I worked on this story for many days with one of the proponents whose family will account for around half of the land assembly for the project. The number was initially a lot higher but the project has been changed and adapted. He has some strong points in favour of wind development, and they should be heard.
This is what they call “journalism,” as in telling multiple sides of a story. And no one else is writing in depth stories like this in Saskatchewan.
That being said, I have another wind story about a great day of wind production in Alberta on Sunday – 74 per cent output. That’s four orders of magnitude better than it was at noon precisely seven days before. But that also caused pool prices to hit zero for 12 hours.
Again, I point out the problem with no one making money is no one is making money. That’s unsustainable. And the proposed reforms in Alberta will make it much worse, by introducing negative pricing. Ridiculous! Nothing with intrinsic value should ever be zero. Ever.
The Lajord wind and solar project puts Weyburn to shame for scale, scope, and cost.
Just wait til that gets out in the public at large, what a sunrise for everyone in south east regina. Hope you enjoy flickering sun.
Sorry, but there are very, very few good reasons for wind and solar and none of them in sask where we have more than enough clean coal, oil, and gas. We are governed by imbeciles to proceed with renewables.
Totally AGREE…………waste of taxpayers’ dollars……………Govt sure know how to waste our $$$$$
Frenchie…a slight twist..
There are ZERO reasons for wind & solar in Sask & elsewhere across this country where we all have more than enough clean coal, oil, and Nat gas. We are governed by Arrogant Ideological MORONS…Provincially and more glaringly in Ottawa.
Spending Billions to Produce SWEET F ALL
All To combat a mental mirage…
ideolouges to proceed with renewables.”
I continue to not understand why Saskatchewan doesn’t establish itself as the nuclear source of the world – from raw material to power generation to recycling used fuel to disposal. From cradle to grave, the world we will save – go nuclear!
Ah yes, coal, oil and gas, without out which not one single piece of equipment that can generate electricity can be manufactured. PAY ATTENTION, I HAVE BENN YAPPING ABOUT THIS FOR SOME TIME NOW. WHO HERE OR ANYWHERE CAN PROVE ME WRONG. Yes I would yell right in your face after I smacked your face for being so stupid you did not realize this or point it out your self, every day of the week.
Now Frenchie, I use the word you in the editorial sense and not personal.
“Nothing with intrinsic value should ever be zero. Ever.” Sorry, that is simply untrue. If the excess has to be disposed of, at a cost exceeding its worth, its value is negative. Simple economics. Excess power must be diverted off the grid before the grid is destabilized (which is disastrous). Once all the excess power that people want is diverted, you are left with the excess power that no one wants. And you’ll have to pay them to take it. The “price” of the power will be negative. This can and does happen with EVERY perishable commodity. As they say, “sell it or smell it”.
I’m making a list of government projects that make money. Please someone, help me start that list …
Aaaah, perhaps the question needs to be refined. Makes money for whom? There are lots of grifters happy to take advantage of foolish government spending, even malign government spending as on vaxxes mandated and the ‘wars of choice’ that even the Canadian gubmint happily participates in.
Until and Hopefully when Trump’s renaissance movement reaches us after we have cleaned house in Ottawa ourselves can we witness a stop to the climate nonsense…
In the meantime, I want to bring back analog vinyl record players for cars and trucks…any investors?
Well, I foolishly clicked on the “some strong points in favour of wind development, and they should be heard” link. I got a long rambling article that didn’t seem to have many strong points in favour – other than mitigating some of the worst effects of your government’s various mandates and of bunging money at your natives. A strong point in favour from their POV I suppose. Maybe I missed something – I was loosing the will to keep reading by about half way.
It’s called providing the depth that no one else does.
Depth is all well and good, but any of the points raised as good are only in relation to other nonsensical government edicts which make it “good”. Intermittent production of energy, at a much higher cost than more reliable energy makes no sense, ever, absent severe market distortions imposed by mathless, scienceless non-thinking moronic bureaucrats.
