As an active participant in Ontario’s energy transition, Utilities Kingston is supporting a long-duration energy storage project that would store electricity to be used in meeting peak demand.We are proud to be a partner on the proposed Quinte Energy Storage Centre (QESC), that would contribute 500 MW of capacity and eight hours of storage for continuous discharge into the provincial grid.
The project is a partnership with two leading Canadian renewable energy companies:Hydrostor Inc.andPotentia Renewables Inc., along with Utilities Kingston and in collaboration with theMohawks of the Bay of Quinte.
The QESC is an innovative solution that will support Ontario's future energy capacity and reliability requirements, with the construction of an Advanced Compressed Air Energy Storage (A-CAES) facility, located in Greater Napanee, near the Lennox Transformer Station.
Hydrostor''s Advanced Compressed Air Energy Storage (A-CAES) technology provides a proven solution for delivering long duration energy storage of eight hours or more to power grids around the world, shifting clean energy to distribute when it is most needed, during peak usage points or when other energy sources fail.
Using compressed air and water to store energy, A-CAES allows grid operators to draw on clean energy, even when there is no sun to fuel solar panels and no wind to generate energy from turbines.
With 1.75 megawatts (MW) of peak power output; a 2.2 MW charge rating; and 10+ megawatt-hours (MWh) of storage capacity, this utility-scale commercial application of A-CAES technology is a significant achievement, conforming to all interconnection, uptime, performance and dispatch standards as set out by the IESO.
Hydrostor''s Goderich energy storage facility proves out the ability of Hydrostor''s A-CAES technology to fully participate in and deliver a range of valuable grid services to electricity markets.
Contributing to deeper understanding of commercial A-CAES facilities at utility scale, corroborating performance and operational metrics, and supporting research in partnership with regional academic institutions.
Facility is fuel free, enabling the province to utilize surplus baseload electricity as a fuel source to provide cost-effective and valuable generating capacity for Ontario.
At its meeting on Tuesday, Jul. 25, 2023, the Council of the Town of Greater Napanee received a presentation from Potentia Renewables Inc., the Toronto-based company behind the new Quinte Energy Storage Centre project (Quinte ESC), which will be located in Greater Napanee.
According to Jonathan Bitoun, Manager of Project Development at Potentia, the Quinte ESC is a "reliable large-scale, emissions-free energy storage solution that is being developed to support the energy transition and the emerging capacity gaps and needs in Ontario."
Bitoun made a presentation to introduce the company, its partners, the proposed project and the technology behind it, and some of the benefits this project can bring to the region and into the grid. The project already has the support of Utilities Kingston and the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte.
Potentia, Bitoun said, is a 100 per cent Canadian independent power producer, headquartered here in Ontario with a mission to safely and sustainably develop, construct, own, and operate renewable energy and storage assets within North America.
Shaheer Aziz, Senior Director of Business Development at Hydrostor, next provided information about his Toronto-based company. Hydrostor is about 12 years old and focused on two efforts: the development of a technology called advanced compressed air energy storage (A-CAES) and the development of energy storage projects around the world, including the United States, Canada, and Australia.
"Using our compressed air energy storage technology, we focus on something called long-duration storage, which is really an energy storage solution that lasts for about eight hours," said Aziz. "We essentially take air when power is cheap; we compress it underground into a cavern; and when power is expensive we let that air out of that cavern to generate electricity. This process is emissions-free and can be sited where it’s actually needed by the electricity grid."
Compressed air energy storage (CAES) has actually been around since the 1970s. According to Aziz, the concept of taking air and storing it underground and reusing it has been around for many years. But the traditional application of that technology, which was done in Germany as well as in Alabama previously, has two limitations: the project can only be located where there are salt caverns underground, and CAES requires the burning of natural gas, "which is essentially emissions."
With Hydrostor''s A-CAES technology, he said, "Our company was able to perfect this process in which we capture the heat and then reuse that heat so that you no longer need to burn natural gas, and this becomes an emissions-free process [And] we don’t need salt caverns because we’ve taken a process from the hydrocarbon space and the oil and gas industry on how they build underground caverns out of hard rock and use that to store the air."
Aziz explained that A-CAES takes electricity from the grid and uses a compressor to compress the air underground. While that air is being compressed, the heat from that air is captured in heat storage tanks and stored there for when the time comes to expand the air.
Using the diagram below, Aziz explained, "The air actually pushes down the air shaft and pushes the water out, and the water holds the pressure and something we call ''hydrostatic compensation.'' Then, when the power is needed, we switch a valve and the water pushes the air down, and the air then gets that heat that was captured previously and runs to the turbine. So through this, we’re able to produce a long-duration energy storage system using just rock, air, and water, which is an environmentally friendly, emissions-free solution to provide long-duration dispatchable capacity."
Aziz explained the benefits of having a system like this. Currently, as Ontario attempts to move toward net zero emissions, the electricity system includes the integration of renewables like solar and wind energy into our grid.
"We sometimes have a lot of baseload nuclear [electricity] in our province. That electricity can be captured when we don’t need it and stored for long periods of time and then deployed. So, what that allows us to do with our long-duration system is to take that intermittent power and turn it into dispatchable capacity. And Ontario today, as you may have seen recorded by the ISO [International Organization for Standardization], has a need for dispatchable capacity going into the 2030s and beyond,” he continued.
"Compare us to, for example, lithium-ion batteries, which are also a great solution for a different set of problems. They’re really good when it comes to that shorter duration, that [two to four] hours — whereas [A-CAES] can really kick in for that longer application. In certain instances, for example, such as our project in Broken Hill, Australia, we can also offer an alternative to transmission lines."
The Quinte ESC is located on an approximately 170-acre property near the Lennox Generating Station, said Aziz, "This is a strategically important location within Ontario’s current transmission network, easily allowing the flow of electricity west or eastwards to fill the emerging capacity gap within Ontario."
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