When there’s a local power outage, it doesn’t affect Rebecca Calder’s house in Edmonton’s new Blatchford neighbourhood.
The Wi-Fi network, the fridge and the heat pump that heats and cools the townhouse all keep humming along, thanks to a backup battery in her basement.
“It’s great,” she said — and not just for power outages.
The battery charges from solar panels on the roof of the three-bedroom home she shares with her husband, Daniel, and five-year-old daughter, Ida. That allows the family to use stored solar power to run the dishwasher and laundry, even after the sun goes down, and to earn a credit of up to $60 per month on their electricity bill in the summer.
The solar panels and battery provide benefits not just for the Calders but for the entire electrical grid. They’re designed to join forces with the solar panels and batteries of 99 other homes as part of a virtual power plant (VPP) that supplies power to the grid, similar to what a physical power plant does.
“It feels good when you can see your power going to the grid. It feels good when you see that first credit on the bill,” said Calder, whose family moved into the net-zero home in January.
Proponents of virtual power plants say they make it possible to add more wind and solar to the grid by filling the gaps when it’s not windy or sunny.
VPPs can also help stabilize the grid by matching electricity supply with demand and reduce or defer the need to spend money on building physical power plants and other electricity infrastructure, saving money for both utilities and other ratepayers.
What On EarthIn Edmonton, the dream of a green community meets reality
For over a decade, Alberta’s capital has been building a groundbreaking sustainable neighbourhood, right in the middle of the city. But some say the development has moved too slowly and is costing too much. With a municipal election looming, one mayoral candidate says the city needs to change course with this prime piece of real estate.
What are virtual power plants?
Virtual power plants are networks of devices that generate, use and store energy, such as smart thermostats, electric vehicle batteries and solar panels with battery storage. By connecting and controlling them together, the energy saved, stored or released by the network eventually adds up to the scale of a physical power plant.
So far, most VPPs in Canada have been limited to networks of smart thermostats that utilities can temporarily adjust to reduce electricity demand and relieve strain on the grid.
But the new virtual power plant that the Calders are a part of can also generate and deploy electricity, like a traditional power plant.
How do they work?
In summer, solar panels on the homes of the Calders and their neighbours generate more energy than they use.
Extra solar is stored in the battery in their basement, supplied by the German company Sonnen, which also makes the software for the project. The battery is controlled by local utilities EPCOR and Solartility, two other partners in the project.
Geoff Ferrell, senior vice-president of virtual power plants at Sonnen, said either utility can draw from the batteries of the VPP if they need to stabilize the local grid or when the price of electricity is high, making it advantageous for the utility to sell to the wholesale market.
The homeowner can monitor what’s happening but can’t control it.
Calder said sometimes when she’s bored, she’ll check the mobile app that tells her how much power is being produced, stored and returned to the grid. She likes the simplicity for homeowners.
“We don’t need to think about it,” she said.
Calder said she feels her family is doing their part to solve the climate crisis by generating renewable energy. “It’s such a small thing to do, but it’s helping.”
On a typical day, she said, the software stops the battery from being drained below 30 per cent, so her family will always have backup power in case of an outage.
Benefits for the grid
Brent Harris is vice-chair of Decentralised Energy Canada, an industry group dedicated to the development of distributed energy technology, such as district heating, microgrids and virtual power plants. Aside from providing benefits for individual customers, he said, VPPs can help solve another big problem: the skyrocketing demand for electricity.
“People are adopting electric vehicles. People are switching from gas to electricity and heat pumps,” Harris said, “at the same time as you’re seeing all these data centres coming on.”
Reports from the International Energy Agency and the Canadian Climate Institute found Canada would need to double or triple its electrical grid capacity by 2050 to reach its net-zero emissions goal.
That would require costly upgrades to the entire grid, from transformers to substations to distribution lines.
Solar expert Heather MacKenzie knew she wanted her family home to be as green and sustainable as possible, so she designed a net-zero home in Edmonton’s Blatchford neighbourhood, known for its geothermal core. Here, she offers tips for other homeowners who want to reduce their footprint.
Harris said generating power close to where it’s consumed is another option.
“We need to get more out of the grid that we already have,” he said. “If we can put these smart assets out there, actually we don’t need to upgrade those lines for decades into the future.”
Harris is also the founder and chief operating officer of Calgary-based Eguana Technologies Inc., a home battery storage provider that is building a one megawatt virtual power plant with B.C. Hydro. The utility is offering batteries for free to 200 homes where the local grid would otherwise need capacity upgrades to ensure reliability.
As with the Blatchford project, the homeowner will get backup power from the batteries, but the utility will control them. B.C. Hydro can charge the batteries when demand is low. During peak times, it can disconnect them from the grid and get the homeowners to rely on the battery, reducing demand on the local grid.
Room to grow?
So far, the Blatchford virtual power plant includes only about 20 townhomes completed by Landmark Homes. But by the end of 2026, the development is expected to have 100 homes whose solar panels and batteries will be able to store up to two megawatt hours of power and deploy nearly half a megawatt as needed.
Ferrell, the VP at Sonnen, said his company’s first Canadian project is just a demonstration, but he hopes it will pave the way for bigger ones.
In the United States, one of Sonnen’s partners, Rocky Mountain Power, now has a growing VPP of 8,000 batteries that store up to 114 MWh and can supply 39 MW daily to the grid — similar in scale to Capital Power’s 130-hectare solar farm, with 110,000 solar panels, in Strathmore, Alta.
That’s still tiny compared with a 12 GW plant run by Oslo-based Statkraft that comprises more than 1,400 wind and solar installations in Germany. Billed as Europe’s largest virtual power plant, it shows the potential huge scale of such networks.
With extreme weather becoming more common, more people are trying to better prepare for power outages. Nova Scotia Power says it will take the next year to evaluate if it can expand a pilot project that delivers back-up electricity through battery storage in your home. Paul Withers explains.
Kelly Tallas, co-founder and CEO of Calgary-based Solartility Group, said some countries in Europe have really implemented this kind of technology well.
So far in Canada, a hurdle to larger-scale projects is varying regulations among provinces, and most are designed to allow large generators to sell to the grid — not small, distributed energy sources. But Tallas said Alberta has started to allow “micro” generators, such as individual homes, to sell power to the grid through aggregators like Solartility. Harris, of Eguana Technologies, said there’s also interest in this technology in British Columbia, Ontario and Nova Scotia.
Meanwhile, Calder said she’s really happy with her system and would “definitely recommend” something similar to other families.
“The big thing for me is we produce power, we use our own power, we save our power and we give back power,” she said. “That is fantastic.”
