Alberta’s Premier Danielle Smith says one of the reasons the province has hit pause on renewable energy is that the electrical system needs reliable backup generation, like natural gas plants that can supply power 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The government of Alberta announced a six-month moratorium on larger renewable energy projects like wind and solar on Aug. 3, and has been criticized by the renewable industry for doing so with virtually no warning.
Ms. Smith said the province hit pause because it has 23,000 megawatts of wind and solar projects waiting for approval but not enough conventional power to take over when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining.
“In the winter, we had several times where the grid almost failed, because we didn’t have enough power and you can’t call up wind and solar on demand,” Ms. Smith said on her radio call-in show on Aug. 5.
“We had times where even though we have 5,000 megawatts of installed wind and solar, there were two days in the winter where it was producing less than 100 megawatts of power,” she said.
Ms. Smith said the solution is to have enough natural gas plants producing electricity to take over on those calm, cloudy days.
‘Bottomed Out’
The numbers appear to back up her argument. The Alberta Electric System Operator (AESO) produces minute-by-minute numbers indicating where Alberta’s electricity is coming from.Over the long weekend of Aug. 5–7, there were times when wind generation “bottomed out” in Alberta, according to Brian Zinchuk, who runs Pipeline Online, an energy industry news website covering Western Canada.
“So on Saturday, it was a pretty low day. It was around 100 megawatts throughout much of the day. And then on Sunday, it dropped to 31 megawatts out of 3853 [megawatt capacity]. … On Monday, most of the day, wind generation was around 100 megawatts. So that’s less than 1 percent to 3 percent [of installed wind power capacity] for three days in a row. … It’s effectively nothing,” Mr. Zinchuk said.
At the same time, he said, a couple of times, wind power in neighbouring Saskatchewan dropped to zero.
“This shows the tremendous variability of wind, but also shows that numerous times it can happen where wind goes to absolutely zero, or just above zero. And this was an area running from Pincher Creek, Alberta, all the way to Moosomin [Saskatchewan]. That’s an area the size of the width of France,” said Mr. Zinchuk.
There were also times when the numbers were better.
Around 1 p.m. on Aug. 7, solar was producing 1,105 megawatts of electricity, which was more than 85 percent of Alberta’s total solar capacity.
Reliability Issues
Electrical grids, the system of power lines that keep a province running, work best when there is significant base load generation—a gas, coal, or nuclear plant that keeps chugging along, hour after hour, producing a stable and reliable flow of electricity.“Risk is unacceptable in all scenarios if … gas units exit the market and are not replaced by supply with similar operating characteristics,” the report warns.
“Other aspects of reliability such as ramping capability, inertia, frequency response and system fault response are likely to be negatively impacted by a net-zero transformation, but further study to fully assess impacts and mitigation is required,” the report adds.
And if an electrical grid is less reliable, the result can be a blackout—such as what Texas experienced in February 2021 during a major winter storm.
Ms. Smith told her radio audience that one area where Alberta seems to have common ground with the federal government is moving to small modular nuclear reactors to produce power.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “believes small modular nuclear is going to be one of the solutions for us [to] lower emission power grid,” she said. “I suspect what will happen is that you will see either a First Nations community or you will see one of the large industrial operations up in the oilsands will be the first to pioneer some of the small modular nuclear.”
