Japan's Solar-Plus-Storage Industry Gains Toehold In Canada

Tabuchi Electric, a power electronics manufacturer based in Osaka, Japan, is installing a fleet of about thirty solar-plus-storage systems at homes in Ontario, Canada.

Tabuchi’s EneTelus Intelligent Battery System (EIBS) generates power from solar panels and stores it onsite for use at any time. The first EIBS system in Ontario came online a few days before Thanksgiving.

The solar-plus-storage systems were installed as part of a pilot program sponsored by Oshawa Power and Utilities, a utility company based in the city of Oshawa, Ontario. Japan’s New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization is providing partial funding for the pilot program.

The EIBS platform bundles a lithium-ion battery and a multi-string inverter with solar power panels. The bi-directional inverters allow the system to store power generated by the solar panels as well as power supplied by the electric grid.

The EIBS system can store about 10 kilowatt-hours of electricity, which is roughly the amount needed to power a typical home for about three days.

The solar-plus-storage system is designed to operate in multiple modes depending on a customer’s preference. The default operating mode mixes and matches self-generated power, grid-sourced power and storage to maximize energy cost savings based on energy market conditions.

Tabuchi, which started out in the transformer business, began making inverters in 1995 and launched the EneTelus line of solar products in 2011.

The solar industry has been a boon for Tabuchi’s business.

Tabuchi shipped more than one million solar inverters in 2014. More than 1.5 gigawatts of the company’s solar inverters were installed last year in Japan, according to the company’s most recent annual report.

On November 23, Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) awarded contracts to five companies, including subsidiaries of Ameresco , SunEdison and NextEra Energy , for nine utility-scale energy storage projects totaling 16.75 megawatts (MW). The IESO contracts are part of an ongoing effort to integrate energy storage technologies into the region’s wholesale market.

Energy storage has the potential to provide a range of real-time grid balancing services. Under some conditions, it may also be able to reduce grid congestion, mitigate the impact of variable resources like solar and wind and avoid or defer major capital investments needed to maintain reliability.

Although small-scale storage projects like Tabuchi Electric’s EIBS system are not part of the IESO program, that may eventually change. If it does, the energy storage market could prove to be an even bigger boon for Tabuchi and other companies like the Panasonic than the solar market.