EVs will crash grid: Toronto Hydro chief

Toronto EV Grid Capacity faces strain as EV charging grows; smart grid upgrades, demand response, distributed generation, and energy storage are needed to manage peak demand and integrate renewable energy in urban networks.

Anthony Haines looks toward the imminent arrival of the electric car with enthusiasm and apprehension.

Why? As chief executive of Toronto Hydro, he has to run the wires that, in a few years, will charge up the batteries of thousands of electric cars across the city.

And he knows that right now, he can’t do it.

“If you connect about 10 per cent of the homes on any given street with an electric car, the electricity system fails,” Haines told an audience at Ryerson University. “It basically can’t handle that load.”

What to do? That’s part of the reason why Toronto Hydro, Hydro One and the Ontario Power Authority have pledged a total of $7 million over the next five years to kick-start Ryerson’s new Centre for Urban Energy.

A related Toronto Hydro project is studying EV potential now.

Cities suck up most of the energy consumed in Canada, but they don’t produce much.

The centre will look at that conundrum, examining how urban areas can produce more energy, more cleanly how they can use less energy and how they can store energy and distribute it differently.

The electric car is an immediate issue. The province estimates 5 per cent of vehicles will be electric by 2020, Haines said but he thinks it could be higher, and in any case plug-in vehicles will be concentrated in cities.

Recharging a car battery pulls about triple the amount of power used by a typical home, he said. Compounding the problem, most people will want to plug in their cars after work in the early evening, which is just when household demand for power hits its peak.

“You connect this huge load on the power grid infrastructure, and the grid simply won’t handle that type of load,” said Haines. “We need some innovative solutions.” Clearly, shifting car-charging time into lower-use periods is among them, but someone has to figure out just how to go about it.

Ryerson’s Ravi Seethapathy, who pushed for the creation of the centre, said Toronto, where EV charging stations are being considered, is a good example of another urban problem: Most of its power is generated many miles from where it’s used, and there are choke-points in the wires bringing power into the city.

“Ideally, renewable energy should be put in the city,” he said, but most of it is being generated in “moose pasture” and still has to be carried long distances to market.

And even if more power is generated within the city, he said in an interview, the system isn’t currently wired to handle it.

The centre won’t just look at electricity. Seethapathy said there’s no reason why more appliances, including air conditioners, couldn’t run on natural gas.

Geothermal energy has also been neglected in urban setting, he said.

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