The past weekend proved to be a close-run thing for the Alberta electrical grid, and Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe is making statements resolving he won’t allow that to happen here.
Specifically, after having nearly completely divested itself of coal-fired power production, Alberta’s dramatic buildout of wind and solar proved impossible to keep the lights on in that province when the chips were down and temperatures hit -35 C, or worse.
Alberta’s close brush with possible rolling blackouts stiffens Moe’s resolve to keep the lights on. On Monday, he announced that SaskPower has relit a shuttered coal unit near Estevan, one the feds had supposedly forced to retire Dec. 31, 2021.
Also note: Saskatchewan has about a million cars registered. So a good bet is Alberta probably has four million. What would have happened if four million EVs were all plugged in last weekend?
If you missed them, these five stories, in order, chronicle what happened in Alberta.
Most of Alberta’s wind fleet slowly shut down Thursday night, but not for lack of wind
Grid Alert 1:
Alberta goes under grid alert for just under 5 hours on Jan. 12
Grid Alert 2:
Grid Alert 3:
Alberta goes into Round 3, with its third electrical grid alert in three days
Grid Alert 4:
Round 4: Alberta declares fourth electrical grid alert in 4 days, second in 17 hours
I’m in Ontario but I work with our Calgary office a lot. Had a Teams call with one of my Calgary coworkers yesterday. (not sure where he lives but is usually in the downtown Calgary office) He couldn’t leave home because he had no power, working off his laptop battery I guess. Wearing a winter coat, and praying his pipes don’t freeze before he gets power back
Thimk!
Would you believe that their is a turbine created that is hemisphere sensitive?
As a one size fits all technology was incorporated instead.
How do I know?
I created it over twenty years ago but had a big ignored from everyone, everywhere unless I was running a business that incorporated a minimum employees…
Then a college who engineered it would work practically but didn’t have a clue in efficiency.
I sense a coriolis effect here. The Brits found that gunnery was different south of the equator also.
This is a torch and pitchfork issue. We don’t really see all the monetary waste and graft of this green lunacy, but get a good power outage in the winter, have people freeze and maybe a few die and the gross incompetance, corruption and mismanagement reaches everybody where they live. And people should rightly ask how this could happen in a province or in a country incredibly rich in energy and resources.
PG; A little outage here and there can do wonders for getting attention but without some improvement in critical thinking, a lot of people will just think the government should just get more involved. That’s most of the problem, governments create layers of regulations and bureaucracy that are unaccountable to anyone and this is why we are in this mess to begin with.
Our government is really good at creating barriers to accountability, just like a lot of businesses where reaching an actual human is impossible. You make another good point that most Canadians will see more government as a solution. A bit like Natives blame all their problems on government and want the government to fix them. I guess it’s a Canadian thing. Ask a Canadian about legalizing prostitution and they will go into how the government will get involved regulating, taxing and overseeing the whole process. They can’t imagine 2 people fornicating for a buck without government oversight…
So what are the so called consequences of holding up two middle fingers to the feds and firing up coal fired generators again??
A stern reprimand from the cbc?
A mean letter from jt?
F-18 flyovers?
Troops in our streets?
Handcuffs on moe and smith?
Canada’s barely armed 2,000 strong army, some with their dicks cut off and others that never had one? Colour me afraid. Take away the tampons and they will be stuck like the Germans in winter.
Brian, a friend in the heavy haul business was telling me this morning that DEF freezes in the truck lines at -18C, rendering newer unmodified trucks unusable at these colder temperatures. Is that something you’ve ever done a story on? Keep up the great journalism.
I have heard a little inkling about that, but don’t have any real knowledge about it. What I do know is that I have never met anyone running a Tier 3 or 4 engine who has not struggled with it and its emissions setup. A few years ago I was doing as story on a trucking firm in Lloydminster, and one of the drivers was hopping mad. He had a tier 3 or 4, only like a year or two old, and he was so mad he was taking it back to Edmonton and buying a 10 year old (or older) Tier 2. He said he simply couldn’t get any work done.
Interestingly enough, I watched a Laura Farms YouTube video recently where they went to visit an Argentina farm. And curiously enough, same tractors they use in Nebraska, but NO emissions control. Imagine that.
My daughter is in her first year as a heavy duty mechanic apprentice. I’ll ask her.
I drive a diesel SUV that uses DEF. The container notes that it freezes at -11°C. I asked about that at the dealership and they told me there is a heater in the system. When I start in really cold weather, the DEF will have frozen, but it won’t prevent the car starting. The heater will melt it soon enough when I get going.
Good to know. Thanks!
I don’t know about DEF. But I know power steering fluid freezes at about -30.
I have synthetic motor oil, trans and differential oil, have a backup battery charging inside that I can drop in in 3 minutes. Freeze plug heater for the coolant…
Last big cold snap, Engine fired right up then power steering pump instantly blew all its seals .
Alberta almost became South Africa this weekend. South Africa is regularly suffering from rolling blackouts every single day.
It started as a couple hours a day. Now? It’s up to eight hours a day on bad days.
Which is precisely what I’m afraid of. Normalization of this until the slippery slope looks like Everest.
It’s simple pass legislation banning green energy from the public grid, force green energy to provide for their customers out of their own pocket including installing green meters. Liberals you want green energy start paying for it your self.
Ironic, isn’t it, that as these power emergencies/consequences are unfolding, that Have Notley is stepping down.
She and her Horde are the ones responsible for shutting down coal power generation, and forcing incapable solar and wind projects on AB. To fellow travellers, those in gov in BC, she is a hero to be followed. Those with common sense, rightly so, see her as an incompetent destroyer.
Brian: The green hydrogen solution is on the way:
“In July 2022 the UK government launched what it calls its First Hydrogen Allocation Round (HAR 1), to obtain bids and award contracts to produce this so-called “green” hydrogen using wind power. …from December 14, 2023 is the announcement of the first round of contract awards. Excerpt:
“. . . The 11 projects have been agreed at a weighted average strike price of £241/MWh
£241/MWh? …EIA’s latest Electricity Monthly Update, dated December 21:…The “price of natural gas at New York City” is given as $11.32/MWh. That would make the price that the UK has just agreed to pay to buy this “green” hydrogen stuff approximately 27 times what we can buy natural gas for here in New York to obtain the same energy content.”
There’s more…
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/01/16/updates-on-the-march-to-the-great-green-energy-future/
Keep the coal Generating Plants and do what Germany did to appease ! They referred to their coal as “CLEAN COAL!
Dan if my memory serves me correctly Ralph Klein also was in power when power generation was moving from coal to NG.
The “coal is bad” narrative has been around for a long time. The environment is an important issue but nobody really took the time to defend energy until they had been under attack for years. The enviro nuts had a 30 year head start with the blessing of higher education and media doing their legwork for them. Every time the news displayed a photo of a smokestack, it was on a cold day so it would look like the world was on fire. The twisting of truth never missed a chance so we have generations of people that can’t understand how clean and ethical our energy sector is, and how every part of our lives is dependent upon it. Like Churchill said- a lie can travel around the world before the truth gets their pants on!
Mark Twain, not Churchill