City and Waterton getting funds to invest in smart grid technology
By Tim Kalinowski on March 20, 2021.
LETHBRIDGE HERALDtkalinowski@lethbridgeherald.com Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) announced funding for Lethbridge and Waterton to help the communities invest in smart grid technology to increase power use efficiency, and to help lower greenhouse gas emissions.The City of Lethbridge received just over $413,000, or about 25 per cent of the project’s cost, to help install Conservation Voltage Reduction (CVR) software.
City of Lethbridge Electric Utility manager Stewart Purkis said the funding builds on work already completed by the City in 2017 when it installed Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) for all residents, and another pilot project in 2018 which experimented with the CVR technology at one substation.
Purkis expected the whole city to be wired into the new CVR system by June of this year.
“We will have it all up and running across the entire city,” he explained.
“We then take six months to develop a data set that we can share with NRCan to inform all Canadian utilities as to what our actual savings were we were able to generate within the Lethbridge system.”
Purkis said the anticipated energy savings are projected to be about two to four per cent across the entire power grid for all classes of customers from residential to industrial. And there should be a marginal cost savings, he confirmed, on the energy component of the power bill for those who are direct supply customers of the City of Lethbridge.
“The advantage is we are not asking you to change anything, to upgrade your light bulbs or change appliances,” Purkis explained. “Simply by operating the grid in an optimized way, we can save all of our customers wherever they are connected … They all save an incremental amount.”
Purkis said the CVR combined with AMI technology puts the City of Lethbridge on the cutting edge of energy efficiency among power providers in Canada.
Besides the City of Lethbridge, the community of Waterton also received a $495,000 grant from NRCan for FortisAlberta Inc. to support the Waterton Energy Storage Project by “showcasing how using a battery energy storage system and advanced distribution control systems can provide reliable access to the grid with economic and social benefits for the community.” Follow @TimKalHerald on Twitter 4
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