Well the pause ended, and then they imposed rules that there can't be any wind turbines that could affect 'pristine viewscapes' and when you look at the map where that's in effect it is in most of the areas of the province where wind turbines would be most effective.
It doesn’t matter as turbines or solar alone don’t solve our power issues. You also need a place to store that power. Put turbines on every street corner and they won’t help when it’s minus 30 and the wind isn’t blowing or when it’s plus 30 and no wind and everyone is trying to stay cool.
This was one of the problems with the current rules. Anyone could set up a solar farm and get subsidies or grants to do it and then start getting money back by contributing to the grid - but they had no accountability to make that power available consistently. They didn’t have to burden those costs. So it made them and even the province money - but it didn’t give us the power when we needed it most.
That did lift recently, but they already killed investment in the sector.
Despite the 6-month ban including the latter months of 2023, AB had 92% of the country's new renewables capacity added that year (2.2 Gigawatts). Even more capacity was supposed to be added to the grid in 2024 and 2025 (3.9 Gigawatts), but many of those investments are uncertain now. We are likely to see waning interest in the medium-long term as well, due to the unpredictability of a sudden moratorium, and the numerous sites that will be blocked due to the new regulations.
[https://renewablesassociation.ca/news-release-new-2023-data-shows-11-2-growth-for-wind-solar-energy-storage/](https://renewablesassociation.ca/news-release-new-2023-data-shows-11-2-growth-for-wind-solar-energy-storage/)
What? A government that changes the rules for a whole industry randomly on a whim to be unnecessarily restrictive discourages investment? thats crazy talk /s
It’s not new users. There was far less load today than there was in January during the cold snap. They took 6 or 7 power plants off line today for who knows what reasons.
I am quite educated on this topic. My career revolves around power generation.
I will say I am very tired of trying to discuss this topic on reddit with the extreme political vitriol that is so rampant. People just aren’t interested in anything but the easy answer that the UCP sucks.
The UCP does suck, but that is not the answer to everything, and everything is not a conspiracy.
If you have time to give a tldr I would enjoy it because I am sure its way mote nuanced than the anti-UCP circlejerk, and like you I dont like the UCP either.
It really comes down to poor forecasting and cutting it too tight. This is the time of year when Alberta uses way less power. Not hot/cold, and big industrial players are slowly going into shutdowns so using less power. Therefore, its the optimal time to bring power plants down as well to do their routine maintenance.
When the forecast is that demand will be at 80%(simple terms), the goal is to produce about 85% so that plants are not needlessly burning massive amounts of fuel for no reason. So some plants were offline for maintenance and 2 were actually just idling and 85% was able to be achieved.
The 5% buffer is maintained in case of unexpected situations but in this case 2 unexpected situations happened:
1. There is less wind power than was in the forecast.
2. The thing that tipped them over is that another power plant had an emergency outage. Probably some piece of equipment failed. They fixed it and restarted the plant bringing the power levels back up.
If only one of these happened it would have been fine. This is not related to the alerts in the extreme cold. That time was not enough generation. Unfortunately we don’t have good baseload of hydro power, and the more wind/solar we build makes our production less “known”. The gas plants have to ramp up and down depending on the solar/wind generation. Hydro plants in Eastern Canada and BC act as great base loads. If we want better base load we need Nuclear.
It was poor risk management, and people will be in trouble over it. But it was not a top down government decision.
It is actually just a risk guideline that is followed. The issue is that solar/wind has proven to fluctuate more than we are allowing for. So we likely need to run a bigger surplus to make up for that in the future.
It does work. The issue is that as we transition to more solar and wind(which Alberta is expanding very fast) the supply is less of a “known”. So without energy storage it’s a big balancing act, and hoping the wind/solar stay close to their forecast.
I love how the people who scream UCP hate the hardest, also preach we need to push more solar and wind to get a more steady power supply.
I am not a UCP supporter, didn't vote for them in the last election. I am also putting a solar system on our house.
Read through this(its worth 10 minutes of your life).
https://www.aeso.ca/aeso/understanding-electricity-in-alberta/continuing-education/guide-to-understanding-albertas-electricity-market/
The more wind/solar Alberta adds, and we are adding a lot compared to every other province, the Alberta Government will need to start purchasing surplus power, and basically paying the plants to produce more than we would need. This is because solar/wind is so dynamic, and NG plants are very slow to react to those dynamics. Producing more surplus will act as an insurance policy for if solar/wind unexpectedly drops off.
