New Brunswick Was Supposed To Be A Smart Grid Leader. What Happened?
David Campbell is a Moncton-based economic development consultant and co-host of the Huddle podcast, Insights. The following piece was originally published on his blog, It’s the Economy, Stupid!, on Substack.
About a decade ago, the concept of the “smart grid” gained traction in New Brunswick as a tool to help manage our electricity system and its costs, and as an economic development tool.
What ever happened to the smart grid?
Essentially, a smart grid uses technology and smart infrastructure to better manage the supply and demand of energy. It was a particularly interesting concept in New Brunswick because we are almost completely reliant on electricity to heat our homes, businesses, and other buildings. Imagine the electricity generation capacity needed in New Brunswick at the low point (say May) and the high point (say February). In many other provinces, when it gets cold you turn up the natural gas or the heating oil. In New Brunswick, it’s almost all electricity, baby.
Further, this “peaking” capacity is spewing carbon (think Colson Cove). Also, NB Power relied on buying power from Quebec to meet some peak demand, usually at much higher costs. According to Statistics Canada, New Brunswick imported $1.5 billion in electricity in the four-year period between 2015-2018. That’s an average of nearly $400 million per year.
So, the smart grid would go a long way to help reduce our peak demand.
For me, it was supposed to be an exciting new economic development sector. New Brunswick attracted Siemens global smart grid development centre and set up the smart grid consortium. There were smart grid startup companies. NB Power was leading the way. Government was throwing incentive cash around.
I was told that in a few years, New Brunswick companies and technologies would be deployed around the world. Much like engineering firms in Fredericton working on water and wastewater systems in South America and Africa, we were going to build an export-focused cluster in New Brunswick.
What ever happened to the smart grid?
The Economist magazine has been running stories about how the smart grid is being used around the world to load-balance renewable energy. There are stories about the rise of grid-scale batteries and the role of the smart grid.
When I search Google News I see hundreds of stories, including that Summerside will apparently be home to a new Canadian Smart Grid AI Centre of Excellence. There was a story from 2019 about how Saint John Energy has lost interest in smart meters.
Now maybe things are moving ahead tickety boo. Maybe New Brunswick is a global leader. Maybe it is a huge cluster and I have just missed it.
Or maybe not.
There was a lot of federal money thrown at projects around 2019. Tens of millions.
This is a problem in New Brunswick (and elsewhere). The boneyard is filled with initiatives meant to grow new clusters (think e-Learning circa 1995-2000). Tens of millions in provincial and federal cash, a little activity, and then nothing.
How can we ensure that future initiatives (like SMR) can be successful if we are not learning from the past?
The Smart Grid was a textbook case. We were an ideal location to build a smart grid and then become a testbed for innovation. We had one integrated utility (with the exception of the aforementioned smart meter denier Saint John Energy and a couple of other tiny distributors). We had massive need for a system that would shave the peak (and help balance renewables). Government seemed to be very interested. We attracted a global leader in Siemens.
I think it would be good for someone, maybe Dr. Herb Emery’s shop at UNB, to do a forensic review of a number of these initiatives over the years to determine what went wrong (and right).
As for the smart grid, if anyone out there can shine a light it would be great. Maybe there are interesting things going on after all.
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