They have not said that specifically. They have said that their target is 30% by 2030, but they have been vague about where the remaining 37% is supposed to come from. ‘Industry sources’ suspect that natural gas turbines will be part of the mix, but I haven’t seen anything official from the government in that respect. There’s simply a gap that they haven’t got a solid plan for. Of course, by necessity I think it will have to be natural gas, but then I think that about 90% of that 67% will have to be natural gas, because there’s no way in hell this province is going to provide 30% of our power needs from renewables by 2030. That number is a green fantasy.
And since I was called on the carpet for this, I have to point out that one of your sources says that the plan will replace 30% of our electricity, while the Canadian Press cite says it will be 30% of all power.
Let’s take that last cite, though (which I hadn’t seen before). It says that Alberta uses about 16,300 MW of energy, of which coal makes up 39%, or 6,357 MW. The government’s target is for 5,000 MW of renewables by 2030. That is in fact 30% of our power. I guess they could be talking about only electricity - I don’t have time to check right now, and bad writing by journalists isn’t surprising.
In any event, let’s just take their goal of 5,000 MW. The first thing to note is that renewables are not like coal or nuclear - a 5,000 MW coal fired plant running at a 90% duty cycle produces a hell of a lot more power in a year than an equivalent 5,000MWp solar installation.
So, to avoid all this wrangling over terms and power vs electricity and all that, let’s just go directly to the source: Alberta Energy Electricity Statistics
Now, from that cite we can see that coal generated 41,378 GWh of electricity in 2015. For simplicity, let’s ignore wind and hydro for a moment, and look at what it would take to replace that energy with solar. Let’s say the government builds a 5,000 MW solar plant. Here in Edmonton we get about 2345 hours of sunshine per per year. If we could convert all that sunlight to energy at peak rates that gets us about 11.725 GWh. That would replace about 28% of our coal-sourced electricity. But that doesn’t account for the fact that our energy needs are highest in winter when solar production is lowest. NAIT has also found that on an annual basis snow cover reduces efficiency by about 5.78%. So now we’re down to 11.04 GWh, or 26.7% of coal-sources electricity.
It also doesn’t account for other losses in the system such as battery storage losses, transmission losses if the solar plants are located far from the city, and on and on.
It also doesn’t account for the fact that your renewables can go almost completely offline for days or even weeks on end. Have a look at that data I provided for November. December will be even worse because the shortest day of the year and on average in December we only get an average of 2.34 hours of sunshine per day! (we get 7.12 hours of total daylight on the shortest day, vs 16.47 on the longest day).
So congratulations - the government’s plan - if they could meet it - will replace maybe 27% of our coal-fired electricity with intermittent, unreliable power that will require us to buy power from other provinces on cloudy days - if we can get it. Or, we have to maintain a complete fossil-powered grid in reserve that can be fired up when bad weather hits.
And because Alberta only gets about half the solar insolation that California gets, our plant would have to be sized to the equivalent of a 10MW plant in California. In other words, we are starting at DOUBLE the cost for an equivalent system elsewhere. And that doesn’t account for the increased construction and maintenance costs of our harsh climate, the costs for snow removal, etc.
So little Alberta is going to build the equivalent of a 10MW solar plant by 2030. How feasible is that? Well, for starters, that’s about 40% of the entire installed solar base in the United States. And if we’re really lucky, it will replace 27% of our coal-sourced electricity, but in the real world probably more like half that, and in the winter months more like a quarter of that.
And this is optimistic. Let’s take a look at the results in Ontario:
From that site you can see the difference between renewable power sources and traditional sources.
For example, Nuclear represents 36% of installed capacity, but 60% of all power output. Why? because it can do it 24 hours per day, every day of the year. Wind, on the other hand, represents 11% of installed capacity but only provided 6% of their power. Solar represents 1% of installed capacity, but its actual output is just shown as “<1%”. The numbers I’ve seen are around .4%.
So we’re starting with double the costs due to poor solar insolation, and then we can hope to get maybe half of the power that an equivalent nuclear or coal plant of the same capacity could provide. If we’re lucky. And we’ll get most of that power in the summer when we don’t need it, and very little in the winter when we do. And there will be long periods where 27% of our power is completely offline for days and will have to be replaced.
The end result is going to be almost no impact on global warming, in exchange for an unstable grid, huge tax and electricity price increases, and a lot of imported power.
