Free power in Alberta! That’s not a typo

20 Replies to “Free power in Alberta! That’s not a typo”

1. No mystery. 100% of wind and solar capacity is excess capacity and when it is working well its value is zero. Why didn’t they ask me before they built it?

2. There is a pretty simple solution:
   Average price out over a day, or a week.
   Also, it seems that the pool price considers infrastructure and its maintenance to be worth exactly 0$.
   Society is too stupid to live.

   1. The price isn’t what you want to sell it for, it’s what people are prepared to pay for it, and if people aren’t prepared to pay for it it has zero value.

      1. Society is too stupid to live.

         1. At times during the worst of the Green Energy Act in Ontario, the price of electricity was negative. That meant that Ontario had to pay neighboring utilities in the US to shut down their generating stations and take imported electricity from Ontario. The result after less than four years was a gutted industrial economy in Ontario.

            Never, ever, ever underestimate the viciousness of Gerald Butts and Katie Telford.

      2. No. Wind gets first shot at the market forcing thermal generation to stand down when the combination of wind and thermal exceeds market demand. Forcing thermal to stand down also means no revenue to cover daily fixed costs, which means thermal generation has to charge more when they can generate to stay in business.

   2. If everything is free, we just need great big fans blowing on great big fans.. Free perpetual motion.. The “Final Solution”!

3. That’s nothing… Imagine that you create a power generation system where you producers are paid to generate power, but you have so much that you are also paying clients to use the power you are generating…

   Then you add in another contract term where they can pay you not to produce power as well…

   1. JD, Ontario has Alberta beat in the stupid department. Imagine giving a solar array owner 80 cents per KWhr for 20 years, guaranteed, when the current rate for producing power from other sources, at peak prices, is 15 cents. Then having excess baseline capacity, paying the US to take it off your hands because you can’t reduce the production. And then raise the rates to consumers so that your province has almost the highest prices on the planet for electricity.

      Yes, Kathleen Wynnie the Pooh was just that stupid.

      1. CC, the dimwits who invented that scheme simply went up the 401 to Ottawa. Butts and Telford became the principal advisors behind Justatwit in 2012 before he became PM.

         Of course Wynnie the Pooh was that stupid. Her only public policy experience was in being an Ontario Board of Education member. She had no actual work experience of any kind. Other than organize some meaningless grass-roots agitation groups, she had done utterly nothing with her life. In short, she was the perfect dupe for cynical shysters like Butts and Telford.

         1. Yep, and yep.

            However, do not for one moment let Stephen Harper off for his stupidity (although he didn’t suffer as much from it as Liberals, he is not immune):

            https://ottawacitizen.com/feature/how-solar-energy-dreams-became-a-nightmare-for-the-small-ontario-town-of-blind-river

            1. That isn’t about Harper. It’s about the stupidity and greed of Blind River in mismanaging its own financial affairs. No one forced them to take the money. It’s their fault if they were incapable of managing the project they started and diverting the money under false pretences. They thought they’d jump on the renewable energy bandwagon without having to understand anything about the electricity supply situation in Ontario.

               They deserved what they got. Ignorance should have consequences. Being insolvent has a cost and if that cost includes losing their standing as a municipality and being taken under provincial governance, tough noogies. BIind River has enough other energy related business in the community that there was plenty of sound advice available to them to avoid this.

4. Unreliables are grid parasites. Make them responsible for their quota of “reliable” power to match demand curves. If they can’t compete with inherently reliable high density generation (by providing their own back-up) too bad so sad.

5. Coal, oil & gas, uranium is stored in the ground, gravity behind dams, and is used as needed. They are reliable.
   If windmill energy was being stored for when demand exceeded The Reliables – as opposed to The “Renewables” – then maybe there could be a conversation about it’s role.
   That’s IF the storage is economical.
   And we all know about batteries…

   1. Nobody should be allowed to sell intermittent power. If they want to sell solar during the day it must be matched by hydro at night.

      1. Agreed.
         The fairy tale storage would have to last until the windy mills started making more power.
         At best, the mills or solar could power pumps to send water back up to the headworks of the hydro dam, but I doubt its economically sane considering that nature already does it for free.

6. the ontario economy at the turn of the century was built by cheap power off the largest single source power drop in the world.(drop x volume) cheap power, all of the original ontario advantage has now been squandered

   1. And so has Alberta’s advantage.

      Ask any Albertan about their power bill. Ridiculous.

7. When you have an excess of a necessity, it’s worth nothing….when you don’t have enough of it, it’s worth everything.

8. Question: How can windmills turn when there’s barely enough wind to move tall grass, and not very much movement either? I saw a few of those coming home to Calgary yesterday. Took video as well.