
In December 2024, delegates from Climate Positive Energy and University of Toronto’s Mississauga and St. George campuses visited Alectra’s head office in Mississauga for exclusive access into the utility provider’s control room. The control room is where experts monitor and control safe and reliable operations of the Alectra distribution system, which serves approximately one million homes and businesses across Southern Ontario. Experts from U of T and Alectra discussed the workings of the control room, as well as the potential for a collaboration focused on the changing electricity sector, including its supply and demand challenges, and the positive impact of smart grid systems.
The visit follows discussions between Alectra Utilities, CPE, and University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM) around the creation of a Distribution System Operators (DSO) Centre of Excellence. Focused on modernizing the electrical grid, the Alectra-UTM discussions are an expansion of Alectra’s existing relationship with CPE.
Once created, the Distribution System Operator (DSO) Centre of Excellence will be located at UTM. Supporting the UTM Strategic Plan, the Centre will create opportunities for funded collaborative research in sustainability, engage students in clean energy technologies, promote community-led sustainability, and foster multi-directional learning opportunities. The collaboration will also contribute to UTM’s plans to embed sustainability practices into infrastructure management and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by relying more on renewable energy. The DSO Centre of Excellence will also serve as a living lab on campus for UTM researchers and experts from Alectra to collaborate on multidisciplinary research spanning topics from economics to risk management, policy, engineering, communications, and information technology. The Centre will connect to UTM’s distributed energy resources (DERs) without impacting UTM’s electricity supply or operations. Researchers from U of T’s St. George campus will bring engineering expertise, with UTM PIs involved in all other aspects of the project.
“The DSO Centre of Excellence builds on U of T’s existing research excellence in clean energy through the CPE-led Grid Modernization Centre project, which will enable a variety of green technologies – from electric vehicle charging stations to battery energy storage systems – to be tested and refined before they are integrated into the grid,” said Shatha Qaqish-Clavering, Executive Director of CPE. “The DSO Centre of Excellence will serve as a testing platform of new technologies directly on the Alectra grid. This will expedite technology adoption like never before.”
“We are very excited about what we could achieve through this potential collaboration with UTM,” said Hisham Omara, Vice President, Grid Modernization at Alectra Utilities. “These fundamental questions that are changing the electricity markets are at the heart of the academic research that we envision with UTM.”
The DSO Centre of Excellence will serve as a state-of-the-art hub for electrical grid decarbonization in the Region of Peel and beyond. We look forward to sharing more details about this research partnership as it unfolds.