Good article - I have worked in the industry in the neighbouring province of Sask and will simply note that all utilities operate with fairly slender and chunky reserves. As noted in the article, a couple of major projects were delayed for whatever reason, which had they not been this issue would not have happened. This is the nature of the system. Regulators frown at 'gold plating' systems which has the effect of 'just in time' deliveries of new units to accommodate growth and to replace obsolete and aged out facilities. There is therefore a certain amount of stress in the system due to this approach - needless to add, when you replace a clapped out unit, net book value zero, with a nice new one, net book value $1 billion, you get a rate increase to pay for it. Not popular.
Also not popular is relying on your outdoor BBQ for cooking purposes given a blackout.
The 'chunky' aspect of new facilities is based on the fact that a new unit delivers, say, 1000 MW when load growth and decommissioned units require 200MW. You have a period of surplus which is then eroded in future years of load growth and decommissioned units. The cycle then repeats. Criticism of the 'unnecessary' capital investment providing 'unneeded' capacity is misplaced.
Frankly, the infrequency of problems is a credit to the utilities across the continent - they're all interconnected and all provide back up services when they can (Sask and BC did so at Alta's need, just as Alta does for its neighbours in the same circumstance). Folks generally have no idea as to the toing and froing between utilities but it is a critical part of the system.
Renewables complicate grid management but that's allowed for as well.
The CER will complicate planning and will drive investment in the coming decades but it is manageable. Much of public discourse is a trifle overwrought. No, GHG-emitting units will not be closed without replacement, thereby driving us all back to the days of "Quest for Fire".
How refreshing to read a real, non-biased explanation for what happened. Like so many situations, this one played out as a proof point for whatever pre-existing beliefs people had (eg Government stupid, renewables bad or whatever) and conveniently ignoring the possibility that the professionals whose job is is to plan for and manage these events were actually doing what they were supposed to and got caught out by other factors. This context is so important AND is a good example of the knee jerk reaction people have and use to drive a narrative or stoke anger based on, often, nothing at all actually related.
A question I have is were the project delays purely technical, or were investment decisions delayed pending the release of the proposed CER? These delays have had a chilling effect(pun intended) on industry, with projects delayed while investors wait on the regs to see if they will be viable.
That’s a fantastic question. Working in oil and gas for almost 40 years, I have observed what regulatory uncertainty does to the willingness to make huge capital investments. The unique thing about CER is the apparent rabidness of the federal environment minister. There is almost no way to manage the risk of him changing the rules based on assurances he might give one week and retract the next.
Excellent article. Alberta doesn't need a lengthy government report - they should just publish Professor Leach's article and focus on getting those plants commissioned.
I spent a lot of years earlier in my career developing back-up power systems. One of the figures that you have to grapple with is that the North American power grid has a reliability of ~99.99% (or 4 nines, as it's usually phrased.) Once you start digging into that last 0.01%, you quickly realize that it's almost always associated with extremely challenging conditions like heat waves, cold snaps, or storms. That means your back-up power system has got to be extremely robust to provide the required availability at those extreme conditions. The easiest way to do it is usually to have your system up and running with excess capacity to absorb whatever performance de-rate is imposed by operating under extreme conditions. That gets expensive, and that 0.01% of the time where the grid fails to provide power doesn't happen often enough for people to consistently make the connection to why their power bill seems to be higher than it needs to be.
Must quibble a tad with Dr Leach's facts - wind turbines weren't down exclusively because it was cold per say. My husband is an electrician and built several of those facilities. At -30, code dictates that turbines be powered down because the brittle factor of the material comes into play and the blades could crack and fly off. Also, the insulation around the cables becomes brittle as well and one minor error on a splice between turbines in those temps and they will go boom boom.
Wind turbines will always be at zero output at -30. Nothing can change this. Basic thermodynamics.
The real issue is how dependent we are on the power grid. If you don't have a gas fire place, you may be half a day or less away from pipes freezing ( gas furnaces still need power to operate the blower ). I live in a rural area where power outages are common. My last house had 40,000 BTU of propane fire place capacity which made the place livable for 5 days during an outage. If you completely electrify you put all your eggs in one basket metaphorically. A useful innovation would be using natural gas to power the electrical components of your gas furnace in a power outage.
