27 Replies to “Alberta coffee makers were not powered by wind Wednesday morning, as wind power collapsed, again”

  1. Tear them all down NOW!

    To the supporters of giant useless windmills I say … Hahahahaha they don’t work … same as Liberals.

    1. The laugh is on us because the owners of these giant bird choppers get paid by the utilities if the wind blows or not.

  2. That’s money we’ll spent isn’t it?
    Those eggbeaters aren’t reliable at all.
    People will die on account of this stupidity!

    1. It won’t matter until the Progs are affected. We need to ensure that Prog Central’s (Hongcouver, Edmonchuk, Cowtown, Tranna, Sodom-on-Rideau, etc.) only source of electricity is solar & wind. Only then can they truly appreciate the issue. Until then, nothing happens.

  3. When the politicians break wind perhaps the windmills will turn…

    Albertans will have to use a gas stove, or piped in politician’s gas, to heat the water for their morning coffee… 🙂

    There is one thing we can rely on, that politicians are reliably stupid, when it comes to gas, electricity, or anything remotely connected to the physics of heating, lighting, or running your home efficiently.

    Cheers

    Hans Rupprecht, Commander in Chief

    1st St Nicolaas Army
    Army Group “True North”

  4. I have looked at Alberta generation numbers several times since this issue was mentioned during the cold snap a few weeks ago, and offer up a less critical perspective.
    AB borders BC, which has considerable hydro generation. This morning BC has been exporting around 500 MW to AB. I have noticed other times during the last three weeks where the wind was blowing in AB, and AB was exporting around 500 MW to BC. These routine behind-the-scenes energy flows are pretty substantial… 500 MW is close to 670,000 horsepower. Visualize somewhere between 150 and 200 CPR diesel-electric locomotives running flat-out.
    BC Hydro has enough reliable hydro generation that they do not need AB’s surplus wind power, but the only situation where that energy has no value to BCH is when accepting it would cause a reservoir to fill to capacity and BCH would have to open the spillways. Reservoir levels are managed to make spilling water as rare as possible, because it is basically money down the drain.
    If you were to look at AB and BC as a single system, the picture emerges of a symbiotic arrangement. BC has the capacity to supply a lot of hydro generation to AB when the wind doesn’t blow, and yes, some of Edmonton’s coffee-makers are powered by hydro generated in BC. When the wind provides more generation than AB needs, they send a lot to BC, and some of Vancouver’s coffee-makers are powered by wind power generated in AB. BC is able to retain a lot of water in its reservoirs whose energy would have been spent.
    http://ets.aeso.ca/ets_web/ip/Market/Reports/CSDReportServlet

  5. “If you were to look at AB and BC as a single system, the picture emerges of a symbiotic arrangement.”

    First, interesting analysis.

    Second, this would be all well and fine if it was a natural evolution of capitalism. However, as this TGF is the result of Gang Green’s baseless parasitism on the taxpayer, I cannot dismiss it as easily.

    1. DB, maybe symbiosis is why the stupid country exists. No one can get along in life without someone else’s brain. People who get everything they need to survive from some else, well, need I say more?

      1. V, if it was actual symbiosis where all parties benefit, I’d have fewer issues. However, it’s not. This is textbook parasitism where one literally sucks the lifeblood out of the other.

        WEXIT!

    2. DB, I agree with your second point. It’s always prudent to be vigilant when governments get involved, and the stronger their influence the worse the outcomes can be. Chernobyl, and the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydro-electric dam disaster that killed 75 are two good examples of the evolution of total government control over investment and operation.

      On the other hand, Tepco (owner of Fukishima), TVA (owner of Three Mile Island Nuclear plant), and Enron (whose financial meltdown probably caused more harm than TMI’s partial reactor meltdown) provide case studies on the evolution of capitalism. Not natural though, because government actors are always involved in this industry.

      The AB/BC arrangement as I see it is beneficial within a range of reservoir capacities, wind generation capacities, annual snowpacks, and demand for electricity that BC Hydro can sell to WA/OR/CA. There is a limit beyond which adding wind generation in AB is more likely to be wasteful than useful, because there is no point in having so much wind generation in AB that the reservoirs in BC are filled to the brim in early spring when the snow in the watersheds begins to melt.

      1. Nick, I wouldn’t trust yer average gov’t “worker” not to bankrupt a street corner lemonade stand inside of 3 days, let alone control a nuclear power station. As I noted elsewhere here yesterday, there are no consequences for bad decisions.

        A pure free market isn’t without its warts, don’t get me wrong. Society can’t handle too many case studies of failing nuclear plants.

        As to the AB/BC “arrangement”, it wouldn’t even exist if our wunnderful, wunnerful politicos hadn’t kowtowed to Gang Green & started shutting off carbon-based electricity generating facilities. It’s a problem that shouldn’t exist in Alberta, of all places. I’d like to lay this all at the feet of Red Rachel, but she isn’t the only one to blame.

        1. Three days? You give them more credit than I do.
          They will shut them down before sundown on Day 1 for not having a business license, or not being certified in Food Safe, or not having enough bathrooms to handle an indeterminate number of genders, or some other bloody excuse.

  6. RE Alberta supplying BC “exceess” electricity from wind power. That would be true if all Alberta energy were produced by wind power.
    However since hydrocarbons produce the bulk of electricity in AB, we are primarily sending that. You don’t get to pretend just the wind is “excess”. Its part of all power generation.

    Years ago I had a friend who was regularly needing to borrow money to pay his rent. Times were tough you know. Except he smoked a pack and a half of cigarettes a day and drank quite a bit of beer.

    So I told him to be realistic – I wasn’t lending him money to pay his rent, I was buying his cigarettes and booze.

    1. Maybe there is a better word than excess.
      Another way of looking at this is that the back-and-forth nature of these energy flows imply that BC Hydro is providing the equivalent of a hydro pumped storage capability for AB’s temperamental wind and solar generation.
      This morning when the wind wasn’t blowing in AB, the 500 MW of hydro being imported from BC saved AB from burning FF to generate that 500 MW to meet the province’s demand.
      This situation is not the same as choosing whether to lend money to somebody that probably won’t pay it back because smoking is more important to them than paying the rent… where the possibility of a win-win outcome never exists.

  7. I had a few really good farts this am. I don’t think they would generate any electricity, maybe a methane flash?

  8. When those contraptions STOP spinning up there in the frozen wasteland … do the mechanisms all FREEZE solid? Do they have to be thawed out with Elon Musk’s “not a flame thrower”?

    1. It’s my understanding (and I stand to be corrected) that, in cold weather when they’re not rotating, they actually draw electricity from the grid in order to warm the gearbox.

        1. When we had those warnings back in Nov/Dec I was thinking to myself, great, there are literally hundreds of bird & bat shredders out there contributing to the electricity shortage by requiring electricity for warmth.

          The irony…

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