With climate change increasing the future prevalence of severe winter weather, North Bay Hydro Services, an Ontario-based municipal utility affiliate, sought to secure the warmth and safety of the North Bay community by improving power resiliency with a microgrid. The Community Energy Park the first utility-scale advanced microgrid in Canada supports a group of community-centric facilities including Thompson Park, the YMCA Aquatic Centre, and Memorial Gardens sports arena, which can shelter residents if a winter storm took out power in North Bay for days.
The microgrid had to be able to deliver power primarily generated by distributed energy resources, adapt to existing building infrastructures and electrical equipment, and operate independently of the main electrical grid during a sustained outage. The microgrid also had to supply enough electricity and heat during the entire time of a sustained outage to support the community refuge.
S&C Solution
To remain reliable when sustained outages occurred on the main grid, the Community Energy Park's power is supplied by a combination of generation sources. The primary source of energy comes from two 265-kW natural gas generators in a combined heat and power (CHP) system that provides enough thermal and electrical energy to effectively meet the facilities' needs. A 10-kW solar panel array supplements on-site generation at the Community Energy Park and when extra energy is produced by the solar panel system, it is stored in a 250-kW battery energy storage system for later use.
S&C's GridMaster® Microgrid Control System acts as the brain of the microgrid's operations. The Community Energy Park's buildings draw the power needed to operate while the controller manages the power sources to ensure generation and load is balanced appropriately. Additionally, the controller continuously monitors the status of the microgrid's distributed energy resources and assesses the microgrid's capability to operate as an island. It also monitors the health of the main grid's supply and automatically triggers islanding if it senses a sustained outage.
At the inception of a momentary outage, the controller supports a variety of responses. It continuously monitors whether the utility affiliate's protection devices will respond and restore power to the microgrid. If the system is ready, the controller works with fast-acting protective relays to execute a seamless unplanned transfer and then immediately transitions to island mode, enabling the microgrid to ride through certain system events that would cause a momentary outage.
Results
North Bay Hydro Services confirmed that, with S&C's execution of the microgrid project, up to 87 percent of the regular electricity requirements for the Community Energy Park's buildings can now be met by on-site generation, along with 55 percent of the park's heating needs. While the park's additional power and heating demands are supplemented by the main electrical grid, the battery energy storage system smooths fluctuations in distributed energy resource availability to deliver full power to each facility when main grid power is unavailable.
North Bay Hydro Services secured reliably powered facilities for thousands of North Bay community members to turn to as a warm and safe refuge during a critical outage while proving itself a forward-thinking utility affiliate that embraces technological innovation to solve reliability challenges.
