Projects

Bedrock Energy Centre, Bayfield

A 198-acre plant site in Huron County, east of Goshen Line, roughly six kilometres from Bayfield. Two Hydro One 500 kV circuits already cross it. That single fact is why the site exists as a project at all: the connection is there, and no new transmission line has to be built across anybody’s land to reach it.

Beneath it are three Silurian pinnacle reefs: porous rock formations more than 500 metres down, below the aquifers, inside natural seals that held natural gas under pressure for 450 million years. The Ontario Energy Board de-designated them from gas storage in 2019.

What the centre is designed to do

• 1,300 megawatts of generation and storage on one site
• Up to 1,000 megawatts of export capacity into the provincial grid
• A 500 megawatt connected campus, served behind the meter
• Eight hours of long-duration storage, and a three-day emergency reserve

The arrangement matters more than any single number in it. Generation on site is more than twice the campus load, which is what lets the centre offer a continuous customer firm supply and sell capacity to the province from the same switchyard.

Phased, not all at once

Batteries and a first modular phase of the campus in 2029. Firm generation in 2030. Compressed air storage in 2031. Each phase stands on its own connection and earns before the next one is committed. That is how a project of this size gets built without asking anyone to take all of the risk at the start.

Stanley

The second reservoir position, held since 2017 and not yet developed. It is the reason Bedrock is a portfolio rather than a single site: the engineering, the regulatory path and the operating knowledge built at Bayfield carry across to it.

It also does not have to carry air. A reservoir that can hold compressed air can hold natural gas, which is what these pools were licensed for until 2019, and restoring that approval at Stanley is part of the plan. One pool storing energy as air and the other storing gas is a combination very few sites in Ontario could offer.

Where it stands

A Technical Feasibility Study was filed with the IESO on 22 October 2026 and the study is now under way. Transmission feasibility with Hydro One is complete. Environmental assessment work and consultation with five First Nations are in progress.