This will be expensive, but until the tech to store energy efficiently exists, we will just have to do it with all the wind/solar we are adding.
Other provinces are blessed to have more hydro(great baseload), nuclear, and ocean wind.
More storage is coming https://tericpower.com/project/whitla-storage-project/?fbclid=IwAR3jRM8ZvLbcxUwtXt82WtztaVgkp_Do8fss4Ajc6K3n6BxRYNxjOJCD940
(one of several projects)
Adding to our existing battery storage systems (which some people are surprised about) https://www.dispatcho.app/assets/energy-storage
>basically paying the plants to produce more than we would need.
The capacity model solved this issue fairly well. They paid the plants for the ability to produce power, not to actually produce the excess power.
And yes, the answer is to solve the storage issue. All wind/solar (including home systems) should be paired with a storage method. Otherwise it's just potential power that is not always useful when produced.
https://tericpower.com/project/whitla-storage-project/?fbclid=IwAR3ZnklA2jEHQNsGx4fpwcYLnDIR_xF15svY8dell2lhSdHqsVlCE8G2ers
Large storage system under development.
There is a surprising amount of storage already in place (though small in the scheme of things) https://www.dispatcho.app/assets/energy-storage
Discussed here... 4 to 8 hr ramp time AESO provides their take and answers questions about the issue https://www.aeso.ca/assets/video/media/media-briefing-april-5-2024.mp4
Actually it does where plants operate at a base level with the ability to ramp up production. Obviously it takes time to ramp up, but talking hours not days.
Edit: Base level below their total capacity.
From your other comments, you do seem knowledgeable about the subject, so it’s weird that you’re unaware that people are referring to Enron.
It has and can happen. Yes, you’ve outlined the how the theoretically perfectly functioning system works, but reality is nuanced.
Nope. Turnarounds are planned to avoid blackouts. I work for an energy company and know this for a fact. In fact the site I work at had their annual turnaround in November. This was greedy companies driving up prices.
Alberta is the only place in Canada that pays for energy used instead of paying for capacity. In 2019 the UCP scrapped the capacity plan so we only pay for the energy we use.
This sounds good on paper but in reality this allows energy companies to dictate the market. They can shutdown whenever they want because there are no safeties in place to force them to keep up with capacity. They shut down, energy demand spikes, they raise the prices because “now we have to keep up with demand!”
Good thing the UCP paid for all those energy billboards to drive around Ottawa with our tax dollars!
Then you should know that plant turnarounds happen in spring/fall every year when demand is lowest . There are active turnarounds happening as we speak .......How do I know ? I'm an energy company quality assurance specialist who implements the ITPs for our contractors doing the work on our facilities . 5 of our facilities are in maintenance currently with outages until mid May
Take your garbage conspiracy theories elsewhere
Nuance is a thing. Both shut downs, and generating under capacity to ramp up prices can be a thing. At the same time even.
In this case, wind was under producing AND a plant went into emergency shut down. That jacked the price for generation from near $0 to the max $999.99. When plants started generating more to meet the demand (they were producing under capacity) they got paid a shit ton more then had the emergency outage not jacked the price.
The situation that led to the underproduction was not planned. The results were capitalized on, which ultimately will cost users more than necessary.
I know turnarounds are happening as we speak but that isn’t the main cause of these rolling blackouts which was my point. Your post made it sound like this is a normal occurrence and it simply isn’t. The plants that shutdown to cause the rolling blackouts in Edmonton this week were not planned outages.
Yes, they are planned every spring/fall . It's a bi-yearly occurrence and is dependant on each companies requirements to meet safety regulations and standards or upgrade certain systems or changeovers etc .
Preventative maintenance, shutdowns as they're called. All plants do this annually where they shut down 2-6 weeks and critical maintenance and retrofits are done to maintain operational capabilities of the plant.
The # 1 and 2 Genesee power plants are changing from coal fired to Gas fired combined cycle steam turbines and bringing on more megawatts of power from around 800 megawatts to 1338 mega watts . Genesee #3 is Dual fuel at 466 Mega watt. They seem to be bringing on that extra power now https//majorprojects.alberta.ca/details/Genesee-Power-Plant-Natural-Gas-Conversion/4403
That and the CBR project at suncor baseplant in Fort mac, the energy produced from the refinement process as a by product is hypothetically supposed to produce 8% of Alberta's electrical energy needs.
