The pilot, run jointly by The Atmospheric Fund, Optiwatt and Dunsky, seeks to gain new insights on load management from up to 2,000 drivers

A new smart charging pilot program — the largest such pilot run to date in Canada — is looking to understand how to manage the impact of electric vehicle charging on grids.

The Atmospheric Fund (TAF) is teaming up with Optiwatt, a U.S.-based telematics managing charging platform and Dunsky Energy + Climate Advisors to monitor the charging habits of up to 2,000 participants in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA).

“A lot of planning studies released in recent years have talked about this exponential increase in EV adoption and what that’s going to mean for the electricity grid,” says Aakash Harpalani, Director, Clean Energy at TAF, in an interview with Electric Autonomy.

“What we’re hoping to prove through this program is if you manage the adoption of these [EVs] in a small way, you can actually move a bunch of that demand to different times of the day and really limit that impact on the grid.”

Building the pilot

The Atmospheric Fund spearheaded the launch of this smart charging pilot as part of its mission to fund high-impact climate solutions aimed at building low-carbon, equitable cities in the GTHA.

According to Harpalani, TAF’s focus for this pilot is to explore “the potential for peak shifting off the peak periods,” with the goal of using that data to help utilities and system operators plan how these resources can be integrated into their future strategies.

The pilot, funded with a $300,000 grant from TAF, began in April 2024 and will run until December. So far, 1,200 participants have enrolled, says Harpalani. Drivers in the program will save up to 70 per cent off their usual charging costs.

Last year, Optiwatt conducted a similar smart charging pilot in rural Alberta involving 600 participants. For the GTHA pilot, Optiwatt will once again use its dedicated phone app to manage participants’ EV charging during periods with off-peak and cheaper electricity rates.

As part of the pilot testing phase, Optiwatt is conducting demand response events, where signals are sent to vehicles on the platform to shift energy usage to off-peak times to optimize the grids’ performance.

Dunsky helped design the pilot with Optiwatt. The Montreal-based consulting firm will also compile and analyze the data once the pilot is complete and publish its findings in a report.

Scaling up

What sets the GTHA pilot with TAF apart from other smart charging pilots is its emphasis on scale, explains Simone Hacikyan, a consultant at Dunsky.

“This is happening in the EV market in general right now, where we are starting to cross more into the early majority of EV adopters. It’s a bigger group of people more likely to just want things to work and with a lower tolerance for some of the hiccups in this industry,” says Hacikyan.

“By getting thousands of people…we can prove potentially that the technology or the approach to load management works. And therefore it’s more likely to work for the even broader population once we get EV adoption into even higher reaches.”

Hacikyan also highlights another critical aspect of the pilot’s scale: its potential impacts on local distribution companies (LDCs).

“We did a number of interviews with LDCs in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area. That was really helpful because it illuminated that LDCs are at different stages of experimentation, learning and grasping of these [smart charging and load management] concepts,” says Hacikyan.

Some LDCs have already conducted their own pilots, while others have not begun to explore this space.

“We really based the design of the pilot on where all of those LDCs were at and what we thought would be the most helpful for them when we have the results” to encourage them to conduct additional or larger pilots and help spur experimentation in this space, says Hacikyan.

Pilot predictions

By the end of the pilot, TAF and Dunsky aim to prove two hypotheses.

“Our hypothesis that we’re going to test is that we can A: shift load effectively and show that there is a peak reduction from EV charging; and B: that that has little to no impact on the EV drivers. If we achieve both of those, then I think we’re in a stellar place,” says Hacikyan.

The other key factor is determining the required costs.

“That is an important one because you have to compare running a program like this to sort of more traditional solutions like building out new transmission or distribution or building a new battery storage plant somewhere in the province,” says Harpalani.

The final report on the pilot will be published next year.