Penetanguishene, Ontario: PowerStream broke ground August 28 on the construction of a system that, when completed in 2016, will provide up to 11 hours of backup power supply for approximately 400 of the utility’s customers residing or owning a business in Penetanguishene.
The high-tech equipment, for what is being referred to as the Penetanguishene Micro Grid, will be installed adjacent to PowerStream’s Robert Street Municipal Substation located east of the town’s Main Street. It will comprise two 500 kilowatt-hours batteries as well as a 750 kilowatt power control system and connected to a distribution powerline that provides service to customers in an area of the town bounded approximately by Robert Street East in the south, Hill Top Avenue in the north, Lecarron Avenue in the west and east of Centennial Drive.
The Penentanguishene Micro Grid will be able to operate either connected to the grid (grid mode) or disconnected from the grid (island mode). It will enable PowerStream to provide power to customers even when there is a loss of supply from the provincial grid.
Micro-grids work in the same way as large-scale electricity delivery systems or a provincial grid but instead of delivering electricity to hundreds of thousands or millions of customers at a time they can be scaled down and customized to meet the needs of communities or even just one customer. Micro Grids rely on a mix of clean and renewable sources of generation and can operate independently or feed electricity back to the provincial grid.
The Penetanguishene Micro Grid will be operated from PowerStream’s System Control Centre at the company’s head office in Vaughan with remote accessibility for performance monitoring via the internet by the company’s project partner, the Korea Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO).
In November 2013, PowerStream became one of the first utilities of its size in North America to initiate a proof-of-concept Micro Grid as a demonstration project at the company’s head office in Vaughan.