Good point. Growing up in a rural area certainly made me appreciate redundancy. Even now I keep my portable genset at the ready even though a long outage in the city where I now live is a greater long shot. Old habits and all that.
As alluded to by a previous post, the unreliable nature of intermittent renewable energy needs far more public debate and attention than it receives.
We are talking about a serious public investment and foisting higher electricity rates in order to replace a highly reliable (barring ice storms, hurricanes etc) electricity grid with a mix of renewable energy and climate alarmist approved backup power.
This is a crazy way to run an electricity grid, especially when combined with a central planning diktat in Ottawa that will force hundreds of thousands of EV automobiles onto the electricity grid at the same time.
There is a need for a serious, pan Canadian discussion on electricity management in this country. Unfortunately, it can’t happen while the current Liberal government is in power. The Trudeau government is trapped by its rigid ideology and is unable to see a disaster in the making, nor are they concerned about the cost- benefit implications considering the risks for ordinary Canadians.
Cascade is pretty close to being online from what I’ve seen. Cascade 1 anyways which has generated some power for short bursts. It really was a perfect storm. Also the Milner plant (thank I have the name right, I didn’t double check) had an unexpected outage on the Friday and wasn’t back at full capacity on Saturday. (It was putting out below 100 MW or less than 1/3 capacity for a few days. By Tuesday we were back to exporting power even during peak times.
The wind forecast was accurate because of the temperatures. Articles I’ve read says wind is zero below -30 as the structures are at risk of damage if they’re generating power below that. So they’ll know there zero based on temperatures.
Near as I can tell though, the delay in Cascade 1 and 2 being online is exactly the reason we lacked reserve. I knew we’d have another alert Sunday evening last week based on looking into the situation on Saturday - and we did. Thankfully more imports were available from neighbors on that Sunday night.
(One additional factor is that hydrongenerataion is lower due to drought in southern ab. Some of the small hydro projects aren’t generating any power right now as a result.)
Andrew provides one reason for our culminating event last weekend. He didn't include the perspective that Genesee repowering, Sundance 7, Cascade Power & Suncor's Coke Boiler Replacement sanction decisions were all delayed by a few years due to the policy uncertainty that existed with carbon pricing, the on & off again capacity market, coal power retirement deadline movement, etc. The business rules constantly changing, coupled with manufacturing capacity limitations as the entire world decided to explore replacing coal with natural gas set us up for the unintended consequences we experienced. Amongst the other contributing factors I hope the AESO reaches a little deeper and looks at the impact of governments constantly tinkering with policy and the impact this has on business cases for generation capacity and the delays created, this should lead to a more robust conversation on achieving grid stability with the benefits of an energy only market.
So it turns out wind generation is the deadbeat dad of power generation. Great when he's around but when times are tough nowhere to be seen. In technical terms "Common-mode failure".
We need another article on the delays on Cascade, etc. Something like a Toyota-esque 5 whys.
On a recent podcast there was also a comment about the co-generation and the economics of it, how the contracts incentivize bad pricing and performance. I was hoping the economist author would address that.
Very important to dispel the conspiracy theorists who say the grid was straining because of sabotage - never attribute to malice etc. But does this not illustrate the problem with renewables? That whatever capacity renewables are to provide, there must be an equivalent, redundant parallel "traditional" system as a back up for when it's dark and still, so you end up building 2x the generation infrastructure?
I find it hard to read this analysis when the author did plenty of tweeting about the renewables pause and the seeming disaster this would have to Alberta and climate change and whatnot. Turns out the pause is justified, no?
I say "no" if only because people put their money down based on the stated rules and then the rug was pulled out with no warning and for no good reason. I suspect it was due to some oil honchos asking their former employee, the Premier, to "kick our competition in the crotch, please." "Right away, boss."
So not because the massive influx of projects was causing concern, in no part because all this capacity can prove useless at times, which we saw live during a near brownout. I get that renewables are here, but why treat them like fusion - the energy dream that's always out of reach. I prefer the sanity of Premier Smith - diversity, invest and keep O&G.
If sanity was Smith's strong suit she would have given the investors a few months notice about the change. She attacked energy diversity. When the oil price drops, and it eventually will, the expensive sources will be stranded. The big foreign companies will pull out and leave tailing ponds and orphan wells. Alberta better be ready for that.
I understand. All that has been "predicted" for years and yet last month Alberta produced a record amount of oil. And there are lots of job vacancies and energy investing, including in renewables.
