EVE Park Microgrid

Powering the Community

BACK TO THE HOMEPAGE

EVE Park and the broader West 5 community are at the forefront of innovation.

When you drive by the site you’ll see the amazing buildings and solar panels, but you won’t see the invisible energy system that wires everything together. EVE Park and West 5 have partnered with London Hydro to implement a local electrical microgrid. Microgrids are basically the same idea as the Ontario Hydro grid, but much smaller: neighbourhood scale. Our microgrid will include solar panels and large batteries inside West 5, and will increase the resilience and strength of the local electricity system.

We will share electricity with the rest of London Hydro, but we’ll have the extra environmental benefits of solar and resilience benefits of local batteries. In the event of a City-wide blackout, EVE Park will be protected thanks to our extra on-site generated electricity that has been stored up and will be ready to help bridge the gap until London Hydro can bring the city grid back online.

There are many ways to use microgrids, some more complicated than others. We’re still working with London Hydro to navigate the details of how this will work, and there may be special advantages offered to EVE Park residents in the future.

Some of the research we’re doing is related to electric vehicles (EVs) and how we might be able to use the vehicles themselves like mobile batteries, storing up cheap electricity in the middle of the night so that residents can use energy from their cars during the day (down to a limit, not to drain their cars too much).

London Hydro plans to use the microgrid batteries in West 5 for:

Grid resilience (supplying backup power during planned and unplanned outages);
Positive impact on GHG reduction through reduced reliance on carbon based peaker plants: surplus solar energy during the day will actually help the rest of the City to use our lower carbon energy, and we can instead use the relatively clean night-time energy from the grid, which expands the impact and benefit of EVE Park’s net-zero energy design!
Increased visibility for London Hydro into grid performance through smart monitoring;
Gain experience with and implement increased cybersecurity measures;
Explore value of VAR control and other power quality regulation technologies;
Feeder demand management (reducing peak loading on the Transformer Station and main Feeder that supply power to the West 5 neighbourhood):
- offsetting demand from EV charging;
- positive impact on deferral of capital grid enhancements (improved asset utilization).
Possible future demand smoothing for rapid chargers for public transit (eg. electric busses)
And more!