Above: BlueGrid partnered with electric motor manufacturer Evoy and aluminum boat manufacturer ABCO to demonstrate a working model of vessel-to-grid technology in Halifax, Nova Scotia. BlueGrid Technology photo
BlueGrid Technology is trying to solve three problems at once — reducing the carbon footprint of Canada’s fishery, allowing for more capacity in the country’s power grid and helping fish harvesters earn extra income in the off-season.
As many companies turn their sights towards green technologies to lower the carbon footprint in a variety of industries, Halifax-based BlueGrid is tackling the emissions from the fishing industry. Currently, the global fishing fleet produces the same amount of greenhouse gasses as 45 million cars.
BlueGrid was started in 2016 as a software company working in telecommunications by CEO Andrew Boswell and CTO James Craig. In 2021, with the addition of COO Trevor Hennigar, the company was exploring new spaces to apply their knowledge.
“The three of us, through a lot of discovery and soul searching around what the biggest opportunity was for the company, really started looking at marine electrification as a space that was going to move quickly for all the same reasons on land with cars, busses and trucks,” said Hennigar.
Specifically, BlueGrid noticed a twofold problem in the intersection of marine electrification and the demands imposed on electricity grids worldwide — vessels need to go electric, and the world needs more ways to store excess energy. According to BlueGrid, for the entire planet to transition to net zero energy sources like wind and solar, the capacity for energy storage would need to reach over 15 terawatt-hours worldwide.
BlueGrid’s solution, simply put, is to turn boats into small power plants with vessel-to-grid technology. Vessel-to-grid allows for any electric or hybrid-electric vessel to connect bi-directionally to the power grid to charge their batteries when power is in lower demand and feed energy into the grid when the demand for energy is high.
“Power can go both ways. Power can be taken from the battery and onto shore, whether that goes from the battery on the boat to the immediate site; that’s kind of like V2B — vehicle to building — or whether it goes right onto the utility grid, which is V2G,” said Hennigar. “V2G is really the ability to take power from the electricity grid, put it in the boat, but also take electricity off the battery on the boat and put it back on to the grid when the grid needs it most.”
Oceans North, a charity that advocates for marine conservation and climate change mitigation, released a study that showed Nova Scotia’s lobster fleet is a prime candidate for converting to battery-electric propulsion systems. Hennigar said this can be taken a step further, with most inshore vessels in Atlantic Canada being eligible for electric conversion.
He said BlueGrid estimated the energy storage potential of Atlantic Canada’s fishing fleet, which accounts for all inshore vessels being fully electric while mid-shore and offshore vessels would be hybrid-electric, at around six gigawatt hours or six million kilowatt hours.
“The majority of those boats are idle when the utility grids need energy storage the most — in the winter months when utility is hitting their times of peak demand and need access to power to get through their coldest days of the year and can’t keep up with supply,” said Hennigar. “Even in the summer, there are some summer nights where there’s a lot of renewable energy being produced in this region where they have too much production of renewable energy and they don’t have enough demand for that supply, so they need somewhere to put that energy.”
Hennigar readily admits that the conversion to electrically propelled vessels does not come cheaply. Overall, a battery-powered vessel costs more than a diesel vessel. He said that over time, as battery technology matures for on-land vehicles, the price of batteries has and will continue to be driven down. In the meantime, BlueGrid’s technology aims to offer a solution to offset some of these costs. By supplying power back into the grid and being paid for this service by the utility company, the owner of a BlueGrid-equipped vessel would be able to recoup some of these costs.
“We strongly believe that the revenue that comes from vessel-to-grid services can help improve the operating model for those boats and effectively reduce the cost of the transition and allow a vessel owner to have an improved financial investment decision in their vessel,” said Hennigar.
In the future, BlueGrid would like to see their technology implemented worldwide. Hennigar said that for the environmental and financial benefits of vessel-to-grid to be utilized on a global scale, a key factor in the transition will be the data, intelligence and software provided from companies like BlueGrid. So far, BlueGrid Technology has made headway in the United Kingdom, British Columbia and the United States.
“That’s the role that we play. We play the role of enabling and optimizing this new relationship between plug-in electric boats and electricity grids, not only in Atlantic Canada, but abroad. We recently got awarded an Ocean Supercluster project that will see us applying our software and data in the United Kingdom,” said Hennigar. “We see Atlantic Canada as a really important place for us to prove our technology. We have the ecosystem here to support us and we have a vibrant and critical marine sector here, but we are thinking globally.”
