55 Replies to “Alberta electrical grid alert second time in less than 24 hours, fourth time this month”

    1. Strangest thing I ever saw, OJ. Was driving along side of ’em yesterday, the nice, shiny aluminum looked just like icicles. Very Christmas-y…

  2. The Germans were told to be ready for outages of up to 10 days. Albertans might be in for the same surprise.

  3. Here in the SF Bay Area … it is ILLEGAL to burn wood when the bureaucracy says so.

    https://www.sparetheair.org/

    ILLEGAL!!! Blares the Spare The Air flashing headline
    So you pay $1,000.00/mo to heat your house and fund a massive PG&E workforce all making > $ six figures

    1. Here in central Mexico, 4000 sf house, no furnace or A/C, don’t need either. Electric bill is about $75 per month, same for propane for hot water and cooking. Sunny 300 days per year, could put in solar but with these rates the payback is 10 years so why bother?
      Take that, Ontario Hydro!

        1. Better than some faceless goons from the ‘central collective’ that whittle away your earnings and savings with their incessant stupidity, funding all kinds of idiocracy and possibly the robber, themself, that shows up at your door..

          I can at least respect the person that took the initiative to show up at the door, you may be able to placate them, to get them to leave you alone.

          It’s death by a thousand cuts or one big one… Protection money or taxes..
          At least you are not freezing your a$$ off in the meantime!

        2. Reply to J West
          Ever actually been to Mexico or relying principally on stories from the Toronto Star.

  5. Wind generation: Excess power when you don’t need it, no power when you do.

    Is this a great business plan or what?

    1. It is in Ontario where the wind turbine owners are guaranteed the revenue whether or not the electricity is required. Hence the dumping of excess power to Michigan and New York at somewhere around 3 cents per Kwh. (typically in the evening).

  6. We have zero need for wind or solar – zero. We have ample clean burning hydrocarbons which as a side effect produce plant food.

    We should be using more hydrocarbons not less. CO2 is not a thermostat for the planet.

  7. I think AB should use some of the 1100 years supply of coal that’s available to us. Perhaps Danielle Smith will see the light?
    People from other provinces are moving here, there isn’t enough sunshine or wind here. Perhaps after a winter of paying sky high heating bills with an added carbon tax on everything, a federal election is a good idea too.

    AB’s next provincial election is 29. May 2023
    Call your MLA and ask them politely to pull their head out of their butt, and mention you won’t be donating to anyone’s political party which is set on raising costs of any type.

    1. Coal is being burned right now but there are only 2 or 3 turbines left (Genesee I, II are coal, III is “dual fuel” but probably running coal now). These 3 units have the highest capacity factor of any generation asset in Alberta over pretty much any period you want to pick. Over the last 30 days GenII and III are +99%, Gen 1 is 97%. Plus their fuel costs are probably 1/5 to 1/4 the gas burners. Unfortunately they are all due to be converted to NGas in 2023. GenIII is already there.

      For the last 2 hours the AESO pool price has been $999.99 per MWh (the highest allowable bid) another very expensive month shaping up for electricity prices in Alberta.

    2. You are correct about Alberta coal reserves. There is over twice as much energy stored in Alberta coal reserves as all of Alberta’s other non-renewable energy resources. And much of it is very high grade and low sulfur content. See page 11 of the document in this link. https://open.alberta.ca/dataset/6f220382-b4ae-43f8-b3f9-7c1230e6700e/resource/e7c2f3d2-7e0d-4774-a463-c54c5450a04e/download/4256197-2009-launching-albertas-energy-future-provincial-enregy-strategy-2009-08-27.pdf

      1. And lots of thorium in those coal tailings after being burnt.
        Enough to fuel thorium molten nuke reactors to get even more bang for the buck.
        Thorium tech has been proven to work back in the 50’s and 60’s .
        Was never used cause they couldn’t produce weapons grade boom stuff from it.
        It’s totally reliable and is failsafe in event of a meltdown it will self extinguish, no need for fancy shutdown tech or back up generators like Fukushima.
        It burns mostly all the thorium and leaves very little radioactive waste behind.
        It will reliably fuel our electricity needs till we can crack the fusion nut.

        Coal can also be used to produce synthetic fuel via the German Fisher Trope Process that was used by Nazi Germany to fuel its war machine.
        What’s not to love about coal.

        2. Look, it doesn’t matter how many sensible options you p[ut forward, they are ignored by the green ideologues because they do not want humanity to prosper, in fact they do not want humanity – except themselves of course.

    3. “Call your MLA and ask them politely to pull their head out of their butt…

      Less than 30 minutes ago I sent my MLA another text to that end. I sent one on the second grid alert a couple weeks back and rec’d politispeak in response. PMO…

  10. Marc in Calgary,

    I wonder when D. Smith will finally admit that the Solar Panels and Wind Turbines do not work ( in cold weather) and contribute a very low per percentage of power to the grid for the rest of the year. It is a waste of money just so Alberta will look “good” to the Black Face Prime Minister – Just – in tRUDEau.

