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.”
The $20 million Stratford Festival Hydro battery, manufactured (and 50 percent owned) by Powin Energy, was procured under the IESO’s Energy Storage Procurement framework. Saturn has since secured another contract for a 25 MWh/50 MW facility under a separate RFP for regulation services.
The Stratford facility will provide reactive power and voltage support to help with Stratford’s growing demand. But it is ultimately a testing facility, where IESO and other participants can learn how a massive dispatchable battery can help manage Ontario’s grid.
A small desktop setup with three screens is “the brains of the whole operation,” says Goertz. “Through this portal, IESO remotely controls the whole facility.” In fact there are no permanent personnel on site; most days it sits unoccupied, just a big battery beside a transformer station.
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.
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