The Reality of Wind and Solar in Northern Latitudes

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

Some more info:

In 2016 we had 167 straight days in Edmonton where thetemperature never got above zero.

Then there’s this:

The article mentions that there have been other long cold snaps like it, but that one was the longest.

https://www.edmontoncommonwealthwalkway.com/storyline/winter/86#

And this was just two years ago:

It is relatively common here as well to get ‘dark doldrums’, where the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining, either at night or because it’s heavily overcast. They can last for a long time as well. Germany has the same problem.

22

Alberta and Germany both seem to be in the running for having the worst energy policy in the developed world. No nuclear, limited hydroelectric, negligible storage in general, undersized grid interties, and so on. Almost as if they intentionally made themselves a pure fossil economy and then were surprised that it takes more than installing a few solar panels to have a decent renewable system. I’m not totally sure we should generalize from them to other regions.

Greatly increasing storage capacity would help. Even if the water resources are more limited in Alberta than (say) BC, hydroelectric doesn’t necessarily require large net amounts of water. Pumped storage is possible, but even without pumping, one can limit the use to only those times when long-term storage is required. I.e., make sure that your solar/wind is more than sufficient when it is active, and only use the hydro at the depths of winter. The peak can be much higher than the average.

Thinking out loud–I wonder why places don’t just buy generation from more suitable regions. Is there any reason why Alberta can’t just buy a solar farm down in Arizona and fund the required grid upgrades? Surely that’s cheaper than buying more local generation. California got 2/3 of daytime power use from renewables, so although the generation is reduced vs. summer, it’s hardly a disaster. We’re still using a lot of natural gas, but the amount that renewables cover increases year after year. Battery storage is also covering a significant part of the total.

23

Yay, I just got an emergency alert on my phone warning of a ‘high probability’ of rotating blackouts tonight.

I don’t know if that’s really fair for Alberta. We have built out more wind and solar than anyone else in Canada. We have 190MW of battery storage, and there is a pumped hydro project being built. It’s just not enough.

We have built out the hydro resources we have, but it’s not much. We’re a flat prairie. And we have wnted to build nuclear plants here for decdes, but have always been thwarted by activists from places like the Pembina Institute and the federal government. I talked about Alberta’s plan to build nuclear power for steam reformation in the pil sands, which would cut their carbon footprint in half. That project was killed as well.

We need nuclear power badly here, and Ottawa finally seems to be at least rhetorically onboard with new nuclear. Maybe it will happen this time.

Also, we do have grid partners, and we import from them all the time. But right mow, our grid partners are also importing.

This is our situation right now. Look at the pool price for elecricity. But it’s probably wrong, as it looks like the graph only goes to 999.99. Probably the developers thought it could never go higher than that…

All our grid partners are importing their own energy.

I

24

I got the same thing. “Turn off all non-essential lights, unplug your car, use your microwave and not your stove,” and so on.

Agree with Sam that hydroelectric isn’t really going to work in a province that is mostly flat. There is a bit of hydroelectric generated, but that’s mostly in the Rockies, and isn’t enough to help all but a few mountain towns.

I’m originally from Ontario, and I was surprised, when I moved to Alberta, to find that there is no nuclear power generation. Given this cold snap, and the one we had last year, and the year before that, and so on and so on, maybe Alberta should look at nuclear. Ya think?

25

That’s pretty bad. Rough ballpark, Alberta’s electrical needs are about half that of California’s (our current demand is 26 GW). But we have >3 GW of battery storage. It was charging at 3.3 GW in the middle of the day and discharging at 0.5-2.5 GW overnight. But Alberta should warrant more storage due to the latitude. And we’re building out more storage at a prodigious rate.

If I had to guess I’d predict that Alberta’s nuclear policy was shaped by the same forces as in Germany: both the environmental activists and fossil fuel lobbies have allied themselves against it. Although that’s true everywhere, they end up with more influence in some areas than others. You would expect them to be more powerful in fossil-fuel-rich areas.

I don’t think importing energy should be considered altogether bad. It’s obviously bad if you end up paying through the nose. But building out supply in other areas, plus setting up long-term contracts, seems wise.

26

You did get kinda screwed with that southwest border. Still–my point is that while traditional hydroelectric is dependent on a significant water source, when you’re optimizing for storage rather than generation, different constraints apply. It looks like there are plenty of places in the Rockies where some well-placed dams would provide significant water storage at altitude. These should store energy far more economically than batteries (though with some downsides).

Clearly, that energy needs to be moved to population centers, so you need to upgrade your grid as well. But that’s relatively easy if most of the distance is flat.

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And, BTW, this isn’t something I’m just inventing out of whole cloth–people are looking at this already, like this example:

It just seems that they should have started on these projects 10+ years ago.

28

Yeah, I already mentioned we have a large pumped hydro projct underway. It’ll provide some significant backup power for a few hours, and help with the morning and evening shortfalls. But it’s kind of a unicorn of a site, and good sites for pumped hudro are few and far between. It’s not enough. Especially if we add more wind and solar and shut down more fossil. Then we’d need a LOT more storage.

29

This is an interesting post, showing how delusional the Canadian Energy Regulator’s Net Zero plan for Alberta really is.