How effective at reducing peak demand was that emergency call sent to cell phones to reduce power consumption? Do managers of public buildings, street lighting and such also act on these calls?
There are better ways to send such a request out without having to make it as dramatic as a cell phone alert. It's done elsewhere via the news and it does not generate as much commotion.
I’m not sure any reduction request communication would have been as quick and efficient as the “fire alarm” method on our cell phones as the consumption rates dropped very quickly. Crude and very annoying but it worked. The public building consumption did make the Calgary newscast though and is a very valid point. Downtown was still lit up like Christmas.
Funny some found that annoying. With exception of two houses in our immediate vicinity that includes about 40 homes, lights went out quickly and neighbours laughed about the challenges of winter.
We live in a pampered society. As you stated in another comment, the challenges of keeping mechanical equipment running in extreme temperatures are huge. We should be expressing amazement that anything runs in a province where winter and summer temperatures can both be measured with a number that includes 40.
Thank you for that clarification. Renewable are a most and I am worried they would be scapegoated for this event. With Renewables I firmly believe that small modern modular Nuclear systems, possibly using Thorium, must be part of out electric grid.
I really enjoyed this dispassionate and non-partisan analysis/explanation. I’m also really enjoying the informed comments here. Thank you! Line Editors - Can we please ask Dr. Leach to write us an article on what a legitimate path for the de-carbonization of Alberta’s grid by 2035 would look like? I have seen zero tangible public discussion on this. Which is crazy. Please also factor in the additional electric demand due to the new electric car quotas coming into the effect concurrently as well. it would be fantastic to have serious discussions about these things. By my (rudimentary calculations) if we meet our electric car sale requirements up to 2035 (not including). AB will need 7700MW per day of additional power generation to power our electric car fleet- (assuming zero population growth, so real numbers). This would be roughly a 60% increase over our current January 2024 power generation capacity. So we’ll need this (approx) as additional carbon emission free grid capacity, all the while at the same time converting 85% of our exiting power generation to zero carbon. Who, what, when, where and how please? Would love something on this..
Good article - I have worked in the industry in the neighbouring province of Sask and will simply note that all utilities operate with fairly slender and chunky reserves. As noted in the article, a couple of major projects were delayed for whatever reason, which had they not been this issue would not have happened. This is the nature of the system. Regulators frown at 'gold plating' systems which has the effect of 'just in time' deliveries of new units to accommodate growth and to replace obsolete and aged out facilities. There is therefore a certain amount of stress in the system due to this approach - needless to add, when you replace a clapped out unit, net book value zero, with a nice new one, net book value $1 billion, you get a rate increase to pay for it. Not popular.
Also not popular is relying on your outdoor BBQ for cooking purposes given a blackout.
The 'chunky' aspect of new facilities is based on the fact that a new unit delivers, say, 1000 MW when load growth and decommissioned units require 200MW. You have a period of surplus which is then eroded in future years of load growth and decommissioned units. The cycle then repeats. Criticism of the 'unnecessary' capital investment providing 'unneeded' capacity is misplaced.
Frankly, the infrequency of problems is a credit to the utilities across the continent - they're all interconnected and all provide back up services when they can (Sask and BC did so at Alta's need, just as Alta does for its neighbours in the same circumstance). Folks generally have no idea as to the toing and froing between utilities but it is a critical part of the system.
Renewables complicate grid management but that's allowed for as well.
The CER will complicate planning and will drive investment in the coming decades but it is manageable. Much of public discourse is a trifle overwrought. No, GHG-emitting units will not be closed without replacement, thereby driving us all back to the days of "Quest for Fire".
How refreshing to read a real, non-biased explanation for what happened. Like so many situations, this one played out as a proof point for whatever pre-existing beliefs people had (eg Government stupid, renewables bad or whatever) and conveniently ignoring the possibility that the professionals whose job is is to plan for and manage these events were actually doing what they were supposed to and got caught out by other factors. This context is so important AND is a good example of the knee jerk reaction people have and use to drive a narrative or stoke anger based on, often, nothing at all actually related.
A question I have is were the project delays purely technical, or were investment decisions delayed pending the release of the proposed CER? These delays have had a chilling effect(pun intended) on industry, with projects delayed while investors wait on the regs to see if they will be viable.
