Insights – 2022 Pioneer in Energy Storage Award Recipient
By Annette Verschuren,
CEO, NRStor Inc
It was a thrill to receive the Pioneer of Energy Storage Award last year. What a journey it’s been since we started our company in 2012. Energy storage was not a common concept back then and there was literally no market to sell the service into.
Energy storage will change the face of every power grid in the world.
We pioneered as a flywheel technology developer with Temporal Power and again with a fuel free compressed air energy storage facility with Hydrostor. They were small but significant projects that we negotiated with the IESO. With our MPower company we have been installing powerwalls since 2014 across the country. We built out our Commercial & Industrial NRStor business, which was eventually sold to Blackstone, in 2020. We learned a lot, made mistakes, solved them, pivoted, and kept focused and determined to grow our company.
The industry needs to continue to innovate on business models to extract the most value from this new asset class to benefit ratepayers, and share assets for best and highest use.
One of our proudest moments for NRStor however was closing the Oneida project, standing next to our development partner Six Nations of the Grand River, a six-year development journey. Aecon worked side by side with us over the last 4 years and then Northland Power and Aecon joined us as our equity partners. Northland Power is the major shareholder of the Oneida project and are strong and engaged partners. The Canada Investment Bank and NRCAN were instrumental in getting this deal done.
Unlocking the indigenous potential to power Canada’s net zero economy is what Oneida is all about. I challenge the business community to treat indigenous potential not as an ESG/CSR file but a core strategy. We need to provide equity opportunity for indigenous communities for sustainable economic and social growth.
I also commend the provincial government and the IESO for moving energy storage ahead on the agenda. Ontario will be home to the largest energy storage facilities in Canada. We always say that the regions with the most storage will have the most flexibility in how energy is distributed and traded. The electricity/energy market will double and triple over the next decade.
But there is more work to do. We must do our best to avoid new investments in carbon producing assets. We must work to enhance the supply chain to get Canada’s valuable minerals extracted, refined to the highest value product to feed the supply chain needs of batteries globally, maximizing our country’s participation and value creation.
We have to deploy more storage on a decentralized basis to help us maximize the use of our constrained power grid and avoid needing to overbuild our systems to meet peak needs – we can lower ratepayer costs if we do this right, with all forms of storage, while we support and enable the economy to fully decarbonize itself.
And on a personal note, these are such exciting times. Energy Storage Canada plays a critical role in defining the pathway of the energy storage industry. What a great organization! I’m proud to have pushed for the creation of this organization in the early years…… you are great pioneers and innovators.