On Dec. 31, New Year’s Eve, it was cold across Alberta and Saskatchewan. On that day, TransAlta, one of Alberta’s largest power generating companies, announced it had completed its conversion from coal to natural gas. It was also shutting down the Highvale coal mine, west of Edmonton.
Their release noted, “In aggregate, TransAlta has retired 3,794 megawatts of coal-fired generation capacity since 2018 while converting 1,659 megawatts to cleaner burning natural gas. This achievement, coupled with TransAlta’s growing and diversified generating portfolio, including hydro, wind, solar and battery assets, helps position TransAlta to be a highly competitive provider of reliable, low and zero-emitting electricity for customers in Canada, the United States, and Australia.”
About that wind and solar:
The AESO website revealed some literally cold, hard facts that weren’t in the TransAlta press release. As of noon, the TransAlta Keephills Unit 1, which was scheduled to retire that very day, was still putting out 302 megawatts, of its 395 megawatt rated capacity. At the same time, Alberta’s entire fleet of 13 grid-connected solar facilities, rated at 736 megawatts, was contributing 58 megawatts to the grid. The 26 wind farms, with a combined rated capacity of 2,269 megawatts, was feeding the grid 18 megawatts.
We have the most cowardly conservative politicians since Neville Chamberlain. And I don’t think even Chamberlain would have been so stupid as to shutter Britain’s energy superstructure at his enemy’s request.
NUTS.
As the saying goes. People “will” die because of this.
This has all the ominous markings of a “Taggart Tunnel” disaster, where sensible people can see the consequences of a rash and ill-conceived decision but are powerless to stop it.
that’s a feature, not a bug, to the climate ghouls.
Their deaths will be ruled as due to … “extreme” weather and temperatures … caused by CAGW. You see … even when the Warmistas directly cause the deaths … the responsibility will LIE with CAGW. Every bad thing is caused by CAGW. In the same way EVERY death is a COVID death. See how this works?
Fuck Em, let the idiots freeze and starve. Meanwhile those of us that don’t bother ourselves with what tyrants write on paper, will continue to burn wood, coal, or grain in our home and shop stoves, and will continue to burn copious amounts of purple diesel letting our trucks idle for non farm related purposes.
High-pressure weather systems in the winter bring lots of sun (at a low angle) and little or no wind, just when energy demands are at their highest. The clear skies also let the earth’s heat radiate off into space at night, so it gets real cold. In the summer that same system will also result in little or no wind, and the high angle of the sun and the clear skies will result in lots of heat, and airconditioning demands lots of electricity.
Politicians don’t consult meteorologists or engineers. They consult people like Greta.
^^this
Hits different (to borrow a phrase from the youth of today) when someone else points it out. Appreciate the intelligent comment.
It’s worse than that Dan. In Ontario (at least) we are now charged a delivery fee, regulatory fees and HST (13% tax) for our electricity on top of the electricity usage fee. So even if you adopted solar (which I have looked into 3 times now) you would still need to be connected to the electrical grid – still paying a monthly hydro bill. And as you expertly point out, when you need solar the most (dead of winter) it is least available.
Excellent!
This winter I was with out power for 24 hours during high winds. Lucky it was when the temperature was about -6C. The linemen did a great job restoring the power the next day. After that experience I picked up a Diesel generator to supply my own power from Richie brothers. Since SaskPower has added so many renewable power sources the grid has not been reliable for me.
I wonder what life will be like in Canada if dear leader in his wishful thinking bans fuels.
I wonder if that would be enough for the west to separate from our masters in the east.
California has now banned private generators. Fortunately, the climate is milder than Alberta but parts get pretty cold.
Remember: The Donner Pass is in California.
Eat your neighbor’s frozen corpse? Recipes please!
Didn’t we already have a Soylent Green thread?
On that thought, Merry Christmas, from Chiron Beta Prime! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=B3DyxaCYlfg
“Get Woke go Broke” is the most popular saying at the moment. I can’t believe that the upper management at Trans Alta have their heads stuck so far up their asses not to see that wind and solar are going to cost massive amounts as the facilities age and wear out. The cleanup costs of wind and solar will be astronomical. In the case of the worn out chemical and carcinogen compounds that the blades and panels consist of, recycling is not possible or extremely expensive. Any company that gets into installing wind and solar should be required to put up a substantial bond to dismantle and safely dispose of the wind and solar equipment when it is no longer operable. There was a lot of whining about abandoned oil wells which are basically just a pipe coming out of the ground. Where are all the greenie goblins now. This is a nightmare in the making.
The CEO of TransAlta is one of Justin’s dipshits. She was parachuted in because she checked the right boxes.
