BluWave-ai launches Ontario EV charging grid project

BluWave-ai and four Ontario utilities companies have launched a province-wide project to manage electric vehicle charging and electricity demand on local distribution grids. 

The project brings together Oshawa Power, Oakville Hydro, Enova Power and Essex Powerlines as Ontario prepares for electric vehicle growth from about 300,000 today to a projected 500,000 by 2029, according to BluWave-ai's studies.

The system is designed to use connected vehicles to ease pressure on substations and transformers while supporting the wider provincial grid operated by the Independent Electricity System Operator.

The rollout builds on two and a half years of operational work for BluWave-ai's EV Everywhere platform in Canada. It also follows earlier demand response trials with Hydro Ottawa, where charging pauses were coordinated across several vehicle brands to reduce local congestion on the electricity network.

BluWave-ai traces the origins of the work to a CAD $4.8 million commercialisation project backed by the Independent Electricity System Operator's Grid Innovation Fund and supported by the Ontario Energy Board. That project focused on using EVs as a form of managed distributed storage on the grid.

The announcement comes as electricity distributors in Ontario consider how to absorb rising vehicle charging demand without relying solely on conventional network upgrades.

BluWave-ai said a fleet of 500,000 electric vehicles in Ontario could add one to two gigawatts of evening demand, alongside about four gigawatts of expected utility-scale battery charging. Looking further down the line, the IESO projects a fleet of 11.5 million EVs by 2050.

BluWave-ai said the system can communicate directly with vehicles from a range of carmakers, including Tesla, Kia, Hyundai, GM, Ford, Volvo, BMW, Jaguar, Mini and Porsche. It said that interoperability is central to creating a broad enough pool of flexible charging demand for local utilities and system operators.

One issue highlighted by the company is the so-called "timer peak", when large numbers of drivers set their cars to begin charging as cheaper overnight tariffs start. During tests, the system met target instructions in full and cut peak demand by as much as 32 per cent by coordinating those charging loads.

"EV capex is paid for by consumers, whereas front-of-the-meter batteries are either paid for by utilities or capitalized by IPPs with utility commitments to long-term contracts, so EVs are very attractive from a capital angle. Regardless, by combining EV Everywhere with our Energy Storage Autopilot, our platform can aggregate the entire pool of EVs and BESS assets as a large energy storage base readily available for utilities and system operators. Our software system demonstrated the capacity to reduce peak EV charging loads by up to 35% and by 21.7% on average," said Alex Linchieh, Director of Product Management at BluWave-ai

BluWave-ai also said average opt-out rates were four per cent, which it described as a sign that drivers generally accepted managed charging as long as vehicles still reached the requested state of charge by departure time.

Ahead of the launch, the company published figures arguing that electric vehicle aggregation could be far cheaper than utility-scale battery storage for some grid management tasks. It said the approach was about 55 times more capital-efficient than deploying an equivalent amount of utility battery storage, and estimated deferred infrastructure value at CAD $2.3 million to CAD $7.9 million per 1,000 vehicles, depending on local conditions.

"When just 33% of Canada's current 1 million EVs get on the platform, it offers grids across the country approximately 2.5 GW of power capacity and 20 GWh of storage capacity, enough to power the entire British Columbia grid for two hours," said Devashish Paul, CEO and Founder of BluWave-ai. "We can balance local substation constraints and the bulk IESO grid simultaneously, turning a potential grid liability into a massive distributed battery as Ontario scales toward half a million EVs. Once the grid gets to 500,000 EVs, this puts an additional 1-2 GW of load on the grid in the evenings, on top of 4 GW of expected utility-scale battery charging."