In Saskatchewan, Poplar River Power Station is now fully online again, which is good, because on Aug. 22, when wind generation fell to less than 1 per cent capacity, natural gas and coal made up 87 per cent of power generation. And of course, Alberta saw its wind production fall below 1 per cent, again.
Texas and Alberta have more oil, gas and coal than God, because God gave all his to Texas and Alberta. And yet “grid alerts” are becoming the norm in both, as they’ve both built out tremendous amounts of wind power, and the wind doesn’t blow. On Sunday, Texas issued its form of grid alert.
But remember, the Canadian government says we must abandon coal and natural gas for wind and solar.
Shout out to Brian Zinchuk for once again connecting the dots on renewable energy. Where’s the rest of media?
Do system operators have a responsibility to deliver reliable power to their customers (the ones who pay for the system)? Or is it their responsibility solve Climate Change?
What is the penalty for failing at the former versus the latter? Hint: There is no penalty.
The stink of Federal influence is all over this. Provincial governments must stop yielding to these suicidal policies. Notwithstanding Clauses and monetary policies need to be instituted at Provincial levels to threaten and starve the Feds of revenue s and bring this pathetic state of affairs to a head.
If system operators don’t have a responsibility to deliver reliable power, the government in those jurisdictions sure as hell does. By the way, the head of ERCOT in Texas at the time of the freeze up power problems there was a green flake by the name of Sally Talberg who led the development of Michigan Saves, a nonprofit green bank that financed over $200 million in energy efficiency projects. She also helped staff the state’s wind zone board and offshore wind council. And get this….she lived in Michigan.
Absolute bloody lunacy.
When the hell are people going to wake up? None of this cr@ap would be happening if the majority had functioning brains.
The last line of this little article, But remember, the Canadian government says we must abandon coal and natural gas for wind and solar. highlights the sheer mendacious incompetence of governments and politicians that are pro-netzero.
Which was entirely my point.
Brian,
you are doing a great job highlighting the insanity of energy policy (if there even is such a thing), at least for those of us who still believe in objective reality. I don’t count most members of government in that number. Bureaucrats in government seem to believe that the policies they mandate by legislative fiat are as easily accomplished as a scene in the “Barbie” movie. The inability to differentiate between fiction and reality seems to be a defining characteristic of government bureaucrats. “Its my fantasy and we WILL make it real.” Laws of physics be damned.
Actually they do care about objective reality: THEIR reality only. Every politician is obsessed with the need to get reelected for hte next term in office. So their policy horizon is at most 18 months. They don’t need to care about anything longer because that won’t happen while they are in office, and the adverse consequences of what they do will take years or even decades. They are viciously shortsighted because that’s what our political system demands for political survival. The voters tend to punish those who focus on the long term at the expense of the immediate needs today, regardless of how shortsighted this may be.
“Every politician is obsessed with the need to get reelected for hte next term in office. ”
Exactly. None of the sons-of-bitches are ready and willing to fall on their swords for the good of their Country. Not one. So they keep kicking the effin cans down the road hoping that the SHTF on the next guy’s watch.
Pretty much the same story here in the Pacific NW. We can’t have reliable generation from unreliable sources.
2800 MW installed wind nameplate capacity. Generation has been nil over much of the past week.
https://trans mission.bpa.gov/Business/Operations/Wind/baltwg.aspx
I drive past still …. non functioning …windmills every day to the golf course. There’s more than enough wind to make golf impossible but not power the useless windmills.
Please understand that Net Zero is the midgame of the plot. The endgame is Absolute Zero – no carbon usage at all by 2050. Imagine a world stuck in total entropy and ask how you are going to survive (that is rhetorical question, human existence will be minimal).
I offer this link with the facing document for the insanity of Absolute Zero.
https://climateadaptationplatform.com/delivering-absolute-zero-emissions/
But remember, the Canadian government says we must abandon coal and natural gas for wind and solar.
It’s not just the government saying it. Received an email from SaskPower last week asking me to contribute my opinion on their push for Net Zero. While the totalitarian-leaning government is driving us this way, the utility sure seems to be interested in going along with it. The email even admits that Net Zero by 2030 is not possible, but they’re still pimping wind and solar as the only way to ever get there – no mention of nuclear.
“…The utility sure seems to be interested in going along with it…”
Utility is beholden to the government(or at least the quasi-governmental utility board). Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.
Also, as regulated monopolies, utilities make a fixed % on their capital investment. Would you rather make 10% on $10B or on $100B?
