Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

Ontario is moving toward integrating power and gas supply networks to achieve high performance hybrid energy supply to cover regional energy demands in terms of electricity, thermal, fuel, and water, supply technologies and scenarios while optimizing environmental impacts and overall costs. The objective of the proposed project is to design and build the modeling framework for an Integrated Ontario Energy Model for gas and power integration using a higher level aggregation of the IESO nodal model used for LMP (locational marginal pricing) in the province. It will provide valuable insights for gas-electric integration in Ontario, particularly for Power-to-Gas deployments. The proposed modeling will provide hourly simulation of Ontario energy grids using IESO nodes, which include Richview, Atikokan, Pineportage and Thunderbay (Northwest), Andrews, Canyon and NPIroqfalls (North), Ottawa (TAOHSC), Saunders (Toronto), Darlington (Essa), BruceB, Nanticoke (South West), Beck2 (Niagara) and Lambton (West). It will incorporate all interties with Manitoba, Michigan, NY and Quebec, and create aggregate generator objects located at each node (nuclear, wind, etc.) with dispatch rules(e.g. min run rate, variable dispatch, etc.). Different overlay gas infrastructures will be studied for each node and add aggregated gas storage at the Southwestern most node. In addition, it will incorporate major gas interconnections with the TransCanada mainline, Sarnia and Marcellus shale at Niagara and Eastern Ontario. Moreover, the Ontario model will include power loads and gas loads at each node with hierarchical levels of aggregation industrial, commercial and residential or a combination, and with all possible model libraries for Power-to-Gas plant technologies. The proposed Ontario energy model will be verified against historical data and used to predict the 2014-2015 Ontario energy demand. Hydrogen production and supply chains will be evaluated as part of the proposed energy model to compare with natural gas options and optimized based on lifecycle-based performance indicators. GIS data analysis will be used for gas-electricity grids as mapped to loads and regions in Ontario.