Alberta federal government offers financial support for energy storage projects alongside oil as well as gas

• The government of Alberta, Canada, has introduced that CA$ 25 million (US$ 20.1 million) in financial backing has been offered for solar-plus-storage and also pumped hydro energy storage as part of a CA$ 176 million bundle that will additionally offer funding to oil and gas industry projects.

The rural government said on Monday that the financing is designed to help Alberta's post-pandemic economic healing along with to reduce its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and provide other ecological sustainability advantages.

The funding is being provided with charitable firm Emissions Reduction Alberta (ERA): CA$ 126 million in stimulus cash from Alberta's Technology Innovation and also Emissions Reduction (TIER) fund, which is moneyed by industrial groups to compensate for the emissions their activities generate. CA$ 50 million is coming from the Low Carbon Economy Leadership Fund (LCELF) of the Canadian federal government.

All the projects picked have been considered shovel-ready, including the Chappice Lake Solar-Storage project, which will certainly match a DC-coupled flow battery with 15MW of solar PV and the 400MW Canyon Creek closed-loop pumped hydro energy storage (PHES) project.

Chappice Lake, under development by Elemental Energy Renewables, has an anticipated complete expense of CA$ 40.3 million as well as will get CA$ 10 million from ERA. Canyon Creek is being developed by Turning Point Generation and also is obtaining CA$ 15 million towards its total anticipated expense of CA$ 200 million.

Those 2 projects are being funded in a group of Low Carbon Energy. Other projects in the category consist of a hydrogen locomotive program, a blue hydrogen hub, an absolutely no emissions hydrogen transit project as well as an area diesel reduction program. In all, the Reduced Carbon Energy projects will certainly get CA$ 62.1 million financing.

Projects in an additional classification, Bioindustry and also Waste-to-Value, will certainly obtain CA$ 58 million, consisting of a carbon conversion centre as well as a low carbon fuel project. On the other hand, CA$ 55 million support will be offered to projects in the 3rd and also last group, Oil as well as Gas. These consist of a project called Sunlight Powered GHG Treatment for Oil Sands Tailing Ponds and also a pilot project to reduce energy losses and also boost oil drainage prices from oil sands making use of vapor additives called surfactants.

Alberta just obtained its first-ever grid-scale battery energy storage system (BESS) in late 2020, when a 10MW/ 20MWh Tesla Megapack BESS went online. The project, called WindCharger, charges directly from a 66MW wind ranch nearby. The province's initial large-scale solar-plus-storage project was approved as remaining in the general public rate of interest in April last year by the regulative Alberta Utilities Commission.

In October 2020, the region's grid operator AESO revealed that it would begin a technology pilot program for quick frequency action services, which was described by Energy Storage Canada as a "action in the appropriate direction," although the trade organization claimed at the time that considerable regulative barriers still exist to unlocking the worth of batteries and other storage.