PSA is demonstrating one of the world’s first fully grid-integrated VPPs designed to allow for more effective integration of wind power. The project is a collaborative demonstration led by New Brunswick Power Corporation (NBPC) in partnership with Maritime consortium members from academia, utilities and government. It is demonstrating the capability of VPPs to balance high penetrations of wind power on a cross-jurisdictional system. Unlike typical Demand Response services, the VPP uses load and wind forecasting and aggregation capabilities to perform near real-time continuous load shifting of commercial and residential loads and provide new ancillary services to the grid. This project was launched in 2010 and is scheduled for completion in the spring of 2015. It is jointly funded by Natural Resources Canada through the Clean Energy Fund and by members of the consortium.

The objective of this demonstration project has been “to learn through doing” and determine if customer loads could be shifted (from a technical perspective) leveraging smart grid technologies to allow for more effective integration of renewable wind generation and to determine if this could be accomplished in a cost effective way. This objective was new and challenging since it has required a full time energy resource that could be continually shifted in both the upward and downward direction to correspond to the intermittency of the region’s wind generation at the system level. This set the PSA project apart from the more traditional but less challenging event driven demand response programs that are most often called upon intermittently for peak reduction events.

The benefits of this project have been:

• Identifying the potential for ILM and the potential to scale up.
• Developing a better understanding of the end-use characteristics and capabilities.
• Developing a better understanding of the customer.
• Identifying the business process changes required to implement ILM.
• Development of local expertise related to ILM within utilities and various service providers.
• Shifting load with great value to the overall system and no impact to the customer (business as usual; i.e. hot water).

The four key messages from our work on PSA are as follows:

• Customers responded favorably to our project involving the effective integration of wind generated power and a positive impact to the environment.
• The ILM solution is technically feasible and is evolving.
• It is still "early days" in ILM. PSA is 4-5 years ahead of its time.
• PSA has revealed challenges in the business case, some of which were attributed to:
  • Lack of interoperability standards which adds cost to development and integration of solutions. 
  • Architecture and the requirement for aggregation services which contribute to another layer of costs. 
  • Availability of robust and secure communications infrastructure.
  • Availability of standardized products suitable for load shifting.