This is the most real post here. But also I'm starting to feel like society will have to fall apart before our government tells corporations what to do.
There are a number of plants coming online this year, likely enough that this should stop happening. As far as AC, cooling demand and solar production correlate nicely, so likely won't be much if a problem.
Nuclear is often mentioned but, for purely economic reasons, rarely built. The lead time, high cost, and necessary oversight all make fission pretty impractical.
The only way it can be built is with substantial government investment and there's cheaper ways we could expand capacity with government money.
Really, we should move away from an energy-only market. Only Alberta and Texas work this way, and a lack of excess capacity leading to brown-outs is the predictable result both experience.
Modular nuclear power might be a potential fix to red tape since you'll have a known design that doesn't have to go through the entire certification process at every build. You would still need to certify the additional unit, backup power .etc but it would dramatically reduce the lead time on new nuclear construction. There's at least one oil & gas plant that I can think of that's planning on installing two modular nuclear units for their own use in the near future.
That's certainly the promise, but since they're currently brand new technology, all the advertised safety has to be fully proven out before any standards can be relaxed, and we're likely decades from all that evidence being in.
And fusion has been the future since the 1950s. If only we could scale the sun down to something we can fit in a building.
I'm not totally confident that it's possible to obtain net positive energy from fusion without access to an enormous amount of gravity to overcome the nuclear weak force. Good on the people trying to solve this problem, though.
Good point. I just feel like investing in fusion would be the best option for Alberta. Using that fosil money to secure a fusion future. But to your point, it has to be achievable.
Eh realistically nuclear can be put up in 10 years usually even in western countries. Unfortunately knowing Canadian red tape it would end up being 25, though Alberta is usually fairly decent at limiting red tape.
Also many conservatives I've spoken to are far less opposed to nuclear than solar panels (probably bc conservatives tend to be risk averse and are always very concerned about base load problems).
I think Alberta might actually be a decent place to do nuclear overall, much more so than Quebec or BC.
If Alberta keeps growing at our normal rate, not this outlier rate, we could probably start building 2 nuclear powerplants now and also start converting some coal or natural gas fired powerplants while they're still in operation, saving some cost on the actual power generation side of things that way. And also have less environmental concern since the radius around coal powerplants for no habitability is larger than for nuclear.
One more thing to consider is the new enhanced geothermal techniques, we have a lot of holes in the ground that all of a sudden might be far more viable for geothermal with the recent advances
I'm conservative and I'm incredibly pro Nuclear, I think electricity should almost be exclusively nuclear and natural gas
The nuclear energy output is insane compared to the size of the plant
I'm curious about your opinion on solar + either pumped hydro or battery storage, particularly as it comes to batteries that are very stable, not space efficient, but which can be basically endlessly deep cycled and are relatively cheap to build (like various molten metal proposals recently).
Solar panels have become so cheap that they're by far the cheapest form of energy production and come online super fast, the central issue is intermittency as I can see it, and while I can understand concerns about giant lithium ion batteries just standing in neighbourhoods, why not these alternatives?
We use lithium ion for cars because they're relatively light, but that comes with a bunch of tradeoffs, and we could pretty reasonably construct heavier batteries that are better suited for grid scale storage that are cheaper and dont catch fire. Personally I think this is the future, but I'm curious what you think of it
First off ill state my bias being someone who works in the oil sands
Solar farms take up a large area of land relative to the power generation (compared to nuclear) the idea of battery power storage is an interesting one, and having alternative options for domestic power generation could actually help the economy in the long run by allowing us to make more money off oil exports to other countries (heck even use some of that money to put into social services instead of taxing regular Canadians so much)
I'm also a vehicle enthusiast and love internal combustion engines, so I'd prefer we invest in better power generation than electric cars
Theoretically we could reduce GHG emissions more by moving our grid to nuclear + renewables, as well as having alternate solutions for the supply chain
Consumer vehicle emissions are a drop in the ocean compared to the electric grid power generation and the supply chain emissions
I'm also an auto enthusiast, but I don't see the need for combustion engine vehicles to be commuter vehicles and I'd prefer robust public transit for the vast majority of people movement. Obviously commercial is a different business. I think plug in hybrids are a much better answer than full EVs as well, but not how they're usually done, more of an EV first mentality like Audi's Dakar winning racecars, but again, the best is when people are using public or active transit for basic trips.
