Drive through the small southern Ontario town of Jarvis and you'll pass by a gas station, a microbrewery, a few local restaurants and shops — and as you head out into the countryside, Canada's biggest battery.
When its rows of stacked Tesla-made batteries are switched on next summer, the $800 million Oneida energy storage plant will be able to hold up to 300 megawatts (MW) of electricity, enough to power a city of around 200,000 people.
The project now undergoing commissioning tests is in the vanguard of a wider strategy to upgrade Ontario’s strained electricity grid for the future. Industrial-scale battery plants will be key to handling an historic boom in demand forecast for the next 25 years, much of which will be met with renewable energy as the province’s low-carbon economy takes shape.
Once powered up, Oneida will work as a back-up power bank for Ontario’s grid, charging up and storing energy in off-peak hours and releasing it when demand is high. The Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO), which oversees Ontario’s grid, expects power demand to grow 75 per cent by 2050 to meet the needs of decarbonizing key industries like mining and steel, as well as millions of new office buildings, homes and electric vehicles.
Canada took an important step in 2023 to spur construction of a fleet of energy storage projects through a tax write-down called the clean technology investment tax credit, which provides a 30 per cent tax refund to any battery plant brought into operation before 2033.
The pioneering Oneida project had to overcome its share of challenges before launching more than five years after funding negotiations began.
Canada is lagging behind many other countries in building a network of grid-connected battery storage facilities. Even after Oneida is switched on, the country will rank tenth in the world for storage capacity, far behind market leaders China, the United States and the United Kingdom.
“Ontario is a market where there is going to be a high penetration of renewables and the grid, as it is, can only go so far," said Michelle Chislett, Oneida's project director at Northland Power, Oneida’s biggest investor.
The variability of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar, influenced by daily and seasonal weather conditions, make batteries an important part of the solution to developing a stable, clean power-fed future grid.
“You need something to smooth the generation profile,” Chislett told Canada’s National Observer.
“Ontario is a market where there is going to be a high penetration of renewables and the grid, as it is, can only go so far," said Michelle Chislett, Oneida's project director at developer Northland Power.
At the core of the Oneida project are 278 Tesla lithium-ion megapacks sitting in neat rows on a four-hectare plot of land on the outskirts of Jarvis, Ont., about 110 kilometres south of Toronto.
The Oneida project will be able to charge and discharge 1,000 megawatt-hours (MWh) of electricity a year onto the grid, the biggest in a fleet of 26 battery-based energy storage facilities planned in Ontario to handle power from future renewables, nuclear and hydro sources.
Oneida is a first for Northland, which until now specialized in wind and solar projects.
Industrial-scale test case
For the province, the project is an important test case. An industrial-scale battery that will provide on-demand power will allow the provincial utility to cut gas-fired power demand and its associated costs during peak periods of power usage. That could reduce natural gas-related costs by $760 million a year, and also cut Ontario’s greenhouse gas emissions by 4.1 million tonnes — the equivalent of removing 40,000 cars off the roads annually.
Canada will need a 1,500 per cent increase in battery-based energy storage capacity by 2030 to absorb the expected growth in electricity demand, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), an industry research group.
This scale of ambition is a positive – if tardy – step, according to Linda Nazar, a University of Waterloo professor who is also Canada research chair in solid state energy materials and specializes in battery chemistry.
“A good start,” she said. “But Canada is way behind on battery technology development and electric vehicles and other technologies” key to the energy transition, she told Canada’s National Observer.
The federal government “does not seem to think that energy storage for the grid is an important matter, but they always figure things out about 20 years later,” Nazar said.
"Ontario has finally woken up to the fact that we are going to have serious issues created by growth in electricity demand and we really do need much more grid storage."
The province is home to more than a third of Canadians and now faces challenges in rolling out enough new battery storage to balance its fast-expanding grid.
The province has only held two auctions for energy storage projects in recent years. The first in 2022 added nearly 900 MW of battery plant capacity to the provincial grid. The winners of the latest auction to be announced next year will generate contracts for 5,000 MW of energy production and storage facilities to be built in the coming years.
The 20-year power capacity deal for Oneida was agreed by Northland and the IESO outside the formal procurement process. It is based on a fixed-price contract covering 60 per cent of yearly revenue and the remainder coming from power sold on the wholesale market.
Taken together, Northland expects a fully operating Oneida plant to contribute about $45 million a year to its balance sheet from now until 2030.
"We believe this helps the deployment of battery energy storage systems by improving future revenue visibility," said BNEF analyst Isshu Kikuma.
"Big drop" in battery costs
Building battery storage facilities in Ontario is also becoming more economic as the cost of lithium-ion batteries continues to fall: prices dropped 14 per cent between 2022-2023 to a record low of US$139 per kilowatt-hour, according to BNEF data.
"We saw a big battery cost drop in 2023, and this trend is continuing this year due to fierce competition among Chinese battery manufacturers and suppliers," Kikuma told Canada’s National Observer.
While batteries may be getting cheaper for now, volatile markets for lithium — the key and most expensive ingredient in Li-ion batteries — still weighed on Northland’s final investment decision on the project.
"We had to renegotiate the deal with IESO several times because lithium prices were all over the place. It really tested our stamina,” Chislett said.
Eventually, the Canada Infrastructure Bank (CIB) stepped in last year with a unique $535 million loan package to de-risk the project by indexing the loans to lithium prices to absorb fluctuations in the market.
The CIB funding — about $165 million in short-term construction financing and a $370 million long-term loan — was needed for a first-of-its-kind facility in Canada, where private sector lenders can be risk-averse.
Talks to secure the CIB loan began in 2020 and were led by NRStor Inc., a Toronto-based energy storage company.
The fact this was the first major battery storage project in Canada was a challenge in the negotiations, said Mihskakwan James Harper, NRStor’s business development manager who was on the team that secured the CIB loan.
"First, we had to prove that energy storage would be cheaper than natural gas" to supply power during peak demand periods, he said, "and that battery plants like Oneida could be central to balancing a reliable transmission system.”
"Complex investment"
For Northland, investing $600 million in a project that had been in development for several years was tricky, Chislett said. The company had to secure financing for most of the construction costs and take a 72 per cent equity stake in Oneida.
The kilowatt per hour price IEOS agreed to pay for Oneida electricity has not been disclosed, but Chislett said it was competitive and in line with other battery storage projects.
"This was a complex investment for the partners,” said Chislett. “So we had to strike that balance between being not too aggressive on our price assumptions, but not too conservative.”
Oneida is also touted as a model for partnering with Indigenous communities living near future energy storage projects. NRStor is a 50/50 partner with the economic development corporation of the Six Nations of the Grand River in southwestern Ontario where the battery plant is located.
"This type of partnership will be a great example as it contributes to both energy transition and community engagement," said Kikuma, pointing to the social impact and other “non-price” considerations, including First Nations involvement, factored into the project’s total cost of energy production.
"Market participants can learn from the Oneida project," he added.
Now with Oneida set to power up in 2025 and a second procurement on the horizon in Ontario, grid operators in other provinces are taking a closer look at energy storage solutions, Harper said.
"We know it influenced and inspired how other provinces are approaching energy storage now,” he said. “We want to continue the momentum.”
Oneida battery energy storage plant at a glance
Location: Jarvis, Hardiman county, Ontario
Size: 300 MW) / 1,000 MWh (MW indicates how much power the system can deliver at any moment, while MWh determines how long it can deliver that power)
Developer: Northland Power, with partners NRStor, the Six Nations of the Grand River Development Corporation, and construction contractor Aecon.
Battery supplier: Tesla Inc.
Switch-on date: mid-2025
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