The Reality of Wind and Solar in Northern Latitudes

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

The current cold snap provides an object lesson in the limits of wind and solar power.

This is what our energy situation looks like right now in Alberta:

We are currently getting 26MW out of our 11566 MW of wind power, and 510 MW out of our 11566 MW of solar capacity. Together, wind and solar are providing 4.6% of our energy. Solar will soon br going completely offline. Wind is already offline due to the cold, with only a handful of turbines turning.

We could have ten times as much wind capacity, and it would still only be generating 2% of our power. Solar is doing amazingly well for January, but we have had little snow and the sun is shining. At 4PM today demand goes up and solar goes away. That will be interesting.

Notice that our grid partners are also importing. As a result, we are currently paying ten times the amount for electricity than we usually do.

In Dec 2023 for the month our solar power generated 6.6% of capacity. And that’s the best December we’ve had in years. Last year, it was 1.1%

Wind goes offline below -30 or so. That happens a lot here. So any cold winter night has to be covered with almost no wind and solar at all.

What’s the ‘renewable’ solution to this? By capacity we have something like 40% renewable energy generation. In reality, when you need it the most it is not there and you have to fall back on fossil fuels. 90% of our power today is being generated by fossil fuels.

Also, anyone who decided to rely on a heat pump as Trudeau wants is going to be heating their homes with electricity today, which makes things worse.

What are the ‘green’ solutions here? Preferably ones that don’t kill a lot of Albertans or bankrupt them. Alberta is already the leader in Canada in wind and solar installations. We’ve spend a huge amount on them, and pay a fortune for energy, and as of now it’s all just about useless. It will be completely useless by 4PM.

Have a look at the weather map. This is known as a ‘common mode problem’. All our grid partners are in the deep freeze like we are, and probably most of their partners as well.

2

Very nice summary. I wonder why engineers cannot make a wind turbine that operates at colder temperatures. Design the materials, clearances and lubrication for those conditions and turn them off if gets too warm.

3

It’s a good analysis, but let’s not use this example as a reason not to continue the investment, development, and evolution of these technologies. I think at this point there are definitely challenges in creating greener energy for the northern latitudes as illustrated above, but wind and solar can work well-enough already in lower latitudes where more of the world’s population lives. And for the part of the year when Alberta does not need to burn as much coal that is still a win.

4

The future for northern latitudes (which includes most of the inland US as well, and certainly the border states) is nuclear power for baseload, with as much solar and wind as local conditions warrant, and natural gas for peaking - and the ,ore wind and solar you have, the more natural gas you will need. Critical hours might be served by energy storage.

The areas that have high natural renewables like Quebec and BC with hydro and the southern US for solar - will have a much easier time getting to Net Zero. You’re mostly there already. But the energy poor interior, including the prairie provinces and border states, need nuclear and natural gas.

Here’s our latest report:

Wind is now completely offline. Not uust because of cold, but because the wind is calm. And it’s calm across the province, and probably a wider area than that.

And we are now paying $1,000/MW for our power, because we have to go a long way to get it since our grid partners are in the same position. This translates on our power bills as ‘delivery’ and ‘destinatio;’ fees, which are now much higher than the fixed cost of gas.

My power bill was $930 last month, with a carbon tax hike and this weather, I expect it will be $1100 or more. Three years ago we were paying $350. My kid says the neighborhood over from ours had a blackout earlier. The grid operator is asking everyone to ration power, which we are doing.

Albertans are paying about five times the price for climate change as any other province in Canada, because we are forced to use fossil fuels whether we want to or not. We just set a new record for demand. The solution here is NOT to build more wind and solar. It’s also not to tax our heating energy more. When there is no alternative, demand is inelastic and raising taxes just bankrupts people. It’s time to change course.

5

Well, I know that I’m going to be installing solar next year. Nuclear takes 6-8 years on average to be built, and I don’t trust the Albertan conservatives to do anything other than invest in natural gas and petrochem. I’ll still have to rely on natural gas in the winter, but I’ll be saving money the rest of the year.

