The National Research Council of Canada (NRC) this week announced its plans to integrate renewable energy storage including solar PV into its electricity grid.
The announcement came at the Renewable Energy Storage Summit, held on Monday in Toronto. The NRCs Energy Storage for Grid Security and Modernization research program aims to accelerate the integration of solar power into the national grid by investing in modern storage technologies that will help its grid overcome current cost barriers to renewable power.
"This large-scale, multi-year,collaborative approach will deploy a critical mass of expertise in targeted areas to help resolve the reliability and affordability challenges of integrating new technologies into a modernized electricity grid," remarked Andy Reynolds, the NRCs general manager of its energy, mining and environment portfolio. "This will help grow Canadas renewable energy sector and create markets for enabling technology and material suppliers, including the mining industry."
The NRC warns that energy costs to customers could be affected in the immediate term as Canadas electricity grid undergoes a major upgrade. The payoff, though, will be worth it: with more robust energy storage capabilities, renewable power becomes more reliable, meaning solar electricity can play its part in managing daily and seasonal variations in energy production and energy use.
Greater renewable storage will also provide opportunities for "peak shaving" (reducing consumption of traditional power during peak hours) and arbitrage (purchasing electricity when prices are low, and then storing it) additional flexibility that will allow the grid to eventually reduce energy costs for end-users.
This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: editors@pv-magazine.com.
By submitting this form you agree to pv magazine using your data for the purposes of publishing your comment.
Your personal data will only be disclosed or otherwise transmitted to third parties for the purposes of spam filtering or if this is necessary for technical maintenance of the website. Any other transfer to third parties will not take place unless this is justified on the basis of applicable data protection regulations or if pv magazine is legally obliged to do so.
You may revoke this consent at any time with effect for the future, in which case your personal data will be deleted immediately. Otherwise, your data will be deleted if pv magazine has processed your request or the purpose of data storage is fulfilled.
Further information on data privacy can be found in our Data Protection Policy.