That’s a fantastic question. Working in oil and gas for almost 40 years, I have observed what regulatory uncertainty does to the willingness to make huge capital investments. The unique thing about CER is the apparent rabidness of the federal environment minister. There is almost no way to manage the risk of him changing the rules based on assurances he might give one week and retract the next.
Excellent article. Alberta doesn't need a lengthy government report - they should just publish Professor Leach's article and focus on getting those plants commissioned.
I spent a lot of years earlier in my career developing back-up power systems. One of the figures that you have to grapple with is that the North American power grid has a reliability of ~99.99% (or 4 nines, as it's usually phrased.) Once you start digging into that last 0.01%, you quickly realize that it's almost always associated with extremely challenging conditions like heat waves, cold snaps, or storms. That means your back-up power system has got to be extremely robust to provide the required availability at those extreme conditions. The easiest way to do it is usually to have your system up and running with excess capacity to absorb whatever performance de-rate is imposed by operating under extreme conditions. That gets expensive, and that 0.01% of the time where the grid fails to provide power doesn't happen often enough for people to consistently make the connection to why their power bill seems to be higher than it needs to be.
Must quibble a tad with Dr Leach's facts - wind turbines weren't down exclusively because it was cold per say. My husband is an electrician and built several of those facilities. At -30, code dictates that turbines be powered down because the brittle factor of the material comes into play and the blades could crack and fly off. Also, the insulation around the cables becomes brittle as well and one minor error on a splice between turbines in those temps and they will go boom boom.
Wind turbines will always be at zero output at -30. Nothing can change this. Basic thermodynamics.
The real issue is how dependent we are on the power grid. If you don't have a gas fire place, you may be half a day or less away from pipes freezing ( gas furnaces still need power to operate the blower ). I live in a rural area where power outages are common. My last house had 40,000 BTU of propane fire place capacity which made the place livable for 5 days during an outage. If you completely electrify you put all your eggs in one basket metaphorically. A useful innovation would be using natural gas to power the electrical components of your gas furnace in a power outage.
Good point. Growing up in a rural area certainly made me appreciate redundancy. Even now I keep my portable genset at the ready even though a long outage in the city where I now live is a greater long shot. Old habits and all that.
As alluded to by a previous post, the unreliable nature of intermittent renewable energy needs far more public debate and attention than it receives.
We are talking about a serious public investment and foisting higher electricity rates in order to replace a highly reliable (barring ice storms, hurricanes etc) electricity grid with a mix of renewable energy and climate alarmist approved backup power.
This is a crazy way to run an electricity grid, especially when combined with a central planning diktat in Ottawa that will force hundreds of thousands of EV automobiles onto the electricity grid at the same time.
There is a need for a serious, pan Canadian discussion on electricity management in this country. Unfortunately, it can’t happen while the current Liberal government is in power. The Trudeau government is trapped by its rigid ideology and is unable to see a disaster in the making, nor are they concerned about the cost- benefit implications considering the risks for ordinary Canadians.
Death, taxes, and The Line readers blaming the feds for any problem in Canada. All inevitable.
Cascade is pretty close to being online from what I’ve seen. Cascade 1 anyways which has generated some power for short bursts. It really was a perfect storm. Also the Milner plant (thank I have the name right, I didn’t double check) had an unexpected outage on the Friday and wasn’t back at full capacity on Saturday. (It was putting out below 100 MW or less than 1/3 capacity for a few days. By Tuesday we were back to exporting power even during peak times.
The wind forecast was accurate because of the temperatures. Articles I’ve read says wind is zero below -30 as the structures are at risk of damage if they’re generating power below that. So they’ll know there zero based on temperatures.
Near as I can tell though, the delay in Cascade 1 and 2 being online is exactly the reason we lacked reserve. I knew we’d have another alert Sunday evening last week based on looking into the situation on Saturday - and we did. Thankfully more imports were available from neighbors on that Sunday night.
(One additional factor is that hydrongenerataion is lower due to drought in southern ab. Some of the small hydro projects aren’t generating any power right now as a result.)
