Alberta now has 44 wind farms, and Wednesday night they collectively produced next to no power (posted yesterday, but leads into the next two for context)

On Thursday, Alberta wind power had a hangover and the sun didn’t come out to play

What the Globe and Mail left out in its story on grid-scale batteries in Alberta

Key points:

The last day saw not only wind utterly collapse in Alberta, but solar AT THE SAME TIME, even at noon. And the narrative that we’ll simply build a lot of batteries for when that happens is disproven, as Alberta’s seven batteries only produced a 62 minutes of a wee bit of power all day on Thursday. And over the last 30 days, those seven batteries only produced 265 minutes out of over 300,000 minutes available to them. Yes, you read that right. And SaskPower is spending $26 million to buy one of these batteries. Seriously. It should be online any day.

So why, again, are we throwing away what we know works, natural gas and coal, for wind, solar and batteries? And it’s not even all that cold yet!

Bonus reading:

Steven Guilbeault cheers IEA report which says “no new long-lead-time conventional oil and gas projects are needed”