Ontario has issued a call for innovative projects that will help the grid adapt to electric vehicles and thermal storage technologies, with a plan to invest at least C$9.5 million this year in winning proposals.
“In short, we are looking to fund three project types, programs that test new ways for consumers to provide grid services, emerging technology demonstrations that are performing real-world testing of near-commercial technologies, and new energy management tools that can support grid flexibility,” a spokesperson for the province’s Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO), which will administer the funds, told The Energy Mix.
The money will flow through the IESO’s Grid Innovation Fund (GIF), which was launched in 2005 and has since supported more than 260 projects. Over that time span, funds have been awarded to projects that addressed specific challenges identified by the IESO. For example, in 2020, Elocity Technologies received $951,731 to test AI-powered technology to manage rising electricity demand from EVs. In 2021, BluWave-ai was given $4,830,735 to test software for optimizing EV charging.
This year’s application window opens May 27 and closes July 21, with the IESO seeking bright ideas to help the grid better accommodate the shift towards electrifying the economy. Increasing electrification is forecast to increase demand on the provincial grid by 60% in the next 20 years, as sectors that now rely on fossil fuels make the transition to electricity.
One of this year’s funding streams will accept proposals that demonstrate how electric cars can be used to balance electricity supply, which will be important if the province’s fleet of 150,000 EVs increases to one million by 2030 as anticipated. Periods of peak energy demand could become ever more strained as an increasing number of EVs draw energy from the grid.
Projects in this funding stream can test technologies like vehicle-to-grid (V2G), managed charging (V1G), or vehicle to home or building (V2H/V2B) charging, which align EV charging and discharging time with shifts in the grid’s electricity supply and demand. Projects that include fossil-fuelled vehicles are not eligible for funding.
Similarly, as the rising use of heat pumps helps cut home heating emissions, it will also put greater demand on the province’s electricity supply. The other funding stream aims “to better understand how best to optimize space and water heating electrification through controls, hybridization, and thermal storage,” the IESO says. A secondary objective is “to explore new approaches for aggregations of non-residential heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) to support the grid.”
In the heating and cooling stream, “the focus is on understanding new technologies as well as control systems—the stream does not exclude control solutions that demonstrate management of existing gas-fired equipment paired with electric heating,” the IESO spokesperson said.