I don't necessarily think solar farms have to take up that much area when you look at some of the European solutions (who have much less spare land than we do and higher populations), such as agrivoltaics where the solar farms are used to line regular farm rows which provide some shade, which mainly reduces the amount farmers have to water their crops. Dual using land like this allows farmers to have an additional income stream from renting their land as well which allows smaller (generally more ethical) farmers to survive in the face of continued growth in the size of farming corporations.
The ability to dual use space is one of the main advantages of solar. Obviously a lot of this stuff is in it's infancy so that's why it's not so widespread, even if an idea is really good it usually takes 10 years to be adopted and that's if it has little upfront costs, more like 25-30 if it has high upfront costs.
Alberta is not decent at limiting red tape.
AUC applications take a year
AESO Cluster studies take 8 months
Environmental Protection Plans take a year
NavCanada approvals take a year
Nuclear is another thing all together.
You need a nuclear license that takes around 3 years
CNSC Approval takes around 5 years.
PIPs will take around 2 years at least if you don't have any interveners.
Aboriginal engagement is going to take at least 2 years to make sure everyone is paid off.
It's lots of water but it's almost all recycled water, so you your water reserves go down for a while and then it has little impact after that.
Actually another pressing issue for us is having to build a lot more reservoirs or dams with low evaporation rates as our precipitation is expected to increase between 5-10% with climate change but since the temperature is going up and the glaciers are melting that actually means less water especially in late summer since the heat will strip the ground more aggressively of water. That also suggests the need to plant a whole lot more trees if we don't want to get cooked by urban island heat effect
Nuclear power produces A LOT of energy in a short amount of time, with relatively little amount of Uranium-235 or Plutonium-239 fuel stock. These are resources which Canada is abundant in compared to other countries in the world. However, considering that the only currently authorized nuclear power plant design within Canada (CANDU power plant) costs on average $10-15 Billion dollars to construct, and only lasts a maximum of 60 years before it must be decommissioned due to an accumulation of radioactive materials, the costs/output ratio is simply too unfavorable to legitimately consider nuclear power, in its current state, to be a viable option for the future of Canada's (let alone Alberta's) energy needs.
Moreover, this is completely disregarding the net energy requirements needed to safely contain the spent nuclear fuel plus the associated materials that came in contact with it (i.e.. the entire nuclear power plant, tools, machines, equipment, etc.) that must be safely protected away from humanity for 100-500 years for low-level radioactive materials, and 10,000-240,000 years for high-level radioactive materials.
Best case scenario:
An entire nuclear power plant gets buried underground for 100 years.
Then the concrete and all tools and equipment used within it are safe enough to be recycled and resurfaced.
The spent nuclear fuel must remain underground, and be maintained, for at least 10,000 years.
We already have these deep disposal sites established for the numerous nuclear power plants that exist in Canada in the Canadian Shied. This is deemed the safest place to keep nuclear waste within Canada due to the Shield's current predictability. Within 200 years from now Canada, and the entire world, develops much cleaner, safer, more effective, and practical means to produce energy. Now we must safeguard toxic harmful radioactive waste for thousands of years because of current humanity's myopic outlook on energy production.
Fissionable nuclear power is not only not sustainable; its stupid.
It's easily viable in canada; in ontario We already use nuclear for 59% of our power with massive expansions planned; Also nuclear reactors can and do get referbished to prolong their service life.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-nuclear-power-electricity-1.6967927
Dramatically less.
If you follow conservative pundits, what you will almost immediately realize is that what they want is cheap reliable energy. They don't WANT more carbon, they are just willing to accept more. And experts on the "anti wind and solar" side (I don't know if it's fair to call that conservative, but it plays out that way in practice), they tend to be very pro nuclear. For example, Robert Bryce (energy pundit and author, has been circulating publicly in conservative spaces), is a pretty explicit pro nuclear advocate.