I remember investing in Transalta about ten years ago, but selling it off rather quickly. Probably around the time that the NDP won their election when I sold all stock connected to anything related to Alberta. (Great decision by the way).
Back then Transalta was about 20 bucks a share.
Today it’s about 14 bucks a share.
They don’t have to care since whatever cost are incurred, the rate payer (you) will have to pay the bill. In the meantime, these utility executives will get their excessive compensation and benefits regardless of the damage they do as long they carry forth the will of those who exercise raw political power.
We have the most cowardly Conservative politicians – that they are not even Conservative. The leadership has hijacked the name and the infrastructure to promote their own interests.
Conservatives have been had.
#Let Her Speak
Conservative politicians are traitors. They threw us under the bus to impress the kewl kids.
“conservative” Politicians”…WTF are those ..??
They do not exist in this country with the very odd exception.
Covid, the apparent final nail in our coffins has glaringly shown that to be FACT.
Those in supposed Conservative parties..?? Near 100% fully compliant part of the Leftist cabal.
I call them 65%-ers and I wish I knew who came up with that term. Conservatives pat themselves on the back for giving liberals only 65% of what they ask for and yet think somehow they are winning the war. As they say here, Republicans are just Democrats in the slow lane.
They gave the peados 100% for c-4.
Even those that are touted as being on our side and fighting for us are just a pack of repugnant Globalists. Michelle Rempel-Garner for example, given to us by the media as a huge thorn in The Turd’s side, yet she, like Jagmeet, are one of Klaus Schwab’s highlighted WEF Future World Leaders. In other words, they work for Klaus and the Kabal, not for you and I.
Mr Zinchuk is a good writer and gives a very cogent analysis, but I disagree with him on his one opinion that “We cannot afford to have rolling blackouts in the middle of winter,…”. The only possible way Canadians will learn that we depend on fossil fuels to stay alive is if we have rolling blackouts and people start dying. Nothing else will persuade people. The fanatical Green zealots want to die, so let them, and once enough normal people suffer enough, then there is a slim chance they’ll come to their senses. But facts, logic, math and reason are wasted on them for now. Still a good analysis though.
That won’t work. The story presented by the ever friendly media will be that DESPITE all the new power sources being bought on-line, climate change is causing all the problems, and you were warned that climate change was going to kill people! It’s your own fault! You resisted too much! However, this new tax on warm clothing will go a long way towards helping.
Younger people have never known reliable power. They will be told it was always so. In fact, it used to be much worse before renewables.
Only the really, really stupid will believe that Saskatchewan wasn’t cold before the left invented global warming.
if people start dying , the warmist elites will say that’s the price to pay to save the planet, and that people just have to adjust to reduced access to heat and power.
You know, you have to crack a few eggs to make an omelette.
Rest assured, the global warming elites will be still have 1000000% access to all the power /natural gas/electricity they need. After all, they are in the “vanguard” of saving the planet and for them to do a good job they need to have access to all the power/heat/electricity . Sort of like all those private jets flying to and fro from those annual global warming conferences each year. They are the elites, so they deserve benefits that ordinary folks should never , ever have.
When the global warming elites wind up dead – by the thousands – at the hands of an enraged populace, then and ONLY then will sanity prevail.
The government of Saskatchewan have built a wind farm in the Assiniboia area. I passed through it twice during the last week of Dec when the temps first plunged into the -30’s……..not one blade was turning. There was also little wind that week, which is often during bitter cold spells. So what good are they at producing energy when you really need it ? We all know the answer to that question. When are the western provinces going to tell Trudeau and his green gestapo to put their heads where the sun ………………. .
If a large enough city sits in the dark long enough..
At this point all incentives (free money) is geared towards green.. Its has to collapse onto itself before all the incentives (free money) is geared towards fixing it all..
We call this progress..
Blackie wants billions of trees planted. Perhaps he is going to get people to do it during the winter to stay warm.
More energy expended to cut trees down and chop them into fire wood than there is in planting them. As a race we have been doing that for thousands of years. It is only in the last two hundred and fifty that we have utilized fossil fuels, amazingly enough it is in the last two hundred and fifty that we as a race have made the biggest advancements. I have no problem with those that want to return to the good old days(?), my problem is that in their zeal they are going to pull all of the rest of us back into the Dark Ages if we don’t stop them.
Sorry to disappoint you but Chamberlain has reincarnated as Boris Johnson he is gone completely nuts on the green front with his bitch of a globalist wife pulling the strings.
The greentarded neo-Marxists will just double, triple, quadruple down.
“We just don’t have enuff!” is what they’ll spout with truculence.