They expect us to primarily replace the rest of our coal and a whole lot of our natural gas with wind by 2030.

Tonight, coal is running at 99.1% capacity. Dual fuel (combined coal/gas plants) are at 100.1%.

If we had done this by now, or were even a few years into the transition, tonight Albertans would be freezing in the dark. All that wind capacity would be providing nearly zero power, and thatmwill be the case EVERY time it gets life threateningly cold like this. It’s ridiculous.

Also, if we transition to EVs as Trudeau is demanding, our entire transportation system would be dead. As it is, Edmonton’s $60 million inveatment in electric buses is already a joke. Now it’s a dangerous one.

Somehow in this mess we have to add something like 20-30% extra generation to handle the transition to EVs. Oh, and their plan includes no nuclear (or maybe a tiny amount, barely visible on the chart), despite their lip service to it. And we’re supposed to build carbon capture, which will drive costs up even more.

And we are supposed to do this while reducing our oil exports, and therefore the revenue from it, 30% by 2030.

This is why Alberta is pushing back so hard. What the Trudeau government is demanding is reckless and destructive. We simply can’t do what they are demanding. It will not happen, because it is not close to being reasonable. They leave us no choice but to push back, hard.

We’ll probably have another grid warning around 6 AM.

30

Interesting, though Googling, High Level is a very small town pretty far north in Alberta, while most of the people in the province live in the south. So those kinds of temperatures aren’t what most Albertans experience.

31

Could you elaborate? Are these trolley buses with overhead pantographs, like I grew up with in Toronto, or battery-powered buses? I thought Edmonton had trolley buses on select routes. Maybe 109th Street? Not being confrontational here, Sam, just trying to remember transit routes from when I lived in Edmonton back in the 2000s.

Agree that Trudeau is woefully uninformed when it comes to Canada as a whole. The needs of Quebec and Ontario (the “Laurentian Elite”) are not the same as western or Atlantic Canada, and none are the same as Northern Canada. Yet Trudeau thinks that a one-size-fits-all solution that works for the Laurentian Elite will work elsewhere. Ummm … no, it won’t, Justin.

I could add more, but … 'nuff said for now.

32

Right, which is why I also gve you temperatures for mid province and south, along with the Alberta average. Along with news reports from similar recent stretches of sub -30 temperatures in Edmonton and Calgary, which represent a large percentage of Alberta citizens.
Going to -39 tonigt. Close to -50 with the wind chill.

33

These are EV buses built by Proterra.

Proterra is now bankrupt. Their buses never lived up to their range promises, especially in winter. The city then spent $200,000 on battery blankets to try to minimize range loss. Didn’t help. The buses would go out at 4:30 AM, and be back at the barn with a discharged battery at 8:30 AM. That was when they were working. Only 16 of them are still running, and the rest are down waiting for parts from a bankrupt company.

It makes you wonder how much CO2 was generated making those buses. Stupid climate policy is worse than no climate policy, because it eats resources that could have been used for good climate policy.

34

Thanks for that, Sam. I have no comments, except to say that Edmonton’s (and Calgary’s and Grande Prairie’s and Lethbridge’s) cold must come into account when ordering such things. As I’ve said before, I never think about needing a new snow shovel in July. Come November, when I do—damn, why didn’t I think of this earlier? Similarly, it sounds like those buses would work just fine in July. But January? Different story.

Hell, I can’t even get my own car started under the cold that Alberta is currently suffering, in spite of the fact that its block heater is plugged in. What hope do electric vehicles designed and tested in warmer climes have here?

35

Well, if any good comes out of this cold snap it might be a wakeup call to people that there are real lives at stake here. Wishful thinking and a ‘legislate it, and someone will figure it out’ mentality destroys lives and kills people when applied to basic services in locations with extreme weather.

36

The conservative mindset seems to be, “if it’s good enough for Texas, it’s good enough for 'Berta.”

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Example?

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Alberta Separatism – Texas Secession
Right-wing politics
Oil uber alles

And, of course, Ted Cruz.

But you were telling us how renewables aren’t anywhere near as good as nuclear, remember?

39

And my phone is still doing it today. Might as well just turn the damn thing off; I know it’s cold, that there’s a strain on the grid, and I don’t need to be reminded of it every two minutes.

40

The key period is between 4pm and 8pm. We’re not using our stove for supper today, and delaying washing dishes and such until after 8.

Oh, I see. Tedious partisan politics again.

What does your last sentence have to do with anything? Does preferring nuclear power make us like Texas? Or is it a conservative trait to prefer power that actually works where we live? If so, guiilty as charged.

Here is yesterday:s contribution to our energy output by type:

The little purple and orange slices at the top of the pie chart were yesterday’s contribution of wind and solar. As a reminder, we have the most wind and solar capacity in Canada, have invested billions in it, and this is what we get from it when we need it most.

We added 802 MW of wind and solar just last year. We have a total of 5,980MW of wind and solar, which is close to half of our demand. That capacity number is what solar advocates use to compare the cost of solar to other sources.

Last night, our 5,980 MW of wind and solar produced a combined output of 14 MW. Enough to power about a block of houses.

Yeah, I prefer nuclear power to that. Any sane human would.