New Brunswick’s Smart Grid Is Still Here, And Innovation Is Alive and Well – Huddle.Today

Greg Robart, P.Eng is the chief executive officer of the Smart Grid Innovation Network Canada. SGIN is a national member network focused on supporting implementations in the smart energy sector for the purpose of decarbonization and grid resilience. 

A recent blog by respected economic consultant David Campbell asking “whatever happened to Smart Grid?” brought to mind the old Mark Twain saying: “The rumours of my death have been grossly exaggerated.”

Smart Grid is still here, still moving forward, and still has tremendous economic and technical potential for our province.

As a province, we started our smart grid journey in 2012 when Siemens Canada moved its global smart grid centre of excellence here to partner with NB Power and modernize and digitize the grid.

The reasons Siemens chose New Brunswick over other global centres are still in place today. There are many benefits to having an integrated electricity provider like NB Power that not only generates electricity but transmits and distributes it across the province—and even goes right into the home with a water heater rental program. That’s a superb sandbox for innovation because everyone is working on the same team and can innovate together.

At the same time, UNB was emerging from the PowerShift Atlantic project with teams of brilliant researchers who were looking at the same kinds of issues in the electricity sector and securing tens of millions of dollars of funding to pursue leading research in Canada and Internationally.

That sandbox only got bigger and nimbler five years ago when Saint John Energy exploded onto the scene with impressive ideas around lowering its costs and greenhouse gasses (GHGs), adding more renewables, and digitizing its local grid. Its vision is equally as impressive and is showing tremendous potential for its customers. The company has received several international and national awards from International Smart Grid Action Network (ISGAN) and the Canadian Electricity Association Sustainable Electricity Awards.

Along the way, the two utilities – just like every utility in Canada, big and small – have come face to face with a raft of other considerable challenges that are new and complex. They include the varied and considerable impacts of climate change, soaring fuel costs, the need to lower GHGs quicker than anticipated, aging assets, understanding the challenges and opportunities of electric vehicles, the desire from homeowners, businesses and, for NB Power specifically, for municipalities to generate their own electricity and fully reap the benefits from that investment.

All of this is governed by national and provincial regulatory systems that were designed decades ago.

You might think these are the normal challenges of running any energy business today but together they create the most formidable set of obstacles any utility has ever faced. They all need to be addressed at the same time as governments and citizens look to utilities to transform themselves into much leaner entities while adding more renewables, emitting fewer GHGs,  ensuring fewer outages, and keeping rates as low as possible. It’s a gargantuan undertaking.

Still, these utilities are pushing through the challenges and continuing to innovate in the smart grid space as part of the solution.

What started as “enabling smart grids” in New Brunswick and across North America has evolved into something broader that the industry now refers to as smart energy and grid modernization. Those terms reflect the growing adoption – and importance – of renewables and the need for utilities to digitize their entire operations, right from technical necessities like sub-stations to creating programs that help customers better understand their energy use and lower their bills during the costly heating season.

Although Covid-19 threw a wrench into certain avenues of progress, we’ve continued to move ahead in New Brunswick on many fronts in deploying and testing the kinds of smart energy technologies that will pay dividends down the road – especially through projects like NB Power’s Shediac Smart Community project, which is a leading innovation Smart Grid project in Canada. Saint John’s Burchill Wind Energy project is another example of how smart grid elements are used to integrate Wind Generation into the Grid helping reduce our GHG emissions.

At the Smart Grid Innovation Network Canada, we’ve expanded our vision to encompass a more national perspective as board members from Ontario, Quebec, Newfoundland, and Nova Scotia have joined our team. The goal of this expansion has been three-fold: to explore new avenues to help NB-based companies find new markets, to share the learnings from NB-based innovation across the country, and to benefit from the learning happening elsewhere.

SGIN has standing representation in the Smart Grid Action Network and the National Smart Energy Standards Council.  Internationally, companies like OSO Norway see New Brunswick as a good place to invest and have partnered with Saint John Energy to set up the Canadian operations of Smart Hot Water Solutions.

One thing we have learned from the last few years of work is that utilities across Canada – and all of North America – are engaged in solving the same problems while facing very similar challenges. These issues include everything from supply chain disruptions to small startups that can’t scale up to meet utility-sized problems, to attempting to roll out new technologies on outdated utility platforms. These challenges have been varied and significant.

Yet, progress is happening, not just because we have stayed committed to our goals but because our economies and societies – in fact, the health of this planet – depend on us succeeding in eliminating the use of GHGs while guaranteeing the way of life we all expect.

So, the work continues relentlessly and SGIN continues to work with ONB, ACOA, and other federal agencies, including NRCAN, NRC, and the Trade Commission to identify and pursue research and economic opportunities that can pay dividends down the road.  With the federal government’s  unrelenting desire to decarbonize and disrupt the electricity sector, the opportunities for innovation, new start-ups, and sector growth remain as large and exciting as ever.

Huddle publishes commentaries from groups and individuals on important business issues facing the Maritimes. These commentaries do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Huddle. To submit a commentary for consideration, contact editor Mark Leger: [email protected].