Hydro Ottawa will need provincial and federal support for “massive investment” in the company’s distribution infrastructure to keep up with rising electricity demand, says its CEO.
“The level of capital to support the electrification plans we have in place is going to exceed anything we’ve ever seen before,” Bryce Conrad, Hydro Ottawa president and CEO, told Ottawa City Council in June after the company presented its annual report.
Conrad didn’t give an estimate of the total investment needed. The local utility has applied to the Ontario Energy Board for a rate increase, but Conrad maintained that that alone won’t be enough to keep up without putting undue burden on ratepayers, CBC reports, with Hydro projecting the need for one new substation per year, compared to one every five years in the past.
“Government funding needs to be made available to distribution companies like ours,” he said. “The scale and scope of this transformation is simply too large to be borne exclusively by the people of Ottawa.”
This week, the Ottawa Climate Action Fund (OCAF) urged Hydro Ottawa, city council, and other local stakeholders to consider a “least-cost energy strategy”, aiming to maximize energy efficiency, heat pump deployment, and distributed energy resources (DERs) to help take the edge of the utility’s investment needs.
“Hydro Ottawa is right to plan for a rapid increase in demand, and they’re opening an urgent public conversation about where the power will come from and how we’ll pay for it,” OCAF Executive Director Steve Winkelman said in a release.
“When you’re looking ahead to a big investment, it’s that much more important to stretch every dollar as far as you can,” he added.
[Disclosure: The Energy Mix Publisher Mitchell Beer also works as a strategic advisor to OCAF and drafted the release that cited Winkelman.]
Ontario’s grid is expected to see demand increase many-fold in the coming years as national and provincial decarbonization efforts lead to a rise in fuel-switching technologies like EV charging stations, heat pumps, and clean energy sources. Hydro Ottawa itself has a goal to bring its in-house operations to net-zero by 2030 by electrifying its corporate vehicle fleet and making wider use of DERs.
Governments are already investing in building the infrastructure and generation capacity to meet the anticipated demand. In Ottawa, further investment in the grid is also needed to support new housing construction and adapt to increasingly severe weather—Conrad pointed out measures taken to address the damage done by the 2022 derecho as an example.
“We’ve become the weather alert capital of Canada,” he said following his city council presentation. “Not a day goes by where I don’t flinch when I see one of them.”
Hydro Ottawa’s 2023 report also lists several other challenges the company has faced in the last year: In addition to severe weather events, the utility’s work force held an 84-day strike, a turbine failed at a generating station at Chaudière Falls, and interest rates continued to rise. But these events are part of broader trends that are expected to continue into the years ahead, including “uncertainty created by the effects of climate change, economic and public health conditions, work force demographics, and technological transformation, just to name a few of the biggest examples,” the annual report stated.
To accommodate new and future demand, the utility has begun building new substations every year, rather than every five to seven, and also helped install more than 500 new EV charging stations last year.
But Conrad said the provincial and federal funding made available for electricity generation and transmission infrastructure has not been matched to the local distribution companies that deliver “the last mile” of service that households and businesses need.
“You’re not charging your iPhones if we’re not ready for it,” he stated.
