Turbines and panels could be how to keeping the lights on, green energy experts say

This article was written by Marco Chown Oved and was published in the Toronto Star on July 20, 2024.

Cynics often say we can’t rely on renewable energy because the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow.

But when the rain falls really hard — like it did this week — wind turbines and solar panels could be the key to keeping the lights on, green energy experts say.

“People often think about renewables as a solution to reducing the emissions that drive climate change,” said Mabel Fulford, director of innovation partnerships at Peak Power, a Toronto cleantech company. “But they also help us weather the storms that climate change brings.”

After Hurricane Sandy hit New York City in 2012 — putting 8 million people out of power — the state embarked on a grid renewal project that involved installing rooftop solar and batteries that can keep operating even during a blackout.

“When you invest in renewables and storage, you’re investing in resiliency,” said Fernando Melo, federal director of the Canadian Renewable Energy Association.

“You can have a large transmission line or a localized substation go down, but if you have a renewable generation coming in, you’re adding new power at different points in the system that can then be dispatched.”

During Tuesday’s storm, Hydro One tweeted out a picture of a west end transformer station that looked like it had been built in a swimming pool. Even with all the other transformers operational, this one failure put more than 100,000 people out of power.

Failures at these crucial nodes in the grid show the weakness of a traditional power grid, said Fulford.

“The traditional grid has this small number of very centralized generation assets. So usually what that means is that where the power is being produced is very far away from where the power is actually needed for use. And it also means that there’s more dependency on these big transmission corridors,” she said.

“The more distributed resources are on a grid, that usually means the generation is a lot closer to where it’s being used. So you get a lot more local resiliency and you get the ability to have certain areas of the grid support themselves.”

These “microgrids,” which typically involve solar or wind and batteries, can keep the power on at an industrial site or a university campus; they even work on an individual household level.

People who have solar panels and batteries (or electric vehicles that contain large batteries) can power their homes during extended blackouts.

“I have a friend outside Ottawa. When the power went out a couple of weeks ago, he had people over to just make morning coffee because he was running his house off of his Ioniq 5,” said Melo.

Renewable energy is often touted as being inexpensive and causing zero emissions, helping us expand our power system to prepare for an energy transition away from fossil fuels. But its ability to add resilience is yet another reason to build more renewables, as Canada lags the rest of the world in a drive to triple renewable power by 2030.

“Storage and renewables have huge value as we think about these extreme weather events,” said Fulford.

Not only do they help address the broader challenge of the climate crisis by reducing the emissions that drive climate change, she said, they also help our grid become more resilient and reliable during the extreme weather events that are predicted to become more frequent and more severe.

“They help us weather the storm, and they help us slow down the trajectory of more and more storms in the future.”