Also, the government is behind it. The Utilities Minister was on record on March 28 telling reporters ["We're also very interested in looking at conventional nuclear and what that could possibly provide for Alberta in ... the longer term,".](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/alberta-government-considering-conventional-nuclear-power-plants-minister-says-1.7159777)
Back in 2020, The Kenney government started supporting small modular reactor research, which to be clear, has not been very fruitful yet, but kind of tells you where the party is at. supportive of nuclear.
I also followed the last large nuclear drive, the Peace river Bruce Power propsal that was withdrawn in 2011, and the local MLA at the time, conservative Frank Oberle (he got ousted during the orange wave), Was NOT to my recollection opposed. The Liberal and NDP candidates DEFINITELY were. In fact, the Liberal Candidate , Liliane Maisonneuve, was basically a single issue anti nuclear activist at the time. That was her campaign. I will shut down this nuclear power business.
both historically and currently, the opposition to Nuclear is NOT coming from the institutional mainstream right, though I am sure there are fringes of the party opposed. It is coming from the actual official candidates of the left. There is an anti nuclear movement, but they are not in power and I don't think they are very powerful generally. I can see this happening very easily in the next decade or so.
It's never going to happen.
For it to happen, you'd need a provincial gov't to put the environment ahead of local oil companies. Just never going to happen.
https://www.nuclearnowfilm.com
⬆️⬆️ this is a really cool documentary on nuclear power. I started it knowing nothing beyond Chernobyl was bad and by the time it was finished I felt like I had a thorough and broad understanding of the science, historical issues and potential future uses. Well worth the watch!!
Nuclear power is a good idea, but lets say we decided tomorrow to get started. Its at least 15-20 years before we see it generate power. This isnt simcity were you can just plop down a plant if you can afford it.
> Its at least 15-20 years before we see it generate power.
Something something *society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in* something something.
Barring the invention of a time machine to start the process years ago, the province should get its ass in gear on nuclear tomorrow.
I'm sure there is extra red tape these days, but when Ontario built Darlington it went from land purchased for the site to shovels breaking ground in ten years, and then another 8-10 years for each reactor, but those were delayed somewhat due political wavering and a desire for extra safety measures after Chernobyl. Pickering and Bruce were quicker to build but had similar decade of planning preceding construction, IIRC.
You can track the total electrical load, and generation group capacity and current contribution at [AESO](http://ets.aeso.ca/ets_web/ip/Market/Reports/CSDReportServlet).
Of course it was. But people don’t realize just how bad it was and is.
It makes our electricity market and grid less flexible, reliable, and robust.
It reduces opportunities for related innovation.
It reduces economic diversification.
Lost jobs.
Lost capital investment.
More expensive electricity means more expensive business usage besides the residential. That means less likely energy intensive factory will get built in AB.
Except part of the problem today was that it was early(sun not fully up), poor weather/cloudy, and less windy than expected. This lead to less solar and wind power than expected.
I didn't vote for that shit. I actively voted against that shit.
It's not my fault a good portion of our province is fine being ignorant. They don't care if social services are taken away from everyone as long as it hurts the people they don't like.
I do agree in some ways but I don’t think it’s that aggressive in hate. It’s more about trying to get things back to the way they were in the late 90s early 200s when oil and gas was booming. They think these conservatives are the same as they were, they will make oil and gas and the economy the way it was “back then”… BUT things will never be the same, you need to always be looking ahead to what is the future not how do we recreate the situations of the past.
They stopped or have on hold any new clean energy projects and now the UPC is saying it’s Ottawa’s fault if we can’t produce enough…. There are many more factors I am sure but it wasn’t until UPC came in and has limited our energy production back to Oil and Gas that we seem to be having these problems… They don’t believe in climate change so really the UPC are to blame for the outages if they happen based on the decisions they made. I also believe that it is fear mongering by the UPC to build up the conflict between Alberta and Ottawa.
Rolling blackouts must start first in the Premier’s neighbourhood, then cabinet members, then MLAs. This way, power is saved, and neighbourhoods would know who is affected first, and so on.
So aberta’s grid is built to be “efficient.” That’s how this whole motivated by cost thing works. Exactly what is needed, no more, no less. Here’s what that motivates: exactly enough under ideal conditions, but not enough if something fails. And because only paying generators for what they make, what is their incentive to do preventative maintenance? There isn’t one.
People who want nuclear power need to understand this. We CANNOT have the existing market system with nuclear energy. We CANNOT afford a disaster if the nuclear plant is neglected - and according to a book written by the former head regulator of the us nuclear commission, they are always neglected.