Andrew provides one reason for our culminating event last weekend. He didn't include the perspective that Genesee repowering, Sundance 7, Cascade Power & Suncor's Coke Boiler Replacement sanction decisions were all delayed by a few years due to the policy uncertainty that existed with carbon pricing, the on & off again capacity market, coal power retirement deadline movement, etc. The business rules constantly changing, coupled with manufacturing capacity limitations as the entire world decided to explore replacing coal with natural gas set us up for the unintended consequences we experienced. Amongst the other contributing factors I hope the AESO reaches a little deeper and looks at the impact of governments constantly tinkering with policy and the impact this has on business cases for generation capacity and the delays created, this should lead to a more robust conversation on achieving grid stability with the benefits of an energy only market.
So it turns out wind generation is the deadbeat dad of power generation. Great when he's around but when times are tough nowhere to be seen. In technical terms "Common-mode failure".
We need another article on the delays on Cascade, etc. Something like a Toyota-esque 5 whys.
On a recent podcast there was also a comment about the co-generation and the economics of it, how the contracts incentivize bad pricing and performance. I was hoping the economist author would address that.
Very important to dispel the conspiracy theorists who say the grid was straining because of sabotage - never attribute to malice etc. But does this not illustrate the problem with renewables? That whatever capacity renewables are to provide, there must be an equivalent, redundant parallel "traditional" system as a back up for when it's dark and still, so you end up building 2x the generation infrastructure?
I find it hard to read this analysis when the author did plenty of tweeting about the renewables pause and the seeming disaster this would have to Alberta and climate change and whatnot. Turns out the pause is justified, no?
No.
If you have no reason, than the opposite of your answer is correct.
I say "no" if only because people put their money down based on the stated rules and then the rug was pulled out with no warning and for no good reason. I suspect it was due to some oil honchos asking their former employee, the Premier, to "kick our competition in the crotch, please." "Right away, boss."
So not because the massive influx of projects was causing concern, in no part because all this capacity can prove useless at times, which we saw live during a near brownout. I get that renewables are here, but why treat them like fusion - the energy dream that's always out of reach. I prefer the sanity of Premier Smith - diversity, invest and keep O&G.
If sanity was Smith's strong suit she would have given the investors a few months notice about the change. She attacked energy diversity. When the oil price drops, and it eventually will, the expensive sources will be stranded. The big foreign companies will pull out and leave tailing ponds and orphan wells. Alberta better be ready for that.
I understand. All that has been "predicted" for years and yet last month Alberta produced a record amount of oil. And there are lots of job vacancies and energy investing, including in renewables.
How effective at reducing peak demand was that emergency call sent to cell phones to reduce power consumption? Do managers of public buildings, street lighting and such also act on these calls?
There are better ways to send such a request out without having to make it as dramatic as a cell phone alert. It's done elsewhere via the news and it does not generate as much commotion.
I’m not sure any reduction request communication would have been as quick and efficient as the “fire alarm” method on our cell phones as the consumption rates dropped very quickly. Crude and very annoying but it worked. The public building consumption did make the Calgary newscast though and is a very valid point. Downtown was still lit up like Christmas.
Funny some found that annoying. With exception of two houses in our immediate vicinity that includes about 40 homes, lights went out quickly and neighbours laughed about the challenges of winter.
We live in a pampered society. As you stated in another comment, the challenges of keeping mechanical equipment running in extreme temperatures are huge. We should be expressing amazement that anything runs in a province where winter and summer temperatures can both be measured with a number that includes 40.
Thank you for that clarification. Renewable are a most and I am worried they would be scapegoated for this event. With Renewables I firmly believe that small modern modular Nuclear systems, possibly using Thorium, must be part of out electric grid.
I really enjoyed this dispassionate and non-partisan analysis/explanation. I’m also really enjoying the informed comments here. Thank you! Line Editors - Can we please ask Dr. Leach to write us an article on what a legitimate path for the de-carbonization of Alberta’s grid by 2035 would look like? I have seen zero tangible public discussion on this. Which is crazy. Please also factor in the additional electric demand due to the new electric car quotas coming into the effect concurrently as well. it would be fantastic to have serious discussions about these things. By my (rudimentary calculations) if we meet our electric car sale requirements up to 2035 (not including). AB will need 7700MW per day of additional power generation to power our electric car fleet- (assuming zero population growth, so real numbers). This would be roughly a 60% increase over our current January 2024 power generation capacity. So we’ll need this (approx) as additional carbon emission free grid capacity, all the while at the same time converting 85% of our exiting power generation to zero carbon. Who, what, when, where and how please? Would love something on this..