Perhaps you missed the 99 odd other stories I’ve written about wind over the last three years. https://pipelineonline.ca/?s=wind
Windy southern Alberta could not get enough wind power onto the grid at the right times to make it work. Does Sask not learn from Alberta’s mistakes? Call upon your MLAs to research Medicine Hat or Lethbridge former City Council members or MLAs for details ….
Nothing has ‘intrinsic value’, absolutely nothing.
The value of a single product or service is always and only what a human is prepared to willingly trade for that product or service at a specific time and place. ie “Demand”. The value of a class or group of products or services is hugely complicated statistical average of literally billions of individual demands.
The idiocy of ‘intrinsic value’ is the basis of the idiot economics of Karl the Idiot Marx.
If there is no demand for it, thus it can’t be sold, and it can’t be stored, then there is no ‘intrinsic value’.
Nothing with intrinsic value should ever be zero. Ever.
As the marginal value revolution in economics teaches, there is no such thing as “intrinisic value.” A thing has value if someone’s willing to pay for it. That’s all. All other forms of valuation are just variations on the labour theory of value, which is simply wrong.
If pool price reliably stayed around zero (and it doesn’t), then there’d be a strong economic and financial case for energy-intensive producers of anything to take advantage of that and build their production facilities near these zero-priced resources, which would of course end their zero-priced status fairly quickly. The zero-pricing taking place in the pool is simply an artifact of poor pricing structure imposed by governmental bodies, not the need of (and judgment about) the market(s) for power.
Pro tip: if you ever see a zero price for anything that humans want/need non-idiosyncratically, there’s a government behind the scenes screwing with the market for that thing.
@Garth Wood and @Fred Z: I never studied Marx, nor economics. And frankly it doesn’t matter.
If something has no intrinsic value, if “The value of a single product or service is always and only what a human is prepared to willingly trade for that product or service at a specific time and place” then by that argument, all power generation in Alberta could have shut off for 12 hours on Sunday and it would not have been an issue. After all, the market was pricing it at zero, you say nothing has intrinsic value, so just shut it off. All off. Every single generator – natural gas, biomass, hydro, wind, solar, battery, the works! Let’s see what happens? (The price would hit limit max in minutes, that’s what)
Oxygen has intrinsic value. Without it, you die in three minutes. Water has intrinsic value. Without it, you die in three days. Food has intrinsic value. Without it, in three weeks you die. And power allows our modern society to have oxygen, food and water.
What am I talking about with oxygen? My late grandmother spent her last year on this planet hooked up to an oxygen generating machine. Without power, as soon as her back up tank would have been exhausted, she would have had a hell of a time breathing. Power is the metaphorical oxygen to the economy. Without it, everything stops. If that doesn’t have intrinsic value, I have no idea what would.
@Garth Wood and @Fred Z: I never studied Marx, nor economics. And frankly it doesn’t matter.
Oh, it matters immensely.
If something has no intrinsic value, if “The value of a single product or service is always and only what a human is prepared to willingly trade for that product or service at a specific time and place” then by that argument, all power generation in Alberta could have shut off for 12 hours on Sunday and it would not have been an issue.
Assuming there wasn’t an intermediary between the producers and consumers of electricity, you’re absolutely right! It wouldn’t have been an issue. Why? Because the producer’s situation would have become immediately apparent to the consumers (the producer stops generating electricity) and the consumers would have immediately “bid up the price” to a non-zero value. (In fact, without the intermediary, the situation would never have arisen in the first place, because of the ubiquitous collective need for continuous, aggregated and instantly-dispatchable baseload.)
You keep missing the distortions of the all-important intermediary here, which cuts the cord of pricing signals between end consumers (households and businesses) and producers of all kinds. But the fundamental statement that things only have value if people want them and are willing to trade for them remains true. The pricing mechanism sends those signals, and there’s no need to fall into the trap of “intrinsic value.”
After all, the market was pricing it at zero, you say nothing has intrinsic value, so just shut it off. All off. Every single generator – natural gas, biomass, hydro, wind, solar, battery, the works! Let’s see what happens? (The price would hit limit max in minutes, that’s what).