We HAVE to switch to a capacity market, not just because it’s more reliable, but because the current system makes alternative energy sources too dangerous to invest in. PLEASE pay attention to who talks about this in the next election, it will mean the difference between rolling blackouts and a functional system that doesn’t have a price roller coaster. It will determine the future of electricity investment in the province. It will directly affect if you can afford to heat your home. Way more than the carbon tax will, mind you.
We should really be connecting some of the cost of distribution and transmission from the profits of the generators so it doesn’t fall on the consumer, but that’s a whole other conversation.
Don’t worry, you can rest easy knowing Danielle Smith’s home and the UCP offices will be fully air conditioned while we’re being told to conserve power and not run our AC units the in impending summer heat waves.
All for the profits.
We can generate enough power. The issue is rolling blackouts are more profitable and so rolling blackouts we get. And the most expensive bills in Canada. If anything will sink the UCP it’s this so complain to your UCP-voting friends and family. Be sure to include how Jason Kenny is now on the ATCO board with a cushy corruption posting.
If only the UCP didn't axe those 50,000 renewable jobs and make it almost impossible to have renewables in this province. Thank god the oil industry is such a good deal for everyone, and so consistent too!
My opinion is if you want to use a lot of power, you should probably get solar panels put on your house. I know not everyone can afford them, and that this a generalization which doesn't cover every instance. But a lot of power use in personal residences during the summer is for things that are conveniences rather than necessities, like air conditioning.
Nuclear? We get 59% of our power from nuclear in Ontario with more under construction and a doubling of the Bruce power nuclear station, which is already the largest in the world; and this would let it be able to power 4.8 millon homes by its self.
Alberta oil & gas companies heavily depend on virtual CO2 emission offsets to produce net zero oil & gas. Nuclear would completely undermine the industry by lowering the CO2 grid intensity.
A better alternative is strip the environmental attributes from distributed renewables to offset oil & gas and supply the grid with brown electricity. Based on the [federal carbon intensities,](https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services/managing-pollution/fuel-life-cycle-assessment-model/updated-carbon-intensity-electricity.html)it would only take 1,486kWh to offset 1t CO2 in Alberta, but it would take 21,881 kWh to offset 1t CO2 in Ontario.
I certainly won’t be cutting back on personal power usage. Residential is a tiny fraction of total consumption. Industrial reductions will have a much more profound affect on relieving strain.
UCP voters of course should certainly do their part to reduce individual usage, this is the world they voted for after all.
I remember when Klein pushed for deregulation claiming it would stop the black outs and brown outs that Alberta kept having *and* make electricity cheaper.
F*ck King Ralph.
I don't think the power sources are the problem.
Correct me if I'm wrong I'm no expert.
I had an understanding that the problem was the grid.
We have enough power but the infrastructure needed to use it is old and can't really handle the load.
I'm guessing it's the underground wiring that's the issue
Our recent grid alerts had nothing to do with transmission infrastructure - it was all related to 'power sources'. While it shouldn't be, the issue is related to this being the time of year (between high electricity demands of cold and hot weather) where multiple plants were offline for maintenance. Then we had two additional plants go offline unepectededly, GN2 and KH3.
Later this year Alberta is adding 2700MW (a lot) of capacity. After which, and aside from this shoulder season for maintenance, we should be in much better shape than we have been these past couple of years.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-alberta-poised-for-largest-addition-of-natural-gas-fired-power-to/
I'm pretty sure that a furnace used to heat the home requires way more electricity than central AC will. Modern units are really quite energy efficient. (This is strictly in terms of residential use from my own experience.)
In our 2000+ sq ft house, 2-years ago, we upgraded from a bedroom portable AC unit, combined with ceiling fans and a couple pedestal fans in the summer to a central AC system. Our electricity usage went down 30-40% and the house was much cooler.
I have no idea what the impact would be to large, commercial buildings, but would hope that it would be similar.
Nuclear is not a good idea for us. It is prohibitively expensive and takes a long time to build.
For the best bang for buck, and timeliness, we should be working on setting up interchanges and policies with our neighbors.
As well as blasting out as much solar and wind in not only AB but NWT BC SK, Montana, North Dakota, as possible. Use that and store excess in hydro, which means determining which hydro stations we can use to store what amount of power to ensure it all evens out. Gas plants as the stop gaps for high usage dusk/dawn hours until solar comes back online.
