Summerside stores the wind
RICHARD BLACKWELL
SUMMERSIDE, PEI— From Thursday's Globe and Mail
Last updated Wednesday, Oct. 13, 2010 6:43PM EDT
The sleepy PEI community of Summerside is becoming one of Canada’s most innovative users of wind power.
The small city of 15,000 on the south shore of Prince Edward Island, 25 kilometres from the Confederation Bridge, is already drawing a substantial portion of its electricity from its own four-turbine wind farm just north of town.
U.S. offshore wind resources But Summerside has even more ambitious plans – to store some of that wind-generated power during off-peak hours inside residents’ homes.
It can make these innovative moves because city council owns and operates the local Summerside Electric Utility, which is a separate entity from Maritime Electric, the Fortis Inc. subsidiary that handles power distribution to the rest of the province.
This independence allows the city to nimbly design and manage a system that makes efficient use of the strong breezes that blow through the region.
Until the mid-1970s, the town produced most of its electricity from diesel generators, said Terry Murphy, Summerside’s chief administrative officer. After that, however, there was a shift to buying power from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, brought across the Northumberland Strait by cable.
When a large private wind farm was built in western PEI in 2007, Summerside arranged to buy a portion of the power it produced.
But Summerside wanted more control over its power supplies, so that same year it hatched plans to build its own $30-million wind project, at a former landfill site just outside the city.
With financial support from the province and the federal government, four large, three-megawatt turbines were installed and the power came on stream last December.
With 12 megawatts from its own turbines and nine MW more contracted from the nearby private wind farm (owned by French energy giant GDF Suez), “we can supply roughly 48 per cent of our load over the year from wind,” Mr. Murphy said. “And we have periods of time when we are supplying 100 per cent of our load from wind.”
Indeed, if the wind is blowing at full tilt, the city can sometimes actually generate more power than it needs. “Right now we’re shipping that back off the island to New Brunswick,” Mr. Murphy said.
To make better local use of any excess wind power, especially at night when the demand for electricity is much lower, Summerside plans a novel storage scheme.
It is going to provide financial incentives for residents to buy special furnaces or space heaters that can be “charged” when there is lots of power, with the heat released later when it is needed.
Manufactured by a company in North Dakota, these devices use electricity to generate heat, which is held in a battery of high-density ceramic bricks. When needed, the heat is extracted from the bricks and circulated to the house.
To provide pinpoint control of the furnaces, and allow them to be charged any time that there is excess wind power, Summerside is running fibre-optic cable into each home that signs up for the program, and will remotely govern each furnace’s power absorption.
“If we can take some of our load off the day, and put it on the off-peak [times], it will flatten our curve and allow a more efficient purchase of energy at all times,” Mr. Murphy said.
About 100 test homes could be online by the end of the year, he said, and in the following months the program will be expanded to many more, focusing on newly constructed homes or existing houses that now heat with oil.
The concept is ideal for a province where the only energy resource is wind, Mr. Murphy said, because it will allow for a much higher proportion of wind in the energy mix than would otherwise be possible.
But Summerside isn’t stopping there.
It has also held discussions with some automotive firms about using the city as a test site for electric vehicles – which themselves can act as power storage devices if they are charged up during off-peak periods. Already, the town is starting to retrofit its own vehicles for electric use.
All this nimble innovation is a direct result of Summerside having full control over the power utility, said long-time Mayor Basil Stewart. Over the years, the city has received many offers to buy its electricity arm – from Maritime Electric and others – but the city council didn’t bite, he said.
“If we sold [the utility], it would be run by remote control by someone else,” the mayor said. For small municipalities, as well as provinces or countries, “security of power is important,” he said.
At the same time, any profits from the electric utility can be directly plowed into community improvements. Already, funds from the power system are used to pay the mortgage on a pricey new recreation centre in Summerside.
The province also supports the electrical independence of PEI’s second-largest city. Energy Minister Richard Brown said it allows him to put pressure on private Maritime Electric to stay as innovative as the city.
“I can meet with the private utility and say, ‘Well, the public utility is doing this, why don’t you do it?’ ” Mr. Brown said. “It gives me an opportunity to balance the two philosophies off against each other.”
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