Which simply proves what I’m saying. The MARKET is doing no such thing! The arcane rules around pool pricing are what’s causing the price to fall to zero. Get the intermediary out of there, and watch the pool price remain positive because of the aggregate demand for continuous baseload.
Oxygen has intrinsic value. Without it, you die in three minutes. Water has intrinsic value. Without it, you die in three days. Food has intrinsic value. Without it, in three weeks you die. And power allows our modern society to have oxygen, food and water.
Sure, I’m well aware of the “rule of threes.” But if oxygen (ferinstance) has intrinsic value, why aren’t I constantly being charged for it? After all, I respire approximately 20 times a minute, 1,200 times an hour, almost 30,000 times a day. How come no-one’s got their hand out to me, constantly demanding payment? Answer: from the POV of an individual consumer, the supply of atmosphere is effectively infinite, and thus the freely-traded value of that atmosphere is zero. There isn’t even an incentive to create a single “producer” (more like “gatekeeper” trying to extract a toll) to try to take payment from me for breathing freely-available atmosphere.
What am I talking about with oxygen? My late grandmother spent her last year on this planet hooked up to an oxygen generating machine. Without power, as soon as her back up tank would have been exhausted, she would have had a hell of a time breathing. Power is the metaphorical oxygen to the economy. Without it, everything stops. If that doesn’t have intrinsic value, I have no idea what would.
Sure, my Mom had to go on enriched atmosphere (high oxy content) during her last days as well. The reason we pay for that is because, once again, from the POV of an individual consumer, the supply of enriched atmosphere is effectively zero without the expenditure of energy. So, an entire industrial infrastructure arises which (amongst myriad other things) can supply enriched atmosphere for a non-zero energy expenditure. But if my Mom hadn’t needed enriched atmosphere, she would’ve paid zero resources to continue breathing the freely-available-to-the-point-of-infinity 21% oxy atmosphere that was constantly hanging around her nose.
Same thing with water (though water is much more scarce than atmosphere). Same thing with food (even more scarce than water, so we pour stupid amounts of resources into creating, storing and transporting it).
Scarcity is the key, and the price mechanism is how we signal scarcity. But if an intermediary stands between buyers and sellers, scarcity can no longer be correctly signaled.
THAT’S the “pool problem” we have. And your insistence on “intrinsic value” leads you down a rabbit-hole that prevents you from seeing the pool as the real problem in pricing electrical energy. Without the artificial distortions of the intermediary, I’m certain that we’d have virtually no “green power” anywhere in Alberta. We certainly wouldn’t have periods of time where the price of electricity would fall to zero.
You are right that this issue matters immensely.
The theory of intrinsic value claims that entities have value in and of themselves, even in the absence of a consciousness which values them. Hence the idea that value can arise in a vacuum; i.e. in the absence of a valuer. This gives rise to the notion of intrinsic prices in economics; i.e. the idea that objects can have a value (price) in the absence of a consumer which values them. The theory derives from Platonism which holds that true, objective value only exists in a Platonic realm inaccessible to human consciousness.
Brian, your contributions to this website are enormous. Pipeline.ca is a fantastic resource. Thank you.
However, like Garth and Fred, I respectfully disagree with you on what is perhaps a narrow point of “intrinsic value”. Your counterargument of shutting off all baseload generation because the immediate marginal value of additional power is zero or even negative is, as you intended, irrational.
If I may, most agree popsicles are very nice. We all remember their sweet summer cooling taste. They have value. If I run a popsicle factory and I massively overproduce during a prolonged cool period, then the marginal value of those new popsicles can actually become negative because people have to keep them in freezers, which costs money. Fortunately few popsicle makers are stupid enough to do this. Sad to say this doesn’t appear true in the government planned energy sector.