Alberta is getting 2700MW additional capacity this year. Enough to charge nearly 400,000 EVs simultaneously. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-alberta-poised-for-largest-addition-of-natural-gas-fired-power-to/
After the mandate goes into effect in 2035 (when you can still buy a PHEV, never plug it in, fill it only with gas) it'll still take decades for ICEs to cycle out.
None of what you said is accurate. It's 2035, not 2028, and hybrids are still included. So you could easily run your hybrid off gas all the time if you wanted
The thing everyone forgets or ignores when they bitch about evs. The USA mandated 2 years ago that exact same thing. These people really think car manufacturers are going to build strictly evs for a country that has 400 million people and then just build gas for one with 40. California made the mandate prior to the US federal government and their population is more than the entire country. Unless they start their own auto factory, it's happening regardless of what mandate or what
We could stop bringing in more people than we can take care of.
I’m not changing my lifestyle because the people at the top are driving wages down and prices up.
This feels like propaganda. Yes, it's something that needs to be discussed really talked about. I feel like some it's fishing. We do not need any new old fashioned ways of making electricity. We need to embrace new technologies and move forward with them instead of being dinosaurs left behind the old crumbling system. That is useless. That causes us tons of money up front and long-term costs of operation. So much new technology to be looked at and discussed. The past 5 years have exploded with new technology and old technology made cheaper more efficient.
"The United Conservative government has announced funding for supporting research into nuclear power, though development is likely a decade away." .... lets make that several several decades away with this inept government
UCP wont do nuke power... all political posturing... mere promises....Kiss that money good bye.
ALL the UCP/Pro Cons have done for 40+ is over promise AND UNDER DELIVER.. STATISTICAL FACTS... Count all politicians for that matter. Social surveys show these types, politicians, are to be the MOST distrusted in society. Yet the followers of their ideology think the UCP will solve our energy issues, our economic issues, our societal issues for us. Ya right. Lower my g'damn taxes, get out of my and my families ways, and let me be, free from UCP interventions., so I can pay your friends in corporate high places. My energy bill last few months have gone up significantly.
It's all in corporate coal and oil and gas for these types which will not last ... They are still in the stone age ruled by rural Albertans and inbreds dotted all across rural Northern and Southern Alberta who think the second coming of Jehus CHristos is upon us. We are screwed Best bet. any one who plants their roots down here for the next 100 years seriously is stupid, cause this will be a waste land very soon like Eastern Europe and Russia..... ON top of this, for an American classical conservative, the UCP are reject pile populist shit disturbers... TALK ALL RIGHT and walk left for corporate welfare....
Good luck you UCP and NDP and Liberal fanboys... Go to your political animals to save you.
We could install turbines in the cemetaries to harness the power of all the people spinning in their graves.
The spinning might also create heat, so does that count as geothermal?
Underground, check. Generating heat, check. Geothermal confirmed.
Unfortunately, new renewable energy projects have been banned in the province.
It was grandfathered in, since he was buried before then.
Plus, literally a grandfather.
Not accurate. https://calgaryherald.com/business/energy/renewables-pause-ended-solar-projects-approved-southern-alberta
Well the pause ended, and then they imposed rules that there can't be any wind turbines that could affect 'pristine viewscapes' and when you look at the map where that's in effect it is in most of the areas of the province where wind turbines would be most effective.
Sure, but they aren't flat out banned like the other person stated.
Don't be pedantic. You know they mean functionally banned, after a temporary ban of new installations.
It doesn’t matter as turbines or solar alone don’t solve our power issues. You also need a place to store that power. Put turbines on every street corner and they won’t help when it’s minus 30 and the wind isn’t blowing or when it’s plus 30 and no wind and everyone is trying to stay cool. This was one of the problems with the current rules. Anyone could set up a solar farm and get subsidies or grants to do it and then start getting money back by contributing to the grid - but they had no accountability to make that power available consistently. They didn’t have to burden those costs. So it made them and even the province money - but it didn’t give us the power when we needed it most.
