Calgary company formerly known as TransCanada Corporation plans a multi-billion dollar green tech scheme, but it faces obstacles familiar from its pipeline projects.
On the face of it, the scheme sounds like a winner.
Like a kind of arbitrage, it takes inexpensive electricity and turns it into expensive electricity. And it saves billions of dollars that would otherwise be spent building new generating capacity.
Unlike other projects to store cheap electricity and release it during periods of high demand, the current proposal by TC Energy, a company better known to Canadians by its former name TransCanada Corporation, the Keystone pipeline builder, is more than just a green experiment.
Using proven technology, the energy giant wants to leverage its engineering skills to build an enormous reservoir on a hilltop plateau not far from Ontario’s Blue Mountain ski resort and then use cheap overnight electricity to pump water up and out of Lake Huron.
“Regardless of what technology you use, the principle of energy storage is the same,” said Sarah Petrevan, policy director with Clean Energy Canada, a research group at Simon Fraser University that has no association with the TC Energy project.
“You take surplus electricity and you store it because you have extra and you don’t need it, and you can draw on it when you do need it.”
Low carbon storage
In the case of the TC Energy plan, the storage will be in the form of “pumped hydro,” creating the potential energy similar to that of water behind a dam, that can be released to drive turbines, turning the energy back into electricity.
As John Mikkelsen, a TC engineer helping to lead the project explained, Ontario’s main problem is too much electricity at the wrong time of day, something pumped hydro can help solve.
“It provides a substantial solution to the surplus baseload generation problem which is when we have excess electricity that the province generates and typically gets exported at our expense or wasted,” said Mikkelsen at a three hour public update last week on progress so far.
Nuclear power is not cheap compared to modern wind and solar, but it is carbon free and dominant, producing nearly 60 per cent of Ontario’s electricity today. But unlike natural gas generating plants, there is no practical way to throttle nuclear stations down during periods of lower demand.
While pumped hydro does not actually create new electricity, by storing off-peak energy this project will save the cost of building new power stations equivalent to supplying a million home