We are really pioneering here. We are on the bleeding edge.
From my interview with Shane Fraser, May 2026
EPCOR's doing something really interesting at the Meadows Recreation Centre. They're installing 14 ultra-fast EV chargers capable of up to 400 kW.
But what's interesting isn't the chargers themselves, but the grid technology enabling them. It's called DERMS.
I sat down with Shane Fraser from EPCOR to dig into how it works. Watch the full interview.
So what's a DERMS?
It's a distributed energy resource management system. So, DER management system. And DERs include things like EV chargers, but also solar panels, smart thermostats, batteries. They're just effectively a piece of software that coordinates how energy and power gets used at sites.
From my interview with Shane Fraser, May 2026
What's unique about this project and what makes it kind of a first of a kind is that it's actually tying the control system, the utility DERMS, directly to the user's DERMS. And by making that link, what we can do is we can throttle the site in response to what's happening in the grid in real time.
From my interview with Shane Fraser, May 2026
So, when we're sweltering in that brutal August heat wave weekend and everyone's blasting their AC and causing grid alerts, the charging site can intelligently throttle back and pull the grid back from the brink.
Built for the worst case
This matters because currently everything must be built, overbuilt, for that worst-case scenario.
Because right now when we build the grid, you know, if we have a site that comes in and says I want a megawatt of EV charging, we make sure the grid is built to support that megawatt of EV charging at all times. Again, and I think you're onto it here, the idea that we can actually minimize that infrastructure, and that's where the cost savings comes from, right? For the vast majority of the day and many, many days of the year, there's actually excess capacity because we have built up to that peak worst-case scenario.
From my interview with Shane Fraser, May 2026
This means cheaper connections, less costly infrastructure, and potentially way more chargers getting built.
Not just chargers
But it goes far beyond EV charging. Industrial sites, big commercial buildings, manufacturing, they all pay to upgrade and maintain for the peak load that they might only use 5% of the time.
This is a test run for a smarter electrical grid that we get more value out of the infrastructure we've already invested in.
This project is honestly Edmonton in a nutshell.
We're quiet and unassuming, but in the background, we're doing some really cool pioneering s---.
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