Time and time again, we witness the destruction of sanity at the hands of government subsidies.
Every major environmental catastrophe is the result of a government policy.
Jenn must have a wind-powered laptop. If hers ran on coal, she would be here already.
Again and again and again…
It is hard to measure the stupidity of the people who believe that windmills and solar panels can power a growing population in a modern high tech world.
Energy is the only thing that allows us to maintain a modern civilization. EVERYTHING RUNS ON ENERGY.
Before the world had cheap abundant energy, we fought our wars with swords and axes. We travelled on foot and I am not talking in a pair of Nike Airs.
When someone moved far away you never saw them again for the rest of your life … and don’t get me started on what people had to eat … and there was often not enough of it.
Etc
Again I ask … how do you measure the stupidity of people who think we can survive without cheap reliable energy.
How do you measure the evil of those who are foisting this new green shyt on us all day long. Or are they simply, as stupid as those whom they govern.
Interesting point you mention. No Oil, No Nikes.
Baseload power can only be replaced by baseload power. The baseload power can be coal, natural gas, nuclear or hydroelectricity.
Peaker plants used for emergency backup and high usage periods, can be natural gas or hydroelectricity. Coal plants don’t respond well to load and pressure changes and I suspect that nuclear is like coal and runs best at constant output.
Wind and solar are not reliable enough to be baseload or peaker plants. All they do is displace reliable power production, making reliable power less profitable. Wind and solar’s intermittency also has the highest risk of destabilizing the power grid. If you have reliable baseload and peaker plants, what’s the business case for wind and solar power?
LC, I think your sentence, “Wind and solar’s intermittency also has the highest risk of destabilizing the power grid.” cuts to the chase.
TPTB are driving (no pun intended) us toward a full electric future existence, with zero alternative, meanwhile driving policies that break/destroy the the supply of electricity to the masses. A recipe for insanity….unless that is the desired outcome?
Oh dear, my tinfoil hat has slipped!
Saskatchewan/saskpower should follow Alberta’s lead and pause wind and solar generation. Flooding our system with these supposedly green power sources makes no sense to me, given their unreliability.
It’s like being forced to buy a lame horse for transportation when you already own a couple of reliable gas powered vehicles. You just don’t need it and the only one who benefits is the horse seller.
The death of millions of citizens is the desired outcome. Sanity is irrelevant when you’re dead.
Alberta and Saskatchewan don’t want to be seen as anti-“renewables” by banning these monstrosities but they could insist that all wind and solar proponents supply their own back-up according to the needs of the grid while competing with the established systems which would put an end to them.
I agree. A few years back when SaskPower was asking for opinions on a proposed wind power plant, I responded that the only way to accept such a proposal was to demand that the guaranteed power be delivered 99% of the time 24/7. The responsibility for the back up generation should rest solely on the group selling the power from whatever “green/renewable” development. In the end the proposed wind plant did not get a green light as it was in a environmentally sensitive location (bird migration route)
You two are quite right. The contracts could be written demanding that capacity factor had to be guaranteed at some nominal base such as 90% capacity factor. Then you would have a true price benchmark for the actual cost of electric capacity and per kWh. The renewables will scream blue murder, but, really, who among us cares about their hurt feelings? This is retail politics, so it depends upon how much political clout they have with the voters through Green Party or NDP voters. Do they count, or the government can afford to tell the Dippers and Greens to pound sand?
Windfarm output averages 15-20% of nameplate capacity, so mandating output would bring that to fact to the forefront. Power companies will fight tooth and nail in court to never have to provide backup power that is equivalent to windfarm nameplate capacity.
I was just thinking about chargers and a question popped into my head. How many charging stations in the wild are tied into the grid vs just hooked up to a big diesel generator? I have no idea, but I’d be curious to find out. I imagine it depends on the location but I’m willing to bet a lot of them would be way too much draw for our strained grid to handle.
A charging station that is powered by wind and solar farms would be epically useless. “Oh, just hang around for few days. The wind is bound to pick up…eventually.”
August 28, 2023 – Alberta AESO report at 11:54
Wind producing 40 mw out of 3853 capacity at this time.
Total net generation on this report at this time was 10451 mw.
Interchange report shows import of 118 mw at this time including 89 from Sask.
It is a clear sunny day with no clouds at all, and just a small smoke haze.
Solar is producing 1084 mw out of 1291 capacity.
That’s right around the threshold of where I write a story – when wind falls to 1 per cent or less of nameplate. At this moment, its 53. But there might be another story out of this yet.