6

How often does the level of cold currently being experienced in Alberta happen? According to this site there were five days where it went below -25C (-13F) in Calgary in 2010, far fewer than in the 1950s.

That’s not a lot of comfort to people experiencing current frigid conditions, of course, and electric generating capacity has to be able to account for extremely adverse weather, whether cold or heat waves (becoming more common in recent years). So, agreed that non-solar/wind backups are important.

I suppose I shouldn’t be griping about having to go down in the basement later today to wrap heating cable around our main water line so it doesn’t freeze early next week with an expected low of 4F, like it did during last Xmas’ -9F low. -40F doesn’t sound like fun.

7

Yeah, the OP seems to be making some very sweeping assertions based on not much time. It’s mid January, winter is half over and some bad days now doesn’t seem like a good reason to jettison wind/solar for the rest of the year. What’s the annual draw on renewables? What’s the corresponding footprint?

Here in the Chicago area, this week with it’s “omg freak polar blast” stuff will be the first time we go below 0F this winter. For the most part, we haven’t had daytime temps below freezing all winter. Each year, “winter” gets pushed back later and later and the famed Chicago winter is more like 35F and damp with a few weeks of snow in January/February. Hardly extreme conditions and probably only destined to get less wintery as global temps increase.

FWIW, we get most of our power here from nuclear and I’m a proponent of nuclear. I still think the OP makes a poor case.

8

Especially this year. We didn’t even have snow on the ground two weeks ago, and this is the first week it’s been truly cold this winter.

9

In December for the entire month, solar returned 6.6% of capacity. Last year it was 1.1%, and not much more in January.

Here’s what solar generation looked like for the entire month of December:

The solid line along the top is ‘capacity’. When you see a headline like, “New 500MW solar plant opens!” Or, “I installed a 10 KW solar system on my roof” They’re talking about capacity. What you actually get is far worse.

Rooftop solar in Edmonton is terrible. If you get it, you’d better hope that the net metering program continues, or you’ll lose your money.

Edmonton tracks how much power rooftop solar generates. You can see the data in the table at this link:

https://homes.changeforclimate.ca/solar-rebate-program/

Be aware that the units are different for the line graph overlaid on the bar graph. The bar graph shows total connected capacity. The line graph shows how many kWh were actually generated in that month.

So for example, in January 2023 there was 34.5 MW of solar capacity on the rooftops in Edmonton. If the sun shines on them for one hour, you would expect to get 34.5 MWh of power from them.

For the entire month, Edmonton rooftops generated 63.7 MWh. That’s less than 2 hours of full solar generation FOR THE MONTH. The total value of the energy generated, at an average of $70/MW, is $4439 worth of energy - for the entire city.

All the rooftop solar in Edmonton is little more than a rounding error in our energy generation.

Why so little? A combination of things:

  1. Irradience. At high latitudes, you get less solar energy per sq meter.

  2. Latitude. Your solar panels should be angld to the sun. In Edmonton, that’s about 53 degrees. If your roof pitch is lower, you’ll lose efficiency. Also, tracking the sun is more important at higher latitudes, and rooftop solar doesn’t track the sn.

  3. Snow. You might see a stat like, “snow cover only reduces solar efficiency by 5% per year”. That’s really misleading. First, there is no snow for six months of the year, so during winter you can count on losing 10% of your power. But in the north its worse, because they are counting on solar heating melting the snow off the panels, which happens in more temperate regions. But where it is very cold, the snow doesn’t melt off the panels. We’ve had light snow this year, but every roof I can see, including one with solar panls, is solid white. I expect the snow on the panels in the city to remain there until the cold snap ends. Maybe weeks.

  4. Poor placement. Edmonton homes tend to have roofs with many peaks. There generally isn’t enough space on a south-facing roof for all the solar you need. So the installers put the panels everwhere, guaranteeing that some will alwasys be suboptimal no matter where the sun is. And again, no tracking, and inclination is probably wrong.

