A recent tour of Canada’s biggest battery allowed participants to get up close to an 8.8MW/40MWh lithium-ion array housed in an otherwise unremarkable looking shed in the Wright Industrial Park in Stratford, Ontario.
“This is a historical moment,” says Stefan Goertz, Director of Development of Energy Services for Saturn Power, the EPC contractor. “But in the future, we’re going to see a lot more of this.”
In the long run, though, this battery may be the seed of a local micro-grid.
“Can we put in solar there as well and have a true micro-grid operating in the heart of our industrial park?” asks Ysni Semsedini, CEO of the local distributor Festival Hydro. “It would be something very unique to Stratford.”
Indeed, as PV continues to grow and disrupt grids with duck-curve regularity, storage is increasingly seen as a prerequisite to further PV growth.
Residential batteries can now be included alongside Net Metering, where they can provide vital backup power.
The solar + storage model is also being tested at scale by utilities including Oshawa Power and Alectra with its Power House project. This approach gets even more interesting when aggregation enters the mix, which could eventually open the door to virtual power plants like Tesla is trying in Australia.
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