Toronto's electrical infrastructure is aging and the demand for energy is ever-increasing.
And while the "smart gird" industry continues to offer new technological tools, innovators are often faced with a difficult question, 'How do you incorporate new technology into an old system without having to tear it down and start from scratch?'
A Toronto consortium led by renewable-energy company
eCAMION, with
Toronto Hydro and the University of Toronto, is collaborating on what could become a important strategy: energy storage boxes installed at the community level.
Toronto Hydro recently announced the completion of the consortium's first energy-storage project, a battery-powered energy storage unit located at a North York's Roding Arena and Community Centre.
This new community-level unit is the first of its kind in Toronto. It differs from Toronto Hydro's traditional energy storage units, which are only used as back-up for particular power stations or transmission centres.
The advantage of the community-level unit is that Toronto Hydro will be able to direct stored energy directly to the customer. That means that not only will the unit be able to feed power back into the the grid during peak times, it will also have the potential to provide power to connected homes or businesses in the event of an interruption in the grid.
The technical term for the use of neighbourhood storage units is a community energy storage (CES) system.
The Roding Community Centre unit is only the first of three that will be installed as part of CES system pilot program. A program funded by the consortium members and by
Sustainable Development Technology Canada.
"An opportunity like this comes once every forty years," stated Ivano Labricciosa, vice president of asset management for Toronto Hydro in a press release. "Toronto Hydro's distribution grid is facing a number of challenges and community energy storage can address some of these challenges instead of developing one solution per problem."
Writer: Katia Snukal
Source: Toronto Hydro