Every single one of them is your mortal enemy. Be they butt-plug ignorant or purposely malignant they are a threat.
I hope Wildrose is paying attention. Their platform is being written for them.
Unfortunately, I think the plan is to eventually sell these shuttered infrastructure assets to multinational ogilarchies for pennies on the dollar when we are crying “uncle” and can’t afford to re-open them. The elites win again.
Politicians pivot between stupid, corrupt cowardly and incompetent. With energy policy it’s all four at the same time.
Does anyone know how many good paying jobs, Union or otherwise, that were lost when TransAlta decided to quit coal and go with Nat Gas, wind and solar? I keep hearing our moron politicians spouting about the good paying, abundant green technology jobs, looking at YOU Notley, that are being created, but haven’t seen any advertising for them.
Wretched Knothead definition of job creation is hiring morons to work for the government. Said morons usually vote Dipper.
When Toronto, aka Moronto, awakes one cold morning to freezing temperatures and that ‘Global Warming’ failed to deliver the requisite salvation from our higher latitudes climate will the geniuses that closed and demolished the coal burning power plants seek the assistance of the ‘Gas Genie” ?
http://auctions.bertoiaauctions.com/ItemImages/000000/258A_lg.jpeg
Turn on the oven to heat the house kids.
Use that 100w incandescent light bull to keep a room above freezing.
No pb, I can almost see moron Doug Ford + mayor/mortician John Tory doing a joint session: “Folks, we ask of you to do more! We gonna start with rolling blackouts” etc etc.
Is anyone allowed to say “rolling blackouts” ?
Another fine example of the fall of the west. We’re doing the very opposite of what we should be doing. The great unwashed, including our elites and politicians, are getting more arrogant and dumber. A perfect recipe for destruction from within. Be prepared to pay higher costs for powering and heating your home. Much higher, as these morons pass their losses onto you.
Enough with the Neville Chamberlain myth. Chamberlain played the bad hand he was dealt about as skillfully as he could. He signed a treaty with a tiny chance for peace and a large chance for delay. Then he came home and prepared a degraded England for war. He transitioned a reluctant parliament to Churchill.
The synonym for Quisling you are looking for is Stanley Baldwin.
Chamberlin would have turned England over to Hitler had he not been stopped by cancer.
Like Quebec hydro to replace Ontario’s Nuclear, BC Hydro will provide through the interchange. Go site C.
Speaking of nuclear. David Staples is in a crusade against the federal environment activist, er, minister.
https://twitter.com/DavidStaplesYEG/status/1477657415386501123?s=20
Only in Canada, where the average total energy consumption per person is in excess of 100,000kWh per year, could a government tax carbon and claim to be saving the world.
https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/canada
It stands to reason that as long as we allow unfettered immigration from sub-equatorial countries our demand for energy will increase. Therefore we have only three choices;
a) increase energy production,
b) reduce our energy use,
c) reduce immigration and become self-sustainable with a self sustaining population.
Maintaining the status quo means that we will have to increase energy production. Reducing energy use means reducing our quality of life. Which leaves us with option c). So it’s a no brainer. If that brings out the cries of racist, misogynist or a thousand other labels, before you open your mouths take a moment to think about it. We as a race have been migrating in small numbers for thousands of years. We, now however, are at the tipping point of population growth. Migration is no longer the hardship it has always been, due in part to energy consumption. So we are at the tipping point, if a country cannot sustain it’s population and allows that population to leave and another country allows said population to enter causing larger demands on it’s sustainability, something is going to break.
Maybe the solar panels & wind mills need a booster shot?
Q from a Yank: aren’t the central provinces (Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchowever, NW Territory) essentially “Red State Canada”?
Could this be a “punish your enemies” policy & be the primary objective of JT’s Flying Circus?
Chainsaw, You’re mostly correct, and the great turd JT, does hate us, but it’s deeper than that. The Quebecers have a permanent hate for English Canada as well. They have slowly infiltrated all levels of federal government to the point that Quebecers now run and control the country. A big part of it is that they really don’t care about the country west of Toronto, cuz it ain’t Quebec. We are just an annoying sliver under their fingernail. They do like our tax monies and transfer payments though. From their perspective, that’s all we are good for. Same for gun owners, we mostly don’t vote for Libs or NDP, so we are a good target for the Libs to appease their urban base. A simplistic reply, but sadly, we have become a simplistic stupid nation as well. (sigh)
We don’t need the feds to screw us over when our provincial governments are so eager to do it themselves. The so called conservative governments of the prairies are a serious disappointment.
Climate change science fiction writers want to make Alberta uninhabitable.
