grid.
Summerside PEI in Canada is well down this road already. They had no energy about a decade ago, and since then they have built a small wind farm and added solar systems to their small city. Using smart meters, software, and some thermal energy-storing furnaces, they have smoothed out the curve on their renewable energy and now get 62% of their electricity from renewable energy.
Medicine Hat wants to make much more efficient use of its grid infrastructure and integrate the growing numbers of EVs, solar, and energy storage systems as assets instead of liabilities to its grid.
And this is just round one of the Energy Innovation Challenge. A new round will be launched near the end of the year by Decentralised Energy Canada and the City of Medicine Hat.
(See part 1 in our Energy Innovation Challenge series as well)