Speaking as a non-academic working systems engineer who hasn’t taught power since the 1990’s (in my academic days, so I’m wildly out of date), we have created a nasty and irrational situation where we have a huge potential generation capacity with wind/solar that is often useless. Given that we need reliable generation including baseload to cover that without collapsing as a modern society, we will either have lots of brownouts and blackouts in the years ahead, or situations where marginal “renewable” power generation — however valuable at times we need it — will become zero or even negative.
We could look at megaprojects to fix this. Out East, in Ontario, we could dam the Great Lakes. A 7m rise in their water level, controlled by locks and a series of spillways and hydro generators would allow us to store staggering amounts of power. (See the Sir Adam Beck pumped storage generators for example). The cost? Oh, a couple of trillion (ca 2000 figure), minimum, ignoring the land destruction and flooding.
Elon Musk would argue we should buy lots of batteries. Maybe. But I’m not certain that’s the best solution, though at least he’s thought about the problem, unlike most.
A rational energy policy would likely save oil for transport, emergency power generation, and petrochemical products, coal mostly for steel production, natural gas for heating and burst energy generation, nuclear for baseload, hydro for baseload and variable energy generation and renewables for those that wished to use them. And we’d have some mechanism for energy storage to try to avoid the zero or negative sale price problem.
On some of these we’re mostly there. On others we’re a long way off and governments are decisively moving us away from any kind of rationality.
-Holmwood
Wind farms are low risk for the proponents who are granted priority purchase regardless of grid demand while they parasitize the baseload operators who have to struggle to make the grid useable and all that imposed inefficiency and grid destabilization passed on to the rate payers or taxpayers. The article is confirmation of a fatally mixed economy complete with rent seeking, green mush, regulatory quagmire (including Harper’s mandate), Grievance industry participation, essentially all the toxins of bad governance. Unfortunately, it is the business environment in the deranged dominion and elsewhere.
The wild swings in output of wind generation inevitably creates output that no one wants at certain times. We don’t try to use wheat as money for similar reasons: the stocks to flow ratio is really bad.
having studied economics, the term ‘intrinsic’ does have meaning in some analyses and situations. it is NOT however the ‘be all and end all’ of measured value.
to gauged that better the business of demand has to be included.
Intrinsic value reminds me of “Goodwill” which as it turns out is the difference between what you paid for an asset and what it is worth (my definition).
Mitigating cow farts has interSTINK value!
Now that makes more sense than Brian’s article.
Perhaps You’ve Heard of Solyndra. (Math is hard).
“The provincial government did, however, announce on June 24 it would provide up to $100 million in loan guarantees …”
So the Canadian government puts $100 million at risk, which, given the time value of money, is greater than the alleged $5 to $6 million dollars a year the wind farm will inject into the local economy over 20 years. In 20 years the wind farm will have reached end of life, and will require removal at a minimum cost of $500,000 per turbine. Simultaneously, the wind turbines will require 20 years of costly and unplanned maintenance. If you don’t believe that, then peruse the fact that the largest wind turbine manufacturers in the world are all demanding emergency bailouts from government, and have been hovering on the edge of bankruptcy for four years because of sky-rocketing warranty costs.
All of this relies on the absurd and un-scientific premise that CO2 emissions pose a threat to the health of the planet and its inhabitants.
Vis-a–vis the Keystone Pipeline, the cultivation of corn for the production of ethanol is a far greater risk to the Oglalla aquifer than was ever posed by the pipeline. Likewise, the data centers that are popping up all over the west consume enormous amounts of water, and municipalities seem oblivious to this.
Our sensible friends at Enbridge are building a $1 billion solar farm on the edge of my community, which will likely suffer severe damage from hail in short order. Personally, I’ve never heard of a coal or gas-fired power plant being destroyed by hail. The data center that this solar farm is to support will consume more water than our entire 65,000 person community.
Waste your precious resources as you wish, or as your government directs, but don’t piss in my shoe and tell me it’s raining.
… “natural gas-fired power will only be allowed 19 days per year, coal won’t be allowed at all.”
No. Some have a tendency to surrender but this must be fought against because our lives depend on it.