The author parroted Scott Moe’s assertion that wind power is getting real cheap now. I wish these “experts” would learn that off-grid costs are irrelevant as they are useless in comparing to the actual cost of allowing their priority random purchase to be made useful to a grid. They (wind and solar proponents) should all be responsible for the costs of grid-useable power. When a large utility gets into the act for ESG, rent seeking, virtue signaling or other irrational reasons, they need to show their internal costs of conditioning their unreliables.
Why blame the Politicians for the Green Shi(f)t when they are merely responding to the wishes of the Electorate who are voting on these issues?
If Canadians didn’t want the country to go green they wouldn’t vote for it, and it’s clear that they do.
Blaming right wing parties for not suiciding themselves is what Conservatives always do.
Unfortunately you have to play the game or get portrayed as knuckle dragging Neanderthals.
Take a page from the Liberals and Campaign from the Center/Left but govern from the Right.
Be all for Solar and Wind, but as extra capacity. Work on the technology to improve its efficiency but don’t force reliance upon it.
The combination of solar and gas is far more economical than gas alone?
Back that up with numbers please.
If as much money was granted to private individuals to invest in heating and cooling their homes with geothermal as has been granted to big industry for wind and solar we’d be well on our way to reducing our carbon emissions. Geothermal heating and cooling adoption will keep us out of the caves of our forefathers, where we used to hide away until the sun returned.
This only confirms what I felt yesterday when reading the entire executive summary of the IEA ( International Energy Agency , see link below )
Green energy is very inneficient, will not ” save” the planet, will cause more economic problems and possibly armed conflicts.( China controls 90% of rare earth metals ! )
all this while we will pay more to try to not freeze in our homes…
an excerpt ; ” … A typical electric car requires six times the mineral inputs of a conventional car and an onshore wind plant requires nine times more mineral resources than a gas-fired plant. …”
https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in-clean-energy-transitions/executive-summary
Here in the Pacific Northwest the situation is similar. For the past 3 days wind generation has been nil across the BPA grid.
https://transmission.bpa.gov/Business/Operations/Wind/baltwg.aspx
Surplus power when you don’t need it, no power when you do. What’s not to like?
Heh …
Was on electrical design team for Sundance, Keephills, Sheerness, Genesee … those were them days of plenty.
All gone.
Such is the march of time.
Wonder if they blow them up or keep them of emergency.
TransAlta announced Keephills 1-2-3 are converted to gas. #3 was coal in 2020, last I was there.
Travers solar 400 MW west of Vulcan is said to be going solely to Amazon, for Alberta distribution centers. Guess they will use “alternate” energy at night and winter?
Solar-wind is backed up by existing coal stns in AB. Gas fired is #1
This site shows the energy generation mix and current Net Generation production.
http://ets.aeso.ca/ets_web/ip/Market/Reports/CSDReportServlet
Ain’t no wind or solar at night to charge EV’s, power Amazon, or LRT. Its all unicorns …
Burn, Baby, Burn is the new Drill, Baby, Drill.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/01/02/2021-the-year-the-electric-vehicle-batteries-burned/
The gov virus infects and reveals all progressives. There’s a reason the federal conservatives dropped progressive from their handle, for years believing it meant Tory, but long since forgotten since the days the right centre allied itself behind the non ideologue Stephen Harper.
Now with zero chance of winning the electorate over, unless and until that happens again and a leader emerges to stay stop the insanity of politicians doing science fiction and science bureaucrats doing politics, as witnessed here on the loony left coast, with us as their piñata.
BC at 1.3 covid deaths per day, iow less than one a day, assuming all 1.3 of them died from the virus not with it, another fools errand.
Or it should be. How does that stack up to increased overdoses and suicides? How about violence, lost jobs, hope and swelling anger?
No, they panic us with cases, when they tell us virtually nothing, except we know weaker strains produce more of them, but not deaths.
Compare, for Canada, this year and last. 3 Jan.21 vrs 3 Jan.22 (14 day average): Cases 31.8K v. 7.9K; daily deaths 131 v. 28.
IOW 400% more cases than a year ago, deaths a quarter. That means, for what its worth, mortality rates from covid are falling.
Why the panic then. To retrench back to reasonable positions while giving themselves cover to correct their negligent record.
Fauci admitting children were highly unlikely to be covid hospitalized, not just tested positive much less than flu and colds.
Their final panic was to offer testing to everybody, hoping to juice up cases even further, but poor logistics hurt their cause on that too.
I might be more inclined to believe in the tale of global warming if someone would explain why (as shown by the GISP2 data) the weather in the day of Julius Caesar was about 4F warmer than it is today, or about as warm as the high end estimate of the warmist shamans.