OEB approves SSM smart grid project
The City of Sault Ste. Marie and PUC Distribution have received approval from the Ontario Energy Board to build Canada’s first community-wide smart grid project.
The Sault Smart Grid Project will cover PUC Distribution’s service territory of 33,500 homes and businesses in Sault Ste. Marie, Prince Township, Dennis Township and the Rankin Reserve. It is expected to transform the entire distribution system by implementing various technologies such as voltage/var optimization, distribution automation and advanced metering infrastructure. It means that not only customers will save on energy consumption, but the utility itself will be better prepared for emergencies such as black outs and storms. As well, the grid will use self-healing technology to reduce the duration and number of outages.
“The smart grid technology can pinpoint the outage location immediately, allowing us to quickly restore power to all the areas except for where the problem is, so instead of hundreds of customers affected by a tree falling on a power line there may be only a handful of homes affected by it,” said PUC president and CEO, Rob Brewer.
The project, which is the largest undertaken in PUC’s 100-year history, is also expected to reduce local GHG emissions by as more than 2,800 tonnes of CO2 annually.
Building the project under an EPC arrangement is Overland Contracting Canada, a subsidiary of North Carolina-based Black and Veatch. The total project cost is estimated at $34 million, and the grid is scheduled to be in service by the end of 2022.
The project has been funded in part by a contribution of nearly $12 million from the federal government.
“The $11.8 million federal investment I announced for the creation of this Smart Grid will mean lower electricity costs for Sault Ste. Marie homes and businesses. Customers will benefit from better reliability, efficiency and resiliency of their local electric network,” said Sault Ste. Marie MP Terry Sheehan. “The smart grid will also produce new economic opportunities for our community in construction jobs as the grid is created, and will attract the interest of a range of industries associated with Canada’s clean energy sector.”
Since 2008, the City of Sault Ste. Marie has seen nearly $1 billion worth of investments in such projects as wind, solar and hydroelectric power generation, a battery-storage project, a cogeneration facility at Algoma Steel, and LED street lights deployed across the community.
“From an economic development perspective, businesses interested in high quality, highly reliable, green power at some of the lowest cost in Ontario will find advantage in locating in Sault Ste. Marie,” said Tom Vair, Deputy CAO, Community Development and Enterprise Services. “The smart grid project furthers the community’s position as a lab for the grid of the future and provides a platform for further industry research and development.”