SaskPower planning for electric vehicles

As Teslas, IONIQs, and LEAFs become more popular in Saskatchewan, SaskPower is working on how to incorporate electric vehicles (EVs) into its plans for the future.

Nathan Hoffart, manager of customer solutions at SaskPower, said meeting electricity demand is one of the key components of managing a grid. “SaskPower has to manage its supply in real time with what our customers are demanding from the grid, and electric vehicles, they don’t change that. It just adds another variable to the equation that SaskPower has to manage,” said Hoffart.

“SaskPower has been sort of adapting and accommodating customers’ needs for electricity for 100 years and that’s not going to change anytime in the future.”

Hoffart said SaskPower is continuing to expand its generation capacity with things like solar, wind and natural gas.

Currently, SaskPower is still deep in the information gathering and pre-planning phase so there aren’t yet answers to a lot of questions. “We’re evaluating the data we have, we’re making forecasts, we’re planning for the future, but the decisions about what happens after that are still to be determined,” Hoffart said.

Questions include whether there will be different price structures to incentivize people to charge their vehicles outside of peak hours — Hoffart said the company hasn’t committed to or thought about changes to billing — or whether there will have to be changes to how service connections to homes are built.

Hoffart did say SaskPower is always looking at its standard design and considering what is appropriate for new homes, and electric vehicles are being taken into that consideration.

Last year, SaskPower engaged in a fact-finding project with current EV owners called Smart Charge Saskatchewan. “It measured their charging behaviours (and) it measured their impacts on the grid.

We worked with that group of EV drivers to try to get a better sense of what EV adoption and what EV charging and driving in the province would have on the distribution grid,” said Hoffart.

The Crown is still evaluating and analyzing the data from that program. SaskPower is also watching other jurisdictions that are further along in EV adoption to see what it might have to change or add.

“We’ve got the opportunity to kind of look at what other jurisdictions are doing – learn from the things that other jurisdictions are already doing and learning about and we can sort of take our cues based on how this unfolds in Saskatchewan,” said Hoffart.

SaskPower has some programs in place already. It’s partnered with EnerCan to encourage third parties to install electric vehicle charging stations along Saskatchewan’s busier highways.

“(That’s) to be able to provide some accessibility for customers interested in considering an EV, trying to remove some barriers and make it more of an option, more of a feasible option that those customers could use,” said Hoffart.

The current project is looking for 20 locations and Hoffart said SaskPower wants to see how this goes before committing to doing more.

According to SGI, not even one per cent of the registered vehicles in Saskatchewan are electric (955 out of 994,558 registered). The number has grown by 21 times in the last five years (from 45 in 2017).

But because uptake on electric vehicles is so low in Saskatchewan — lagging behind other provinces, as Hoffart put it — SaskPower doesn’t think the province will hit a tipping point in a need for big changes in the next few years. Hoffart said the company is still expecting a gradual increase.