    If private companies want to build them. great – but no grants or subsides.

    Nuclear Power is the best way to go to produce electricity – they don’t need the large plants, but smaller ones like they have on submarines. Four of them would help if built near: Edmonton, Calgary, Grande Prairie and Lloydminster. Money spent on these will provide ample power as compared to “Green Power. “

    1. Can’t use Sub type nuclear plants on land as typically there isn’t enough water around for their use…

      Now if you wanted to sink them in the bottom of a lake somewhere, that’s a different story

  11. We need penalties applied to the wind and solar producers if they don’t produce what they claimed that they would. They should have to pick up the price of the imported power that wind and solar can’t supply what Power producers claimed they would. Insert it into a hard contract. Why should the taxpayers of Alberta subsidize these, “useless when you really need them”, dreams and have to suffer and pay more when they fail. Period!

    3. All the solar plants have a nameplate capacity, but never ever meet that, not the least of which is that you lose ~3% just by installing the panels

    4. Good idea….but we need to do the same thing for politicians who push those things. When load shedding becomes necessary, those areas which elected politicians that support those “unreliables” should be first to be blacked out. That is, immediately after the power to the homes of those politicians is shut off and government operations are also shut down. They are the reason for the blackouts….THEY should be the first to feel the effects of their stupidity.

  12. Keep your gas tanks full Liberals are going to crash the electrical grids everywhere, because Everything Liberals Touch Turns To Shit. ELTTTS Law.

  13. Call an election now. Does Alberta love the NDP approach to energy or Danielle Smith’s version?

  14. Hey.
    Viva Frei is live streaming the Kari Lake Election Contest Trial with Barnes right now.

    1. Well it’s “fuel” is free, therefore it should be cheap, except when you take into account:

      -Contracts that force consumers to purchase intermittent wind before any other stable souce
      – Tax credits and incentives to force acceptance
      – Long term contracts that don’t include any performance or clean up clauses
      – Changes in land use because the Hundreds of wind turbines you need to replace a single dense conventional power plant
      -graft and corruption involved in awarding contracts to the connected.
      – additional infrastructure to get the distributed intermittent power into the grid
      etc

    2. It still doesn’t look attractive. Something that doesn’t exist is VERY expensive, due to supply and demand. No tax can change that reality. Of course, the ideologues driving this insane policy don’t care about reality, merely sticking it to evil capitalist humans and their industrial society.

  17. Quit bitching everyone, after all wind turbines are producing – at 3.2% of their capacity. Colour me impressed.

    1. Trying to get 418,908 “battery powered” vehicles made for canada in 2025 is going to be an issue…

      And forcing people to buy vehicles that aren’t practical for their needs is a non-starter

      1. The Calgary Herald was crying that the fuel tax relief in Alberta has cost the treasury $1B so far in 2022.
        Sounds good to me!

    2. Did anyone vote for this? No, it is a “regulation” not a law, thus sidesteps all democratic governance principals.

  19. Sitting smug in my little corner of SW Ontario.
    All our power comes from Bruce Nuclear Power.
    Whoops- we still gotta pay for the “green shit”
    Not so smug anymore.

  20. Talking of which, the Feds today announced that by 2030 (7 years hence) 60% of all motor vehicles are mandated to be electric. If they believed this, why haven’t they started building electricity power stations? Imagine 1,000, 000 vehicles in Ottawa. 10 hours of charging, at least, requiring a 7GW worth of power stations. The GTA, with maybe 10 million vehicles, we need 70GW of power generation. Perhaps we should start a building program instead of shutting down coal power.

    Apart from the hubris of it all, in the name of controlling the planet’s temperature, it is pure folly. And, further, completely tyrannical and dictatorial. The government does not have to right to tell us how or when and where to travel. Further still, it cannot centrally plan the economy, even with computers. It can, however, create enormous economic and social hardship with its central planning, see Covid.

    Typical car being 70-100kWh of battery capacity
    https://www.leasefetcher.co.uk/guides/electric-cars/how-many-kwh-to-charge-a-car

  21. Manitoba has an abundance of green hydro electric power, and in the last municipal elections, one of the Winnipeg mayoral candidates wanted to make Winnipeg a solar and wind power envy of the world….Politicians are stupid.

  22. Sitting in the trap shack out here in the buck brush. Wood stove is cranked.

    Hunting dogs are in the porch. It’s just too damn cold to leave them out. You’d never know they are inside (except you can smell ’em ha) they’re curled up on each other just like they would be outside.

    Got a buddy coming over for dinner. We’re having roast duck – rare. His wife is away and I can’t cook rare anything when she is here.

    Got a cabinet full of assorted delights.

    LG

      1. Haha

        C’mon over DB there’s plenty to go around.

        We’re prepared for a power outage as well.

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