Toronto: With the launch October 31 of a new initiative by the Independent Electricity System Operator, Ontario’s large electricity consumers joined the ranks of traditional generators by providing a high-value service for balancing the power grid.
Ontario’s institutional, commercial and industrial consumers are now able to help the IESO, the province’s power grid operator, to balance supply and demand on a second-by-second basis, using ENBALA Power Network’s GOFlex™ smart grid platform. The balancing service, known as regulation, has until now been provided only by generators.
“This project represents a big step forward for Ontario’s electricity sector,” said IESO President and CEO Bruce Campbell at the launch of the new initiative at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. “Every day in our control room, we see the efforts consumers make to reduce their energy use at peaks, which in turn strengthens reliability. Now we are taking demand response to a new level. We are looking to major power consumers to provide a highly sophisticated – and critical – component of grid reliability.”
ENBALA has been contracted to provide up to a maximum of four megawatts of aggregated regulation service. Sunnybrook Health Science Centre, McMaster University, Confederation Freezers, Atlantic Packaging, Collingwood Public Utilities and Walmart will be among the first to participate in the ENBALA’s Ontario Grid Balance® network.
“Large electricity users are such a valuable resource to our electricity power system,” said Ron Dizy, President and CEO of ENBALA. “By intelligently managing the flexibility in when and how they use power, we’re able to deliver value back to the grid in a number of ways – while generating a new revenue stream for connected users.”
Regulation service acts to match total generation on the system with total demand on a second-by-second basis. It does this by responding to small and frequent changes in electricity consumption and generator output in order to maintain a constant balance. As a result, participants in the ENBALA network will increase and decrease their power use in response to real-time system needs.