What do you get when you divide 6 by 3,618? The fraction of power output of Alberta wind on Thursday morning

Climate Cult Insufferable Twits 39 Comments

One Alberta coal plant put out 135x what the whole wind fleet did. Not 1.35x, or 13.5x, but 135x.

Saskatchewan is going down this path. We are going to give up what we know works, for what we know absolutely does not work, on an irregular but frequent basis. SaskPower is intent on adding an additional 3,000 megawatts of wind and solar power production in this province by 2035. This will generally be done through independent power producers, with a power purchase agreement.

This low wind situation lasted from 3 a.m. until at least 2 p.m. on Thursday. And its low again right now, around 165 megawatts of 3618.

What will happen to our grid when 40% or more of it is wind and solar, everyone’s driving electric vehicles, and we have days like this? Do we not charge the ambulances? Or the grain trucks for farmers? Shut down Evraz and maybe a half dozen potash mines? Rolling blackouts?

 

39 Replies to “What do you get when you divide 6 by 3,618? The fraction of power output of Alberta wind on Thursday morning”

  1. I’m old enough to remember all the horror stories that were put out about what would happen to our civilization when an enemy’s EMP attack wiped out the electrical grid. Well now it seems that our enemies have found a way for us to voluntarily collapse our electrical grid without them firing a shot.

    1. Oh just wait, With Putin and the Ukraine situation, you just might get to see the EMP scenario come to pass!

      1. Why do something risky like an EMP attack when you can just donate money to greenpeace and accomplish the same thing?

  2. April 13 9:20 AM Wind power in Alberta currently producing @ 6/10 of 1% capacity and providing 1/5 of 1% needed electricity.

  3. I read this crap and wonder who is in charge of the government,Sask Power and the health system. The people in charge of our medical system should have their licences revoked, and the people running Sask Power are despicable that they have not learned from other jurisdictions and shelved wind and solar and concentrated on uranium, its the next step.

    1. That’s what Scott Moe, the government and SP are doing. The rest of the attention on wind/solar is simply to keep the antinukes and NDP off their backs while they do the real work of new nuclear. This is about politics, and the international antinuclear industry is strong. So you cannot reject wind/solar until their failure has been loudly and publicly revealed. That’s the time at which the government and SP can say, “Been there, done that, it failed ludicrously.”

      1. Moe is going ahead with it for one reason: he knows full well that a sufficient majority of the electorate will continue to vote for him.

      2. An enterprising reporter could ask Moe and his government to explain why the use of wind power decreased in the late 1790s, and if the modern iterations have solved the problems identified so long ago…

        but that wouldn’t be playing “fair”

  4. Do we not charge the ambulances? Or the grain trucks for farmers? Shut down Evraz and maybe a half dozen potash mines? Rolling blackouts?

    Yes, that’s exactly what they’ll do. Only affects the Dirt People in the Districts. The Virtuous in Capital City will never be affected, of course.

    There are lots of calls here for Western separation, but it sure seems like the Eastern mind viruses are already running all of our cities, schools, and utilities. SaskPower is pretty clearly a fifth column.

  5. The futility of wind power has already been demonstrated in Canada. It was revealed just how worthless it was in Ontario after the passage of the Green Energy Act in 2009. So it’s no surprise that in looking for alternatives, Scott Moe has put Saskatchewan into an alliance with Ontario, New Brunswick and Alberta all looking for new nuclear power.

    It’s also no surprise that all of these provinces need new power generating sources. In the case of Saskatchewan, the Boundary Dam station is ancient. Two of its six coal-fired units were shut down years ago. The remaining four are in very poor shape, having been heavily used for load-following. The Poplar River station has already demonstrated the uselessness of sequestration.

    So other than retaining in good operating condition its remaining coal-fired and gas-fired units, SP needs new generation. For reliability, that means nuclear, using mined-in-Saskatchewan uranium for fuel.

  6. // What will happen to our grid when 40% or more of it is wind and solar, everyone’s driving electric vehicles, and we have days like this? //

    China is far ahead of the rest of the world in the development of batteries that use sodium, which are starting to compete with ubiquitous lithium power cells.
    […]
    And sodium batteries come with a big advantage: They keep almost all of their charge when temperatures fall far below freezing, something lithium batteries typically do not do.
    […]
    The most immediately promising use for sodium batteries is for electric grids, the networks of wires and towers that transmit electricity. Batteries for grids are a fast-growing market, especially in China
    […]
    Sodium batteries need to be bigger than lithium ones to hold the same electrical charge. That is a problem for cars, which have limited space, but not for electricity grid storage. Utilities that switch from lithium to sodium can simply put twice as many big batteries in an empty lot near solar panels or wind turbines.
    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/12/business/china-sodium-batteries.html

    1. Sorry, dizzy. That’s buying into Chicom propaganda. What China is actually doing is starting up a coal fired plant per day and a nuclear plant per month. No, they’re not ahead on anything, certainly not on phantom battery technology.

      1. A quote from the article:
        // Research into using sodium for batteries began in earnest in the 1970s, led then by the United States. Japanese researchers made crucial advances a dozen years ago. Chinese companies have since taken the lead in commercializing the technology.
        Out of 20 sodium battery factories now planned or already under construction around the world, 16 are in China, according to Benchmark Minerals, a consulting firm. //
        The above is a repeated pattern, from solar panels to Christmas decorations. A picture:
        https://static01.nyt.com/images/2023/04/11/multimedia/00china-sodium-06-czkm/00china-sodium-06-czkm-superJumbo.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp

        1. One wonders why we in North America are not investing in THORIUM Reactors..?

          Fully proven way to create Electrical energy: No water required, Fuel is beyond abundant and to my limited knowledge, completely utilized in the reaction…??

