SOLAR SHARING
Project slated to turn Richmond Hill homes into a zero-emission neighbourhood power plant,
Calling your home a power plant because a few solar panels have been slapped on the roof is a bit of a stretch.
But what if your home also had a way to store that solar energy and was connected to tens, hundreds, even thousands of other homes in a community?
What if your local electric utility could manage how that collection of houses deploys the power they generate and store?
You’d have, in essence, a virtual power plant — part of what visionaries such as Tesla Motors founder Elon Musk call the “Internet of energy.”
It’s a future that Neetika Sathe, vice-president of smart grid technologies at PowerStream, is starting to build today.
The country’s second-largest municipally owned electric utility launched a pilot project this week that will see 20 residential properties in and around Richmond Hill equipped with solar panels and bookshelf-sized battery systems.
Those home systems will be networked together like computers in an office, allowing PowerStream to control all 20 as if they were a single system — a zero-emission neighbourhood power plant.
“We are the first to do this in Canada,” said Sathe, who has plans of eventually opening up the project to PowerStream’s 375,000 customers spread across 15 communities, including Markham, Vaughan and Barrie.
The utility will be marketing the program under the name PowerHouse.
For participating customers, it offers the potential for lower hydro bills and never experiencing shortterm power outages occur in their neighbourhood, as the battery system provides reliable backup. A handy mobile app tells homeowners when their system is generating solar power and the charge status of the battery.
PowerStream benefits by having control over all battery systems and being able to decide how and when that stored energy can be used to support the local grid.
“If we have a storm alert and know there’s a chance of trees falling on wires, with the click of a button we can tell all these battery systems to charge up because we may need them for backup later,” Sathe said.
Having previously worked at Nissan Canada, where she was responsible for launching the company’s Leaf electric vehicle, Sathe said it was difficult to go back to promoting gasburning models. She decided it was time to move on.
“I no longer have gasoline in my blood. I now have electrons in my veins.”
The battery systems are being supplied by San Francisco-based Sunverge, which is also providing the software that will allow PowerStream to intelligently tie all the systems together.
Ken Munson, chief executive officer of Sunverge, said the software does more than just monitor and control solar panels and batteries. It can also manage the home charging of electric vehicles and the operation of smart thermostats and other devices that are becoming part of the automated home.
Munson credits Musk’s launch of the Tesla Powerwall battery in May for creating excitement around the possibilities of using energy storage in homes and business.
“We’ve seen a global upswell as a result of them, so that’s good for us,” Munson said.