Five years ago in the wake of the massive black-out, Burlington Hydro Inc. began a journey to put the City of Burlington in the forefront of load and outage management technology to protect mission critical assets in the downtown core.

What started largely as a key learning exercise has delivered tangible benefits to the City of Burlington.  The system has delivered a major payback to the community in enhanced reliability and service responsiveness. The most advanced deployment of automation is in the downtown core where the system detects faults and restores power without human intervention.  Joseph Brant Hospital and the Water Treatment Facility are two facilities protected under the halo of the self-healing grid, ensuring continuity of power to vital community services and protecting the environment. Over time the ‘self healing’ attributes of the downtown system will also be expanded city-wide.

In addition to significant economic and societal benefits, the knowledge and leading edge engineering developed through the deployment of the system, gives Burlington Hydro a distinct advantage in broader scale modernizations. Electricity reliability and the automated systems that help drive it, provide an important point of differentiation for economic development for Burlington, Halton and the Province.

The switching automation system is viewed as a key building block towards GridSmartCity™.  Burlington Hydro engineers, project leaders and cross functional teams will combine their respective experience and ideas to continue our heritage of innovation. Establishing the best methods for the integration of environmentally-conscious energy solutions and achieving enhanced customer and system interaction over a reliable, responsive and secure framework is paramount.  With this in mind, our deployment of smart meters and in-home energy management devices with respected technology partners will form another key building block of GridSmartCity™.

Local electricity utilities are experiencing a renaissance of sorts becoming focused on rethinking, redesigning and reinforcing their grids with intelligence. Building on the experiences gained through the switching automation system, and, our demonstrated capability using emerging technologies to our customers’ advantage, Burlington Hydro will play a leading role in the transformation.