For the third day in a row, Alberta went into an electrical grid alert on Sunday. At one point it had no contingency reserve left at all, but imports from BC appeared to save the day. While it looked a little hairy there for a bit, there was no emergency alert declared, unlike Saturday.
Did I mention before that Alberta has more coal, oil and natural gas than God? Because guess what? It still does.
A few years ago in the biting cold (common on the prairies) a gas compressor station went down which then took a major generating station (Sheerness) down as well. The generating station was originally built to burn coal and the coal mine was a short distance away. Funny thing is that when Sheerness burned coal it was never off line except by design for maintenance. For some strange reason I am a fan of coal as a base supply of electricity.
I suspect converting a coal plant to a gas plant isn’t as easy in practice as in theory. Queen Elizabeth power station in saskatoon also converted from coal to gas years ago and often has problems. Like houses, a new build is easier and better than completely renovating an old home.
All of those virtue signalling EV owners are destroying the electric grid operations. It is more important to have heat and light especially in winter than to charge up your energy sucking pig of a battery car.
I have been saying for years … EVs are not the answer, they are part of the problem. There will never be enough electricity to power everything in the new high tech world we are in.
I know the answer for some governments is to take away our means of transport and put us on busses (or in box cars) … and don’t think that they aren’t salivating over that thought.
Our world is being taken over by a gaggle of humanity-hating mentally-ill billionaires and their political puppets.
JW
Totally bang on.
My attitude is…ya wanna drive an electric buggy.?
No Problem.
1: That’ll be $50/mo. for road tax
2: And when you charge it, you do so via your OWN windmill or your OWN set of Solar Panels.
As for the Globohomo Cabal – a Pair of Hypersonic fast movers aimed at Geneva courtesy of Mr Putin would be well received. A 4th REICH we don’t need nor want.
Never underestimate STUPID PEOPLE IN LARGE GROUPS.
(That’s us Canadians)
Canadians are not a serious nation of people.
We elected a FILTHY LIBERAL Pedophile Blackface and a Delusional half retarded Sikh Terrorist loving NDP loser.
WE ARE GETTING WHAT WE DESERVE.
Enjoy the Suck.
YEAH, I hate people. Especially FILTHY LIBERALS.
Latest data I could find in a quick search was from 2022. At that time, there were about 3,500 EVs registered in Alberta, most of them in Calgary. Just a WAG, but I suppose there are about 5,000 +/- in AB in early 2024.
It’s always fairy dust and unicorn farts, sunshine and roses, so I don’t expect to see much reporting on what effect EV charging had on the grid or articles on charging difficulties during the the time the AB grid was on the precipice.
The herald had an article in Dec indicating it could be as high as ~9500.
So, simple math:
1) estimate 1/3 would be plugged in and charging
2) average at home charge in 10 kW range
= 30 MW
Now that can go much higher if more cars are charging, maybe to 100 MW if everyone was charging, even higher if more are using faster chargers but I don’t think that is the case. I think a good guesstimate would be in the 30-50 MW range as it was a Sunday and people may not have been using them in the cold much. That could be a bad assumption I admit. I’d also assume that most (>95%) would be stored in a warm garage, if not then yeah, the numbers go higher.
So, it’d have an effect but as a percentage of the overall grid consumption they aren’t a significant portion yet, and let’s hope people are smart enough to keep it that way. That being said, those people with EVs would have been the biggest power consumer per capita by far as compared to everyone else. Greedy Socialist bastards.
Just imagine, that with them only being 0.3 to 0.5 % of the overall car fleet. If everyone goes EV, would 30-50 becomes ~ 10,000 MW pretty damn quickly. A totally impractical situation and tells you just how much a farce the whole damn thing is. Yah, you can massage the numbers many ways, but if you replace > 1 million cars and > 1 million trucks with EV equivalent you end up with 10’s of GW of power needed. That damn unicorn better start eating a lot of beans to make that a go.
Frenchie – I didn’t see that article in my admittedly brief search. Thanks for the additional, more recent info.
I was surprised at the low number of EVs as of 2022. Based on that number, even if all of them were charging, they’d only be a small part of pushing the AB grid to the max. The 2024 number you found is more than double 2022 but less than triple and still relatively small. Heating related use is the biggie.
We’ll just have to wait and see if any articles come out about EV’s effect on demand over the past few days and if there have been any difficulties getting those EVs charged due to the high demand. My speculation is that we won’t hear or read much about it or if we do, that everything was “just fine”.
Thanks again for the more recent data.
below -50C in Keg River for two days in a row. keep the car plugged in Mabel!!! the carbon tax effect will be kicking in soon .
i used to think of opposing government only in democratic terms. I now think of armed, physical confrontation as inevitable.
Scary, isn’t it? Reminds me of that Kennedy quote: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” After our rights were stripped away with the consent of ALL parties during the covid fiasco, the response to the Freedom Convoy, the freezing of bank accounts, C-21, the absolute refusal of gov’t to LISTEN… yeah, it seems we’re in for a fight.
Although, a better way is Western separation. That also seems inevitable.
The power imports were from Saskatchewan.
The grid issue is due to a few things. Alberta has seen its population increase significantly with people leaving BC and Ontario (ironically both lefty jurisdictions) for a place where there is a more reasonable cost of living. On top of that, we have the those that Trudeau dumped on us. Also, recall that while AB had the dumpster fire named Notley as premier she shut down how many coal fired power plants. And of course, she did this before any replacements were on line and such replacements haven’t materialized since. Windmills have proved to be useless at extreme temperatures having to be shut down before they shatter (unbelievable!!). I really hope both Danielle Smith and Scott Moe make hay around this – hammer home the point that renewables aren’t at the point yet where they can be relied on at all and let technology determine the timetable – not lefty politicians. It’s exactly as Brian points out – with all the resources AB has, there is absolutely no reason to have a grid issue at any time. This is what happens when agenda driven lefty politics is at work.
Time to stick a microphone in front of Notley and get her on record responding to many of the points commenters here have raised. Weather like this unmasks what truly dangerous, evil, fraudulent climate hucksters she and Justin are. Ban all ice vehicles and convert all grid generation to non-‘fossilfuel’ within 10 years? They want us all dead, whether we freeze, starve, or use their convenient euthanasia services.
Forth grid alert just issued Monday morning!
Story posted!
The idiots in charge, were they not so stupid, could offset wind against solar and hydro. It would be a lot of frigging around but run solar during the day and hydro at night. As it is right now the billions spent on wind and solar have added nothing to our capacity. When our demand is the highest the sun ain’t shining and the wind ain’t blowing.
scar
Could you elaborate on offset wind with hydro?
Where would the hydro come from?
I’m not a real smart person, but from what I’ve read there are multiple ways to remove the “problem “ products that are produced by using Coal.
Why in the bloody heck did they not apply this technology to our former coal electricity generators????
Unfortunately I can guess that politicians have shares and friends in the companies given the contracts, right?
1100 years of coal supply in AB, ready to be cleaned up and used for electrical generation.
A little known fact is that Alberta has more energy stored in it’s coal reserves than it has in oil and gas reserves. And it’s top quality coal as well.