The reason rooftop solar even remotely works financially for homeowners is because of high subsidies and because of net metering - you get to bank solar energy hours generated, then get the hours back when you consume. That’s a great deal because in reality the energy you generate from solar is probably worth $30-50 MW, but if you consume that energy in the evening, you might be getting power that would otherwise cost $500 or more per MW on a bad day. You are only paying maybe 1/10 of the true cost of your energy.

The people paying for that? Everyone else. And this doesn’t scale - the more people add rooftop solar, the higher everyone else’s bill goes. At some point, the program will stop. Then you’ll find out that solar power is almost worthless after a certain point.

10

The real question is, “How often does wind power go ofline?” Sometimes it’s due to cold, sometimes due to calm weather. Right now it’s both.

This was from May:

https://pipelineonline.ca/for-the-fourth-time-in-16-days-albertas-wind-power-drops-to-near-zero-output/#/?playlistId=0&videoId=0

Wind power went offline 4 times in a 16 day period, simply due to calm.

In Alberta, wind is MUCH better than solar. But even so, wind almost never gets above 50% of capacity, and we often goo days with no wind power. And as a reminder, any time there is no wind at night, there is no renewable energy at all.

Here’s December’s wind report:

That’s a pretty good momth for wind, but notice we still had a stretch from Dec 7 to 9 with almost no wind or solar, And wind dropped almost completely offline on the 15th as well. And look what happened to energy prices when it did (the green line).

The truth is that when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, we’re fine. Everyone is, pretty much. We’ve already got enough wind and solar to handle those situations. But when the wind isn’t blowing, the sun isn’t shining, or both, we have a big problem, and it’s not a problem that can be solved wth more wind and solar.

When you are paying $30/MW when conditions are favorable for wind and solar and $500-$1,000 when they aren’t, the answer is not to install more wind and solar. What Alberta desperately needs is energy when the sun isn’t shining, the wind isn’t blowing, or the temperature is extremely cold which kills both.

It’s a bright sunny day here. Just freaking cold. Here’s what our current energy situation looks like:

This is peak solar. Noon, on a day with not a cloud in the sky. We’re at 32.1% capacity. That will begin to drop now until dusk. Wind is offline due to cold, for a seconfd day in a row. Coal is running at 99.1% of capacity, and Dual Fuel at 99.6%. Remember that when comparing the capacity of coal or natural gas to the capacity of solar.

11

What was it the rest of the year?

As I said, during the winter I’ll have to use natural gas for heating. In the summer, though, axial tilt means we get more sunlight here than southern climes. As for roofs not working for solar… my house, at least, is pretty perfect.

And as for snow… well, I’m looking down the street right now, and I see three houses with solar panels… none of which have snow on them. Salt Lake City gets more snow than Edmonton, and there my solar production dipped in the winter… but over the entire year my electric bill was almost entirely processing fees.

I really don’t understand your animosity towards renewables.

12

The data going back to the start of the program is all in the table I linked.

The best month we had for Rooftop solar so far was May of 2023.

Total installed capacity: 37.6MW
Total Generated: 3707 MW

So almost 100 hours of full sunlight equivalent, Or about 3.2 hours per day.

Interestingly, most marketing material I see from the solar installers uses “4 hours of full sunlight equivalent per day” as the amount of energy we should be getting. We’ve never hit that, even in our best month. Note that June and July were only 64 hours equivalent, and April was about the same. Closer to 2 hours per day full sun equivalent. May was a real outlier.

13

If your fees were only processing fees, it’s because you are getting a massive subsidy on the backs of other rate payers.

I am not against renewables. I think every place should use as many renewables as local conditions allow for. Here in Alberta, that’s about 30-40% wind and solar by capacity, with most being wind, which is close to where we are now.

How can you tell? Because during the day when the sun is shining and there’s at least some wind, we don’t have any power issues. We don’t have to import, and grid prices are generally well below $100/MW. Often $30/MW.

It’s at night, or during calm periods, that we suffer and pay $500-$1000/MW to import energy. Solar power does nothing for you at night, and wind power is unreliable.

The events of this week illustrate that no matter how much wind and solar you have, there will be times when it is completely offline. What do you expect to do during those times? And how would building more renewables solve this problem?

