How provinces, electricity providers are prepping to power an EV future

The Sept. 20 federal election put Justin Trudeau’s Liberals on a path that’s all but guaranteed to drive the adoption of electric vehicles in Canada.

The party pledged during the campaign to hasten the transition to zero-emission vehicles, setting a course for half of new light-duty sales, per year, to be ZEVs by 2030.

The timeline will doubtless challenge the auto industry and electricity providers, with experts saying the increase in ZEV adoption will put pressure on the network, particularly at peak times. Grid operators and distributors in Canada’s three most populous provinces are confident, however, that the power lines can keep up.

Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO), which runs Ontario’s power grid, has been factoring EVs into its longterm energy plans for more than a decade. IESO has relied mainly on government adoption targets, with a dose of “skepticism” worked in, said Chuck Farmer, IESO vice-president of planning, conservation and resource adequacy.

“There was definitely [uptake] in the sector, and we were seeing it, but not really to the level maybe the targets had-it in place,” Farmer said.

With momentum building, however, he said IESO is seeing charging networks expand, auto supply chains get serious about EVs and the pace of adoption pick up.

“We think that’s setting up the conditions for this to start to have a significant impact” on the electricity grid, Farmer said.

MODEST GROWTH

Still, IESO’s latest demand forecast, released in December 2020, shows it is preparing for relatively modest growth in EVs. In its most aggressive demand scenario, the agency forecasts the number of EVs in Ontario to reach 700,000 by 2030 and 1.2 million by 2040. Its 2030 estimate for EVs is 8.2 per cent of the roughly 8.5 million new and used light-duty vehicles that Statistics Canada said were registered in Ontario in 2020.

And the federal government’s new 50-per-cent ZEV sales target for 2030 is only the halfway point. This June, Ottawa moved up its 100 per cent ZEV adoption goal by five years, now aiming to have ZEVs account for 100 per cent of annual light-duty sales by 2035.

But even if gasoline and diesel sales end by the middle of the decade, it will take considerably longer for EVs to replace all vehicles on the road.

IESO is working the advancing federal targets into its updated 2021 forecast, Farmer said.

“We’ll have to look at what are the signals that this will actually make its way into policy and be implementable as a policy and start to put in place the plans,” he said, adding that meeting higher power demands would likely mean building new generation plants and upgrading transmission lines.

NO MAJOR GRID INVESTMENTS

In Quebec, the country’s second-largest auto market by number of vehicles, Hydro-Quebec is weighing more aggressive expectations than other power distributors. The province’s 26,102 new EV registrations in 2020 account for 6.8 per cent of all new Quebec motor vehicle sales and nearly half of all new Canadian EV sales. The public utility is planning for 1.5 million total ZEVs on the road by 2030.

Data from Statistics Canada shows that about 5.5 million light-duty vehicles were registered in Quebec in 2020. Not adjusting for slow growth in total vehicle ownership through the 2020s, 1.5 million EVs would make up nearly 27 per cent of Quebec vehicles by 2030.

No major transmission or distribution changes will be needed to make it most of the way to that target, said Louis-Olivier Batty, a spokesman for Hydro-Quebec.

“We don’t see any issues. We will be able to provide the electricity, the energy, for one million electric vehicles without any major investments in our network.”

But as EVs take up a larger share of the market later this decade, he said, work will likely be needed. What form will depend on how EV efficiency improves and how demands on the grid evolve, Batty said.

On the West Coast, BC Hydro is planning for 635,000 EVs by 2030, around 20 per cent of the 3.1 million light-duty vehicles on the road in 2020. As with Hydro-Quebec, the Crown utility said it is prepared to generate and distribute enough power to meet the demands of the hundreds of thousands of additional EVs.

TARGETS AMBITIOUS

From a power perspective, BC Hydro, Hydro Quebec and the IESO expect that every one million electric cars connected to the grid will consume about three terawatt-hours (tWh). Electricity generation in Canada sat at 635.6 tWh in 2020. That means electrifying all light-duty vehicles would increase national power demands by about 11 per cent, based on 2020 generation and light-duty vehicle stock of 23.5 million.

Ottawa’s new EV sales targets are ambitious, but the power grid should be able to absorb the shift, said Saeed Kaddoura, a senior analyst on the clean-economy team at the Pembina Institute, a Calgary-based clean energy think tank. One concern, he said, is managing the two daily peaks.

“It’s when everybody’s getting ready for work and when everybody just got home and is cooking their dinner,” Kaddoura said.

EVs can worsen the evening peak because many drivers simply plug in when they arrive home from work.

Hydro-Quebec is currently piloting smart chargers capable of delaying charging while ensuring that vehicles are ready for the morning commute, Batty said.

“You expect to have a full charge — let’s say, at 7 in the morning. So, you plug [in] your car, Hydro-Quebec will make sure you have a full charge at 7 in the morning. But maybe we’re going to start charging your electric vehicle at 9 or 10 p.m., when we’re out of the peak hours.”

Pricing incentives that prompt consumers to adjust their habits are another avenue. BC Hydro is consulting with residential customers about optional time-of-day rates, which would offer cheaper power during offpeak times. Hydro-Quebec and the IESO are looking at similar approaches.

INTELLIGENT GRID

Longer term, smart grids could smooth out these demand peaks and cut down on the amount of energy consumed, said Claude El-Bayeh, a post doctoral fellow in the department of electrical and computer engineering at Concordia University in Montreal.

“There’s progress, but it’s in the early stage,” he said, pointing to a range of research and development in energy management systems for homes and businesses, dynamic electricity pricing and bidirectional charging. The latter would give EVs the ability to discharge their batteries to feed the grid at peak times.

But El-Bayeh estimates it may take up to 50 years to transition to a fully intelligent grid.

“I do not want to be pessimistic about the time, but more realistic,” he said.

In the interim, local power distribution is likely to prove troublesome as more EVs plug in, El-Bayeh said. He pointed to pole-mounted transformers as one example. In Montreal, transformers often serve about 10 houses. If all of them tried to charge an EV at the same time, El-Bayeh said, it could result in serious infrastructure damage.

The problem is likely to lead to significant adjustments for local distribution companies (LDCs), which are responsible for delivering power to consumer sockets in Ontario, said the IESO’s Farmer.

“[If] you get four or five different electric vehicles trying to charge on one transformer, that would exceed the transformer capabilities,” he said. “So I think LDCs are ... taking this very seriously.”