When there is a local energy cut, Rebecca Calder does not affect the new Blatchford neighborhood of Edmonton.
The Wi-Fi network, the refrigerator and the heat pump that heats up and cools the house that is kept humming, thanks to a backup battery in its basement.
“It’s great,” he said, and not only for energy cuts.
The battery charges for the solar panels on the roof of the three -bedroom house that she shares with her husband, Daniel, and her five -year -old daughter. That allows the family to use solar energy stored to execute the dishwasher and laundry, even after the sun sets, and win a loan of up to $ 60 per month on its electricity bill in the summer.
Solar panels and battery provide benefits not only for cauldrons but also for the entire electricity grid. They are designed to join forces with the solar panels and batteries of another 99 houses as part of a virtual energy plant (VPP) that supplies energy to the grid, similar to what a physical energy plant does.
“It feels good when you can see your power going to the network. It feels good when you see that first credit in the bill,” said Calder, whose family moved to Zero’s net house in January.
The proponents of virtual power plants say they make it possible to add more wind and solar energy to the network filling the gaps when it is not windy or sunny.
VPPs can also help stabilize the network matching the supply of electricity with demand and reduce or differ the need to spend money on building physical energy plants and other electricity infrastructure, saving money for both public services and other taxpayers.
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What are virtual power plants?
Virtual power plants are devices networks that generate, use and store energy, such as smart thermostats, electric batteries and solar panels with battery storage. When connecting and controlling them, the energy saved, stored or released by the network eventually adds to the scale of a physical energy plant.
Until now, most VPP in Canada have limited themselves to intelligent thermostat networks that public services can temporarily adjust To reduce the demand for electricity and relieve the voltage in the network.
But the new virtual energy plant of which they are part of the Calders can also generate and deploy electricity, such as a traditional energy plant.
How do they work?
In summer, solar panels in the houses of the Calders and their neighbors generate more energy than they use.
Extra plot is stored on the battery in its basement, supplied by the German company Sonnen, which also manufactures the software for the project. The battery is controlled by local public services Epcor and Solarthility, two other partners in the project.
Geoff Ferrell, senior vice president of virtual power plants in Sonnen, said that any of the public services can extract from VPP batteries if they need to stabilize the local network or when the price of electricity is high, which makes it advantageous that the utility is sold to the wholesale market.
The owner can monitor what is happening but cannot control it.
Calder sometimes said, when boring, he will verify the mobile application that tells him how much power is being produced, stored and returned to the network. She likes the simplicity of the owners.
“We don’t need to think about it,” he said.
Calder said he feels that his family is doing his part to resolve the climatic crisis generating renewable energy. “It’s so small, but it’s helping.”
On a typical day, he said, the software prevents the battery from running out below 30 percent, so your family will always have support energy in case of an interruption.
Grid benefits
Brent Harris is vice president of Decentralized Energy Canada, a group of the industry dedicated to the development of distributed energy technology, such as District heating, MicroRedes and Virtual centrals. In addition to providing benefits for individual customers, he said, VPPs can help solve another big problem: The demand for electricity shoots.
“People are adopting electric vehicles. People change gas to electricity and heat pumps,” said Harris, “while you Seeing all these data centers“
Reports of the International Energy Agency And the Canadian Climate Institute found that Canada would need Duplicate or triple your electricity capacity by 2050 to achieve its net-zero emissions objective.
That would require expensive updates to the entire grid, from transformers to substations and distribution lines.
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Harris said that generating energy near where it is consumed is another option.
“We need to get more out of the network we already have,” he said. “If we can put these intelligent assets, we don’t really need to update those lines for decades in the future.”
Harris is also the founder and director of Operations of Eguana Technologies Inc., based in Calgary, a house storage supplier in the home that is building a virtual energy plant of a megavatio with BC Hydro. The utility offers batteries for free to 200 homes where the local network would otherwise need capacity updates to guarantee reliability.
As with the Blatchford project, the owner will obtain energy support energy, but the utility will control them. BC Hydro can load the batteries when the demand is low. During the peak hours, it can disconnect them from the network and make the owners trust the battery, reducing the demand of the local network.
Space to grow?
Until now, the Blatchford Energy Plant includes only about 20 attached houses completed by historical houses. But at the end of 2026, the development is expected to have 100 houses whose solar panels and batteries will be able to store up to two megawatts hours of energy and deploy almost half megavatio as necessary.
Ferrell, Sonnen’s vice president, said that his company’s first Canadian project is just a demonstration, but he hopes that he will allane the way for the largest.
In the United States, one of Sonnen’s partners, Rocky Mountain Power, now has a growing 8,000 batteries that store up to 114 MWh and can supply 39 MW daily to the network, similar to the scale to Capital Power’s 130 Hectare Solar Farm, with 110,000 solar panelsIn Strathmore, Alta.
That remains small compared to A 12 GW plant directed by Statkraft based in Oslo That includes more than 1,400 wind and solar facilities in Germany. Party as the largest virtual energy plant in Europe, shows the large potential scale of such networks.
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Kelly Sizes, co -founder and Executive Director of Solarthility Group, based in Calgary, said that some European countries have really implemented this type of technology well.
Until now in Canada, an obstacle to large -scale projects is variable regulations between the provinces, and most are designed to allow large generators to sell to the network, not small and distributed energy sources. But Size said that Alberta has begun to allow “micro generators”, such as individual houses, sell energy to the network through aggregators such as solar. Harris, from Eguana Technologies, said there is also interest in this technology in British Columbia, Ontario and Nueva Scotia.
Meanwhile, Calder said that she is very happy with her system and that “I would definitely recommend” something similar to other families.
“The most important thing for me is to produce power, we use our own power, we save our power and return power,” he said. “That is fantastic.”