          1. Steakman, you are right about thorium. Using thorium fuel is the route India is taking with its heavy water reactors and its breeder reactor. India has lots of thorium and no uranium. Thorium can also be used in CANDU reactors in Canada along with several of the SMR designs now under regulatory review. Having no water in a reactor is always desirable because of the explosive expansion of super-heated steam. Thorium is why the world will never run out of fissile material for nuclear reactors. There’s a huge amount of uranium in the world. The oceans alone have three billion tonnes of it dissolved in seawater. But the earth has at least three times as much thorium as it does uranium.

            As for dizzy, he’s still proliferating Chicom propaganda. There are no super-batteries anywhere.

      2. You want phantom technology?
        Between 1999 and 2023, the number of operational thorium reactors in the world has risen from zero[4] to a handful of research reactors,[5] to commercial plans for producing full-scale thorium-based reactors for use as power plants on a national scale. wiki

        1. Wrong. Thorium has already been demonstrated to work in CANDU reactors. It’s also in use in Indian PHWRs. At this time there’s no need for it because uranium is so cheap. Any other phantasies you want to unload here?

  7. ‘What will happen to our grid when 40% or more of it is wind and solar, everyone’s driving electric vehicles, and we have days like this? Do we not charge the ambulances? Or the grain trucks for farmers? Shut down Evraz and maybe a half dozen potash mines? Rolling blackouts?”

    A modest proposal.

    We harness up all the idiots and experts ,who brought us to this impasse.
    To run on Human Hamster wheels until they replace the “Unavailable energy”(The promised Free electricity) or die trying.
    Retribution in its purest form.
    A fitting and just end for Gang Green.

  8. When somebody purposely threatens your life, you get to defend yourself.
    If you don’t think this shit is a lethal threat, you might be retarded.

  9. Embrace the healing power of AND!
    What will we do when the grid is 40% wind? Yes and yes and yes and yes!
    AND, is there anything it can’t do?

  12. There won’t be enough to run an electric chair, and hey, finally some insight into why this is happening.

  14. That’s why you need batteries and natgas backup you nitwits. Do you not understand wind and solar are intermittent? How effing stupid are you ?

    But all you men are feeling so inadequate in the face of change. Buncha pussies is what you are.

    1. Now show me where the batteries are? And Nat Gas is a carbon fuel … and taxed to death. Why would you punish-tax a necessary resource? Necessary to keep the lights on, and homes warmed? What? Are you people bloody inSANE!?

      Get back to me when the toxic, short life span, batteries show up, and actually work as back up.

      2. Kenji, it doesn’t matter. People like Emily are incapable of doing basic arithmetic. Imagine for a moment that you had an LI battery the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza. That battery would only store enough electricity to run Ontario, or the sum of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta for half an hour. On top of having to be replaced every decade, you’re entirely right about the uselessness of batteries.

        Where are they? Batteries in that quantity do not and never will exist.

        1. Is your femininity so fragile that you cannot stand the presence of basic science? Put on your big-girl pants and grow up. Barbie is a toy, not a persona.

    2. Ah, yes, batteries. Alberta has built five grid scale batteries, 4 x 20 MW, 1 x 10 MW. The cost somewhere between $60 and $100 million. I wrote this about them about six weeks ago: https://pipelineonline.ca/alberta-wind-generation-falls-to-0-3-capacity/
      Batteries provided Alberta power 0.09% of the past 30 days

      The common public perception is that battery storage will step up to fill in when wind or solar power production drops off. But that is not reality. Grid scale batteries are used to absorb short-term peak demand. Alberta now has five grid scale battery facilities, although the fifth does not appear to have gone fully online and was not available to provide power to the grid on Feb. 23. But it did provide some power earlier in the month.

      (SaskPower is building its own 20 megawatt grid-scale battery facility on the east side of Regina. It’s expected to be able to output that much power for one hour at a time.)
      Between the five battery facilities, over the last 30 days there was a total of 216,000 minutes they could have cumulatively provided power (43,200 minutes per month x 5 batteries). In total, they provided 202 minutes of power, or 0.09 per cent (nine ten-thousandths) of the total time available. That’s for the 30 days previous to Feb. 23, 2023.

      The last time the 20 megawatts eReserve1 Rycroft provided power to the grid was near midnight on Jan. 28, providing 20 megawatts for 12 minutes. Indeed, in the last 30 days, the facility only provided power twice, with the other instance on Jan. 25, providing 20 megawatts for 11 minutes, from 4:24 to 4:35 p.m. In total, that battery provided power for 23 minutes in 30 days.

      eReserve2 Buffalo Creek, also 20 megawatts in capacity, had similar numbers. Its last power to the grid was 19 megawatts for 11 minutes, from 11:50 p.m. Jan. 28, to 12:01 a.m. Jan. 29. On Jan. 25, it, too, provided provided power from 4:23 p.m. to 4:35 p.m., 19 megawatts for total of 12 minutes, and a grand total of 23 minutes in the last 30 days.

    3. // you men are feeling so inadequate in the face of change. //

      There are a lot of people with a “get a horse” attitude.
      “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
      ― Upton Sinclair,

  15. Our neighbours owned a Jacobs 32 volt DC system in the 1940s up until 1955 when we got AC central power on the farms. In the USA, Jacobs sold 110 volt DC systems.
    The DC system required 16×2 volt lead acid batteries, plus a backup genset to charge the batteries on low wind days. . Then and now, intermittent wind was the major concern. The towers were a boon when TV first came in, just the right height to catch CKCK TV in Regina. The gensets were sold to scrap dealers who salvaged the copper from the wind generators, the lead from the batteries, and the copper and aluminum from the air cooled motors and their generators.

    Jacobs still makes wind generators to this day.

    https://youtu.be/RtfIHo8Iq4M

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