… “Creating revenue streams from renewables… It’s a hedge, I suppose, against what we see coming… Frankly, that this isn’t on the taxpayer dime”
No. Every failed (and they all fail) government project in Canada falls on the private sector tax payer eventually.
… “Landowner rights… Oil is never going away in our lifetime… We’ve been caught off guard by this reaction from some… It all smacks of cancel culture… Our goal is to remain solvent… we may not like the cards we’ve been dealt, but if we want to play the game, you play the hand you have”
No. Do not surrender.
Brian Zinchuk, is this “ jonolithm” receiving money from Trudeau’s tax payers?
I have no idea what jonolithm means.
The only “case” seemingly in favor of a wind project is to align with the imbecilic, anti-scientific and Marxist dictates from a hostile federal government.
The anti-scientific lie of AGW, the subsequent demonization of carbon dioxide, and the Marxist EDI mandates are the problem. The solution is not to adapt to the new artificial idiocy imposed from above and afar. It is instead to ignore these mandates and carry on as things were before.
Windpower is a money-loser, and only through games imposed by gov’t is its unwanted, unneeded, and intermittent power ever used by the grid.
Taxpayers should not be on the hook for subsidizing these projects, nor for back-stopping loans or loan-guarantees, nor for the eventual reclamation of these sites.
By playing along with the “new rules”, we are capitulating to the plan of the scum who mis-rule us. And every wind farm built is another nail in the coffin not only to real, non-rent-seeking industry, but also to our security and prosperity. When the subsidies end (whose billions of dollars come from money stolen from the petroleum industry), so does wind power. And with it, our historically competitive low-energy cost economy.
Actually someone is making money.
I like to joke that Rachel Notley has done more for British Columbians than any other NDP premier.
By proceeding with the Renewable Electricity Program, Alberta developed a large intermittent generating source next door to a province with a large hydroelectric generating source.
Things often aren’t as simple as they are made out to be.
When wind generates an abundance of energy in Alberta the pool price is lower – sometimes zero – and BC is importing the excess while conserving the water in their reservoirs… or selling the energy southwards into Washington/Oregon/California in real time if a profit can be made. When the wind isn’t blowing Alberta’s pool price is higher.
Because BC nearly always has more generating capacity than needed for its own [instantaneous] demand, BC Hydro is able to supply Alberta with the shortfall. Being able to buy low and sell high is not the result of some nefarious design, it’s because the majority of BC’s installed generating capacity is provided by water stored in reservoirs… ie dispatchable 24/7. Alberta’s dispatchable excess hydro capacity at any given moment is probably less than ten percent of its intermittent wind and solar. When the wind doesn’t blow and the sun isn’t shining Alberta has two choices… burn more gas or import from its neighbours. Presumably they choose whichever has the lower cost.
Many people are skeptical when I tell them this, but the near real-time information posted at https://aeso-portal.powerappsportals.com/data-portal-dashboard/ allows anyone to see it for themselves.
You are absolutely correct. Alberta sells or gives away power to BC at low or zero dollar prices frequently. And when BC is selling into Alberta, it’s typically at a much higher price. BC is winning that game every day of the week and twice on Sunday. (literally – happened two Sundays in a row). The more wind and solar Alberta ads, the more free power BC gets whenever there’s a surplus. And since both wind and solar have doubled in three years in Alberta, that’s becoming a much more common occurrence.
Saskatchewan does play a bit of that game, but our intertie to Alberta is down for maintenance for several months.
Thank you Brian. i appreciate your feedback.
He has some strong points in favour of wind development, and they should be heard.
Fed!
Billy Bob weighs in…
https://youtu.be/fmbZwxEnAFc
I just heard on the news that the feds are going to give NB (yes, my province) a billion dollars towards wind power generation and SMR’s. The ones they had commentating on TV were just beside themselves about what a wonderful thing this is going to be. All our electrical problems will be solved. Hee haw!!!!
Omg, the ottawash trough now has a wind pipeline to NB. Yippee!
Didja all forget about Point Lepreau?
@No lo se:
Yup, Point Lepreau is certainly no cash cow. It’s badly run.