Ontario is leading the way in the Canadian energy storage market, with 34 MW of projects under way and a total of 50 MW planned.
“Most utilities see storage as something that is coming,” Sylvie Briz, director of marketing and business development, residential storage at Panasonic Eco Solutions, tells the Pembina Institute’s Green Energy Futures blog. Panasonic and its partners are leading one of the province’s projects, a 30-unit, 300-kWh photovoltaic-battery pilot in Oshawa.
The installation is one of a range of storage demonstrations the Ontario government has funded, including batteries, flywheels, hydrogen, and thermal storage, Green Energy Futures reports. “Oshawa Power is being very progressive and trying to learn more about the technology, how it’s going to interface with their grid, and how customers are going to use it,” Briz says.
Last week, PLANT reported that compressed air storage could save the province up to $8 billion and 87 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions over 20 years, while eliminating the need for natural gas peaking plants.
Dodge and Kinney comment that “deployment really is the key” with energy storage, since it’s hard to say what niche a particular technology will fill until it enters relatively widespread use.
“The fact is that storage can play in dozens of different areas of the electricity market, whether it’s just providing backup, whether it’s time shifting, whether it’s bulk storage for holding wind energy—when the wind’s blowing and we don’t need it—or solar energy when we want to deploy it at a later time,” said Corporate Knights Editor Tyler Hamilton. “Whether it’s just doing voltage regulation or grid regulation. Sorting it out and coming up with rules once they nail that, I think it’s going to open up this whole world of innovation.”
