If you build a wind farm in SK vs AB, you will get roughly one third more megawatt-hours out of it. Build the same turbine, get one third more return. That’s a surprising conclusion from analyzing wind capacity factors in SK and Alberta, seen in this story.
Zero still means zero, but this was rather eye-opening.
It’s also interesting to see how some wind farms in Alberta don’t perform worth a damn. Take a good look at the graph. You see several with capacity factors as low as 16 per cent.
Alberta windfarms name plate capacity is 1760 megawatts
“But later in the day it rose to 2007 megawatts, or 35.3% of capacity”
????!
Er, check for typos, and redo the math.
Fixed. 5,684 megawatts. 1760 wind turbines. Thanks. Missed that.
Interesting data Brian. Not surprising. However, I think the most important data point is this. Power is produced when the wind farm wants not when you need it. After that fact, all the math is almost meaningless.
Lefty
WIND FARMS, SOLAR, ALL A WASTE OF $$$$$$$…………..DRILL BABY DRILL
“Build the same turbine, get one third more return.”
That’s when you commission your -own- study, because that sounds like BS. These government swamp creatures have proven time and again that they can’t be trusted. They lie like they breath.
Taking numbers like that at face value in current year 2025, it’s basically malpractice.
Another interesting thing to know is how much land do we need to generate this electricity? The Kw per acre wouldn’t be very impressive. In all these calculations we count the value of the land @ $0.
The lesson of that was that Sask has plenty of baseload as a percentage and should keep it that way. Don’t follow Alberta and destabilize your grid with more unreliables. Less than a hundred large spinning shafts holding AC frequency is much safer than thousands of inverters running at random intervals.
Don’t wind turbines need to be shut down if the wind speed gets excessive? Perhaps the wind conditions in Alberta and Saskatchewan are different, or different regs (limits) apply in each province regarding excessive-wind shutdowns.
If they don’t feather off their blades at high winds they tear themselves apart and or the towers collapse.
The only people in favour of wind & solars are snake oil salesman or mentally deficients that still get covid vaccines and pee sitting down