Most commercial electricity bills charge twice: once for the energy used, and once for the single highest peak of demand in the month. A fifteen-minute spike — chillers, ovens and EV chargers all running at once — can set the demand charge for the whole month. A battery installed behind the meter exists to erase exactly that spike.
The idea is simple. The battery charges overnight, when electricity is cheap and the building is quiet, and discharges during the few hours when the building's load peaks. The grid sees a flatter building; the building sees a smaller bill. Unlike turning equipment off, nothing in the building changes: the lights stay on, the chillers keep running, and the occupants notice nothing. The flexibility is stored, not improvised.
What makes the economics work in Canada is that several provinces now pay a large share of the battery itself — in exchange for the right to call on it a few days a year.
In British Columbia, BC Hydro's Energy Storage Incentive covers up to 80% of eligible project costs for commercial and small industrial customers on a distribution rate with a working smart meter. The minimum system is 25 kW. In return, the customer signs a 10-year agreement: BC Hydro may dispatch the nominated portion of the battery for up to four hours, twice a day, during demand response events — about 18 to 20 days a year in practice — and the battery powers the customer's own building during those events rather than exporting to the grid. Connectivity runs through BC Hydro's Distributed Energy Resource Management System (DERMS), using IEEE 2030.5.
Ontario takes a market route. The Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) runs an annual Capacity Auction, where demand response resources — including batteries — compete to provide standby capacity and earn capacity payments. Large customers can also use the Industrial Conservation Initiative (ICI), which rewards shifting load away from the five hours of highest provincial demand each year, since those hours set the Global Adjustment charge. And the Save on Energy Peak Performance program pays commercial and institutional buildings to cut HVAC load during summer peaks — a battery makes that cut without touching a thermostat.
In Quebec, a battery can backstop participation in Hydro-Québec's Gestion de la demande de puissance program, whose GDP Latitude and GDP Engagement options reward customers who reduce load during winter peak events. The battery discharges while the building's own equipment keeps running, so the curtailment is real even when comfort cannot be compromised.
Sizing is where most projects go wrong. A battery sized to the building's nameplate peak is money wasted; a battery sized to the actual peaks — read from a year of 15-minute interval data — pays back years sooner. The right questions are unglamorous: how high is the peak, how long does it last, and how often does it happen? A two-hour spike needs a very different battery from a six-hour plateau. Battery life matters too: warranties are usually counted in cycles or years, and a battery cycled daily for peak shaving ages differently from one kept in reserve for outages. And listed equipment (UL 9540) plus a proper interconnection review are part of the project, not an afterthought.
The other decision is orchestration. A battery on its own can shave a peak; a battery coordinated with the building's other flexible loads — chillers pre-cooled before the peak, EV chargers throttled during it — can shave a bigger one with a smaller battery. That is the job of an energy management platform: Tenergen OS, for example, treats the battery as one flexible load among others, deciding hour by hour which asset should carry the peak. The battery becomes the last resort, not the first.
For a building owner, the starting point costs nothing: a year of interval data, the demand-charge line on the bill, and the incentive program in your province. If the peaks are short, sharp and expensive — and in most of Canada, they are — a battery in the basement may be the cheapest negawatt you can buy.