Annex homes are storing energy, saving money and helping Ontario’s grid

This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Sandwiched between the washer and dryer, cleaning products and a stash of paper towels, a sleek white box hangs from the wall of Andreas Souvaliotis and Joe Gisini's basement.

A single word in chrome letters betrays the appliance's function: Tesla.

The "Powerwall" is a giant home battery capable of providing electricity for the entire house, and ten homes in Harbord Village signed up for one as part of a pilot project that heralds the future of a carbon-free electrical grid where blackouts are a thing of the past.

The battery charges up on the ultralow overnight electricity rates, when the province produces surplus renewable energy, and then powers the house all day long.

Not only does that mean Souvaliotis and Gisini never pay peak hydro rates (and never suffer from blackouts), it also means they free up electricity for their neighbours in a part of the city where aging wires and transformers are under daily strain.

"What's really cool about this is it's a beautiful blend of selfish and unselfish," said Souvaliotis. "It gives us unbelievable resilience, savings on our bills and it's also something we can do for our city."

That's because the battery makes the house disappear off the grid at a time when demand is peaking – "shaving" the peak down — a much cheaper solution than building more generation or upgrading neighbourhood transformers.

"Peak demand is so much higher than what we normally consume. If we can shave the peak, we’ll never need to build another nuclear plant again," he said. "Little creative solutions like this are the way forward."

Souvaliotis and Gisini signed up for the pilot project run by NRStor, an energy storage company currently building grid-scale batteries at Six Nations of the Grand River.

The pilot offered Tesla Powerwalls to homeowners for $29.99 a month, after a $1,500 connection fee, significantly reducing the upfront cost, which can top $15,000 to purchase and install one on your own.

Even with that significant subsidy, NRStor says the program provides a net benefit to Toronto Hydro and the Ontario electrical grid, because the batteries spread out demand, providing more electricity consumption at night and less during the day, which can defer or eliminate the need for costly upgrades to wires and substations.

The Toronto-based company is on a mission to bring electrical grids into the 21st century, making them cleaner, more efficient, more reliable and cheaper for everyone.

"Every utility in the world has built their assets to meet peak requirements, assuming everybody starts consuming power at the same time," said Jason Rioux, chief development officer at NRStor. "That's what's happened for the last hundred years."

As people switch to electricity for their cars, stoves and heating, demand is projected to skyrocket, requiring a doubling of power generation, according to some estimates.

"Are we really going to build out to the peak and double all the copper wires in every street on every pole?" Rioux asks.

Rioux uses the analogy of highways. They’re jammed during the day and empty at night. It's the same for our electrical grid. We have both excess generation and excess transmission capacity at night. But the wires are full and the power plants are running at full blast during the day.

There are two ways to solve these problems: The expensive way is to build more highways (or wires). The cheap way is to convince people to drive outside of rush hours (or shift their electricity consumption to the nighttime).

"The ultimate use of an asset is if you’re using it all the time," said Rioux. "Let's bring the energy in when we have spare transmission and distribution capacity and store it in the places we need it."

With rising demand and the impending closure of several nuclear reactors for maintenance and refurbishment, Ontario is facing an electricity crunch and the possibility of blackouts this summer.

To meet the spike in peak demand, the provincial government has commissioned new and expanded natural gas plants, a solution that has drawn the ire of environmentalists, who point out gas must be eliminated — or at least minimized — in order to comply with the federal government's impending Clean Electricity Regulations, which promise net-zero electricity by 2035.

This spring, Queen's Park introduced new programs to curtail peak demand, such as the Peak Perks program, where homeowners allow their A/C to be turned down remotely, and the ultralow overnight electricity rate, to encourage people to charge their EVs overnight.

The province is also investing in grid-scale batteries, a new but burgeoning technology that can mimic the Tesla powerwall, but at the scale of a small city.

These batteries will allow the province to capture and redistribute renewable, non-emitting wind energy, which is predominantly produced at night when there is little demand. Ontario currently exports much of that wind energy at rock bottom prices.

"It's almost like a grocery store not having a refrigerator," said Rioux. "You’re going to have to show up at the grocery store and immediately buy it from the truck. You’ve got to bring it back to your house and eat it right away because you have nowhere to store your food and keep it fresh for when you actually need it."

"That's how the power grid is functioning today without storage," he said. "It's hypersensitive to matching supply and demand on an instantaneous basis. Nothing else in our life is like that. Every other aspect of our life has some storage."

Scaling up the pilot from ten houses in Toronto to hundreds or thousands of houses province-wide would have an enormous impact on the grid, flattening out demand and alleviating the need to build more polluting peaker plants.

"The opportunity right now is actually for homeowners to be part of the solution to the city's needs and the province's needs," said Rioux.

Sitting in his backyard in the Annex, Souvaliotis says batteries are a no-brainer.

"The future is smart. We have the processors and the servers to implement smart solutions like this everywhere."

Anyone can read Conversations, but to contribute, you should be a registered Torstar account holder. If you do not yet have a Torstar account, you can create one now (it is free)

Sign In

Register

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com