$6 million project to bring solar power to electrical grid

By Bob Klanac
Thursday, February 14, 2008

A groundbreaking project spearheaded by researchers from The University of Western Ontario and the University of Waterloo will enable small solar farms to connect to large electrical grids.
The $6 million project will develop efficient technologies to convert solar energy to electricity and produce weather-predicting software to assist in managing climate challenges. Through these tools, the researchers hope to encourage utilities to adopt solar technologies.

Led by Western and Waterloo researchers, project partners include Hydro One Networks, OptiSolar Farms Canada, Bluewater Power Distribution Corporation and London Hydro. The project was one of six provincial clean energy projects unveiled recently by the Ontario Centres of Excellence.

Rajiv Varma of Western’s Electrical & Computer Engineering department says the project will dovetail nicely with the recent initiatives by the Ontario government.

“The government has instituted a standard offer program,” says Varma. “Solar power producers will get 42 cents per kilowatt which is seven times more than is paid for electricity.”

Varma says the provincial government also ensured that any company that wants to produce ten megawatts or over of solar power will be allowed to connect to the grid and have the 42 cents / kilowatt price guaranteed for 20 years.

“There is a rush from all of these solar producers to connect to the grid, about 1,200 to 1,300,” he says. “Last year the number of solar farm applications were half of the wind farm and now just in the last month solar has superseded wind applications.

Hydro One, which handles 95 per cent of the power distribution for the province has been connecting as many of these applications as possible mitigated by evaluating the impact of additions in terms of voltage levels, line losses, tranformer impact and such.

Varma says that this is where their new project comes in.

“Our power group and Waterloos group have been working with Hydro One in recent years to resolve the challenges in connecting wind farms,” he says. “We have all this experience and now the new challenge is to connect solar farms. The team has lots of experience in this.”

Varma says that having Hydro One as a project partner is a distinct positive for the long-term impact of solar power given that they handle 95 per cent of the province’s electricity and are working closely with project leaders to bring solar farms into the grid.

Key to the project Varma says is that Hydro One will integrate technology developed by the project into the grid as it is developed, a big difference he says from a typical pilot project scenario.

The project team consists of 16 members from both universities, ten coming from Western. Varma’s team includes five from Western’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, two from the Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel and two from the Richard Ivey School of Business.

“It’s a terrific team,” says Varma. “The boundary layer people will the looking at the issue of wind and snow loading with regards to the farms and the Ivey people will help us with exploring land usage policies for installing renewable sources.”

Varma is Western’s project lead with M.M.A. Salama fulfilling the same role at the University of Waterloo.

The Western project team consists of T.S. Sidhu, A. Yazdani, J. Jiang, and G. Moschopoulos from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Leo W.M. Lau from Surface Science Western, H. Hangan and J. Galsworthy from the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department & Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel and Guy Holburn and Tima Bansal from the Richard Ivey School of Business.

source: http://communications.uwo.ca/com/western_news/stories/$6_million_project_to_bring_solar_power_to_electrical_grid_20080214441427/