Most people don’t understand megawatts this, megawatt-hours that. But they DO understand what zero means. And below zero per cent is about as close to zero as you can get. And zero = useless.
I suspect my continued reporting on this has had a small bit of impact in the Danielle Smith decision on renewables. I don’t know for sure, but have been told she’s briefed on what I’ve been writing.
Brian Zinchuk didn’t kill himself.
I was unaware that I had? Was that a Jenn suggestion?
And Gods word says he put everything here for us to use. I’m sure that would include oil, gas and coal.
…and animals! Bullfighting and bear-baiting is fine.
Not to mention dog or coq fighting.
Fishing
Chicken eating thieves
Gophers
Rabbits
Groundhogs
Porcupines
Assorted roadkill
Ba-a-a-a-a-a-a-c-o-n!
If there really IS a climate emergency and it’s caused by people burning fossil fuels, why does Clean Green Canader ship 30 million tons of coal annually, 46% of it to China, which country uses it to generate power?
Can it be the 3.5 billion bucks we get from coal sales? Is this NIMBY-ism in the extreme?
All of the coal shipped to China from Canada is metallurgical coal for steel-making, not steam coal for power generation. China’s largest coal supplier, because of shipping distances, is Australia. The same metallurical coal is also exported to Japan, India and South Korea for their steel industries.
It’s amazing that people don’t understand how BC’s largest export is used.
(I believe Jenn and her ilk should only be able to “fuel” their battery cars with wind and solar generated power…)
Who builds stuff that is unreliable and unpredictable in its unreliability?
Are there any engineers walking around bragging about their Unreliable & Unpredictable Machine?
Who would even listen to the sales pitch?
Oh wait, the government.
The electricity will generate itself.
“Love of theory is the root of all evil”
I let Bill Whittle in a monolog named The Train Set shed some light how intellectuals and bureaucrats and their love affair with theoretical outcomes ruin it for the rest of us living in the real world.
https://youtu.be/rnEsI2fTaJo?si=OwnRcuHUCifLTmEu
I will never tire of singing praises for coal. I love the stuff. When I lived in Pennsylvania, I heated my house on good old Pennsylvania Anthracite. The stuff just sits there, glowing red for 8 hours or more. It is very clean, with no visible smoke. By contrast, I hated burning wood. Had to check it every 2 hours or so. The bottom line is, i was very comfortable burning this stuff in my basement while I slept upstairs. I have no concerns whatsoever about utility scale coal power generation. I considered working in a coal power plant in my early days. I wasn’t worried about the coal at all. However a steam leak will kill you fast. But steam doesn’t care if it was created by coal, oil, gas, or nuclear.
Absolutely right. Nicely stated, sir.
August 28, 2023 5:18PM
Grid alert declared in Alberta due to hot weather, low winds
Just checked the AESO site again at 7:22PM
Wind increased slightly to 123 mw out of 3853 max capacity.
And solar is now down to 178 out of 1291.
Importing 528 mw at this time.
Alert ended about 8:25 p.m., give or take.
https://twitter.com/theAESO/status/1696347449126949359?s=20
So that wind that is always blowing somewhere else was blowing somewhere else?
Unicorn Farts.
The ultimate wonder fuel.
This will solve all our energy needs..
Forward to the glorious new future…
What do you mean,there are no unicorns?
Find some,immediately.
The “magical thinking” of our fools and bandits is eye popping.
Banishment.
The only civil solution.
Us and Them is the only rational recourse when faced with Emoting Morons.
The Cult of Calamitous Climate cannot be reasoned with.
And they have chosen the path of mandates and government coercion.
They cannot persuade any ration being of the wisdom of their ways,so they have chosen force.
Wrap your mind around the current state of thuggery,the non tool using segment of society,has declared war.
War upon the unenlightened tool users,who produce everything these geniuses need to survive.
And they have chosen to trash the social contract.
Rules for thee,none for we.
Unreliables as the compulsory choice for all your energy needs.
A tax on the fuels that work ,to “encourage” the use of unspecified and unworkable “alternatives.
Taxing our air.
These are Oxygen Thieves.
And yes.
They really are this stupid.
Lost in their own little dream world.
Absolutely convinced that shouting slogans will change human nature.
Such is the way of man,when convinced of their power,they seal their doom.
The windmills,these whirling crucifixes of the new religion will stand, abandoned on our hills ..
Just as this poet described.
“I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
History do repeat.
“And yes.
They really are this stupid.
Lost in their own little dream world.
Absolutely convinced that shouting slogans will make lies true.”
Fixed that for you.