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.”
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Conservation Voltage Reduction software will run user demand at the low end of the allowable voltage range. For our typical 120volt devices the ANSI specification is +/-5%. A minimum 114 volts at service entrance (your main circuit breaker) and 108 volts at furthest receptacle. Meaning your lights will be dimmer, your space heaters will take longer to heat a space, your hair dryers will not dry your curls as fast although most devices will compensate somewhat by drawing proportiionately more current to deliver the same power. Basically you get 95 watts out of your 100 watt bulbs. The provider hopes you will not notice.
There has been controversy about CVR since technology allowed its widespread use some 10 years ago. The general sentiment is that it allows for inferior electricity that saves the provider 0.4 to 4% at the cost of inferior power quality and no passed on savings to the end-use customer.
Can I hope the City will explain how this can be a benefit?
perhaps one will notice the difference whilst having a foot in the bath and a fork in hand jabbing a socket.