Emera And Novonix Plan ‘Microgrids’ To Power Neighbourhoods of The Future
HALIFAX — A Halifax company is playing a key role in Emera’s push to transform the power grid with renewable energy.
Emera is the company that owns Nova Scotia Power, along with several other utilities across North America and the Caribbean.
Through its renewable energy development arm, Emera Technologies, the company has developed a platform that lets communities run on solar power they generate themselves, independent of the larger power grid.
Central to this “microgrid” platform is the work of Halifax’s Novonix, a battery technology company born out of Dr. Jeff Dahn’s Dalhousie University research group.
Novonix has been working with Emera to develop batteries that will work in its microgrids. Emera Technologies’ CEO Rob Bennett says batteries are a key part of making renewable energy viable, so Emera needed help from the best in the business.
“It’s just natural for us. [Novonix is] where the experts are and we need that expertise… so it makes for a perfect opportunity to collaborate,” Bennett says. “You normally wouldn’t expect that Atlantic Canada would be home to some of the best, most well-known battery experts in the world. But that is, in fact, true.”
Solving The Reliability Problem
Bennett says microgrid communities might one day replace large swaths of the traditional power grid.
Renewable energy can be easily generated at a small-scale, community-level through things like rooftop solar panels. However, the biggest challenge around renewable energy has always been reliability: solar power works when the sun is shining, but how do you light your house at night?
Innovations in battery technology are beginning to address that reliability problem and Novonix is one of the companies on the cutting edge.
“There’s a lot of science that goes into this; it’s not just as simple as having a few batteries and chaining them all together and plugging them in and there you go,” Bennett says.
“They need to be specific to a certain application. A battery that would go in your house for a backup battery is much different than the battery that would go in your car – they’re completely different chemistries and technologies.”
Designing a specific battery for a specific application “is not an easy thing to do” but Bennett says Novonix is one of the best in the business.
Drawing on Novonix’s technology, Emera is beginning to put its microgrids into action.
Bennett says Emera’s microgrid technology envisions an energy distribution system based around community-level generation and storage. Once communities have a reliable way to store the energy they produce, there’s little (perhaps even no) need for centralized power generation.
Rather than one big plant producing massive amounts of power and forcing it hundreds of kilometres through tiny wires, communities would generate and store their own electricity on a microgrid.
These microgrids would be self-sufficient and operate independently but communities could also be connected to one another so energy could be shared when needed.
Tackling Sustainability
Bennett hopes of a series of independent but interconnected microgrids will eventually make up large swaths of the power grid.
While exciting in theory, that future is a long way off. However, Bennett says microgrids can still help utilities become more sustainable.
“Everybody wants to get to a future that has a lot less carbon dioxide,” he says, and that will require a dramatic overhaul of today’s electricity grid.
Bennett admits there is still a ton of work to be done. And while utilities like Emera start transitioning their infrastructure to support more renewable options (many would argue far too late and far too slowly), demand for power grows.
Bennett says energy usage rises by about two percent every year. So at the same time utilities should be decreasing emissions they also have to generate more and more power.
In places like Florida, new communities are regularly being developed. Bennett hopes Emera’s microgrid technology can be implemented in those new communities.
“Instead of supplying all those homes using the traditional way of burning coal or natural gas, it makes sense for new communities to use microgrids… and make the energy right in the community,” he says.
“Now you’re supplying these communities, right from their inception, with a clean, reliable energy product. And that’s important because that affords utilities the time money to deal with the legacy issues.”
What About Atlantic Canada?
Solar power’s effectiveness is different from region to region. Consistently cloudy skies, or humid temperatures, make it tougher to generate electricity from the sun.
Emera’s microgrids are designed around solar power so the company is focusing on regions like Florida, where solar is the most effective. Solar power will probably never be as widespread in cloudy Nova Scotia. But Bennett says parts of Emera’s microgrid technology can still be used here.
Once again, batteries like the ones Novonix are producing will be key.
Although it’s more a loose concept than an actual product at this point, Bennett says Emera eventually wants to use battery technology to provide more reliable power, particularly to rural communities.
“I see a world where some of the technology that we’re developing, particularly the battery technology, could be used by any utility anywhere to create distributed storage,” he says.
By augmenting traditional power transportation systems with batteries, Emera could make sure communities don’t lose electricity when power lines go down.
“We call it the last mile solution because there are big problems everywhere … where utilities have to serve large networks in rural areas and it’s very hard to maintain the reliability at the ends of the powerline,” he says.
“If we can create energy storage solutions that could help keep the power on and provide even just emergency power to these people in very rural settings, that could be really important,” he says.
Trevor Nichols is a staff writer with Huddle in Halifax. Send him an e-mail with your story suggestions: [email protected].