The Ontario government has contributed $3.4 million toward a five-year, $10.5 million project that aims to economically integrate wind and energy storage, making it possible to give an intermittent resource like wind more load-following and baseload characteristics. The project is being led by Dr, Reza Iravani, a professor at the department of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Toronto, and will include a team of six full-time engineers and 16 graduate students. “This funding will be used to investigate and finally develop a prototype system for integration of wind and energy storage,” Iravani explained in an interview. “This requires significant interface development in terms of power electronics circuitry that interfaces the storage and wind with the rest of the power grid.”

The team will be exploring the use of multi-megawatt flow batteries, such as the type manufacturered by Vancouver-based VRB Power, as well as sodium-sulphur (NAS) batteries. Iravani said Japan, which has years of experience with large-scale sodium-sulphur systems, is currently installing a 30-megawatt NAS battery system at a 100-megawatt wind park. He said the goal of the U of T project goes beyond simply smoothing out the intermittency of wind so the power is more dispatchable. “What we are going to do here is use the concept of energy storage as a stabilizing factor for the rest of the grid.” The goal is to have a commercial product by the end of the five-year project.

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