Bear in mind that a provincial-level grid failure in this kind of weather would be a mass casualty event that can never be allowed to happen.

A related problem is peaks in price just before sunrise and just after sundown when demand is still high. That *might be solved by pumped hydro storage, and batteries might help with peaking. But the problem is caused by solar dropping offline during peak demand, so more solar can’t fix it.

The truth is, without storage there are plenty of times in Alberta when there simply isn’t enough renewable energy available to meet demand, and there wouldn’t be even if we built out ten times the capacity and bankrupted ourselves doing it.

The only answers for Alberta are nuclear and natural gas, with renewables making up maybe 40-50% by capacity and 15-30% by actual generation, with most of that coming from wind. We just can’t do much better. It’s just reality.

14

No, that’s not the way it worked there. Maybe it’s how it works here, but I doubt it. In Utah, the rebate I got was on the installation. I didn’t get any rebate on my electric bill- other than the fact that I was using less electricity from the grid. Most months my usage was less than I was producing, and they didn’t buy back the excess.

And like there, I won’t be disconnecting from the grid. What do we do in the few times a year when solar and/or wind won’t cut it? We’ll draw from the grid. And when solar and wind are sufficient, it leaves more electricity for those of you who insist on using non-renewable resources.

15

You are in Utah? I thought you were in Alberta. I know very little about Utah’s power situation, and the subsidies and legal stuff. So ignore what I said. Utah is also much farther south and in a better situation for solar power in general.

16

It’s early days, but that’s a strong candidate for the Top Ten Goalpost Shifts of 2024.

17

We got rooftop solar with batteries rather than feeding into the grid, at nearly the same latitude. Works well in summer - we can store surplus power generated during the day to use in the evening, and we spent 6 months totally off grid, including turning off the boiler for most of that time and using electricity to heat the water. But in winter power generation is negligible except for the rare sunny days. Nuclear would be fine for this situation as long as it produces enough total power, since the batteries flatten out the peaks and troughs of demand.

Once everyone has electric cars, the batteries in these could be used similarly - charge from the grid when demand is low, draw power when it’s high. Keep fossil fuels to cover unusual circumstances.

18

I was thinking about days when there is no wind power, and cold is one aspect of it. Nonetheless, you did ask for how many -25 days there are. That’s a hard question to answer, because Alberta is a huge province.

In Ft MacMurray, a little more than about halfway north in the Province, the *average December nighttime low is -20. In January it’s -22, and in February it’s -21. That’s three months where the average low is getting close to -25. If the average is -20, unless the weather is incredibly stable you should expect quite a few -25 days in there.

In Edmonton, the average low in January is -16. At the airport, more like -19. At High Level in the northern part of the province, the average January low is -24, in Feb it’s -23, and in December -22. The average low in December across the entire province is -13 in December. This includes Southern Alberta which is generally warmer.

So -25 is absolutely common in many parts of Alberta in the coldest months of winter. I could not find an absolute count of number of -25 days, but it’s plenty. We get them every year.

As a reminder, we only need one major grid failure when it’s -30 outside for there to be massive damage and loss of life. We had multiple grid alerts yesterday. We simply can’t tolerate a widescale long grid failure. Even worse would be a natural gas delivery failure.

19

Nope, I was questioning your statement about -30 days being something that “happens a lot”. That seems to be an overstatement.

Here in Kentucky I’ve experienced frigid outbreaks down to -20F (that was decades ago; the coldest we’ve had since I moved back to the state was last year’s -9F). That doesn’t mean that subzero temps “happen a lot”.

Of course, ignoring electrical grid problems in the expectation that severe weather doesn’t hit can be costly. Texans found that out in February 2021 when the grid failed and millions lost power and heat. In the fallout from that event, Governor Abbott and other state officials tried to fix the blame on renewable energy sources, but those claims didn’t stand up.

20

Do you think the info I fave might change your mind? Also -25 happens a lot more than ‘minus 30’s’. As I mentioned, -24C is the average daily low for January in High Level, and only a couple of degrees warmer in December and February. That’s three months where the daily average low flirts with -25.