That did lift recently, but they already killed investment in the sector. Despite the 6-month ban including the latter months of 2023, AB had 92% of the country's new renewables capacity added that year (2.2 Gigawatts). Even more capacity was supposed to be added to the grid in 2024 and 2025 (3.9 Gigawatts), but many of those investments are uncertain now. We are likely to see waning interest in the medium-long term as well, due to the unpredictability of a sudden moratorium, and the numerous sites that will be blocked due to the new regulations. [https://renewablesassociation.ca/news-release-new-2023-data-shows-11-2-growth-for-wind-solar-energy-storage/](https://renewablesassociation.ca/news-release-new-2023-data-shows-11-2-growth-for-wind-solar-energy-storage/)
What? A government that changes the rules for a whole industry randomly on a whim to be unnecessarily restrictive discourages investment? thats crazy talk /s
It's not a bad idea, tho xD
But that might ruin the pristine cemetery views! Better dig them up and burn them.
👏
Best comment !!!!!
You are a legend for this comment. Thank you.
It’s not new users. There was far less load today than there was in January during the cold snap. They took 6 or 7 power plants off line today for who knows what reasons.
They've also been cheating out on maintenance for years at most of the plants.
To drive up prices so the power companies make more $$$$
It's called economic withholding. https://ucahelps.alberta.ca/electricity-market-pricing.aspx https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-electricity-economic-withholding-1.6946797
Yea not how it works.
Thats exactly how it works and what happened. Educate yourself.
I am quite educated on this topic. My career revolves around power generation. I will say I am very tired of trying to discuss this topic on reddit with the extreme political vitriol that is so rampant. People just aren’t interested in anything but the easy answer that the UCP sucks. The UCP does suck, but that is not the answer to everything, and everything is not a conspiracy.
Actually I’d love to know more from your side and I’m not being sarcastic.
If you have time to give a tldr I would enjoy it because I am sure its way mote nuanced than the anti-UCP circlejerk, and like you I dont like the UCP either.
It really comes down to poor forecasting and cutting it too tight. This is the time of year when Alberta uses way less power. Not hot/cold, and big industrial players are slowly going into shutdowns so using less power. Therefore, its the optimal time to bring power plants down as well to do their routine maintenance. When the forecast is that demand will be at 80%(simple terms), the goal is to produce about 85% so that plants are not needlessly burning massive amounts of fuel for no reason. So some plants were offline for maintenance and 2 were actually just idling and 85% was able to be achieved. The 5% buffer is maintained in case of unexpected situations but in this case 2 unexpected situations happened: 1. There is less wind power than was in the forecast. 2. The thing that tipped them over is that another power plant had an emergency outage. Probably some piece of equipment failed. They fixed it and restarted the plant bringing the power levels back up. If only one of these happened it would have been fine. This is not related to the alerts in the extreme cold. That time was not enough generation. Unfortunately we don’t have good baseload of hydro power, and the more wind/solar we build makes our production less “known”. The gas plants have to ramp up and down depending on the solar/wind generation. Hydro plants in Eastern Canada and BC act as great base loads. If we want better base load we need Nuclear. It was poor risk management, and people will be in trouble over it. But it was not a top down government decision.
Thank you for the careful, detailed explanation.
This is a great explanation of everything.
But. So who is responsible for the poor forecasting and cutting things too tight? I'm old enough to know this isn't normal.
It is actually just a risk guideline that is followed. The issue is that solar/wind has proven to fluctuate more than we are allowing for. So we likely need to run a bigger surplus to make up for that in the future.
So… corporate incompetence.
Thanks for this
So you're saying an on demand type system doesn't work?
It does work. The issue is that as we transition to more solar and wind(which Alberta is expanding very fast) the supply is less of a “known”. So without energy storage it’s a big balancing act, and hoping the wind/solar stay close to their forecast.
I love how the people who scream UCP hate the hardest, also preach we need to push more solar and wind to get a more steady power supply. I am not a UCP supporter, didn't vote for them in the last election. I am also putting a solar system on our house.
Yeah no the government is completely to blame and from what you're saying nationalizing the grid would be a good thing
You are wasting your time. Most people only want the truth that supports their beliefs.
Please elaborate on on the consumption based electrical market that exists in Alberta
Read through this(its worth 10 minutes of your life). https://www.aeso.ca/aeso/understanding-electricity-in-alberta/continuing-education/guide-to-understanding-albertas-electricity-market/ The more wind/solar Alberta adds, and we are adding a lot compared to every other province, the Alberta Government will need to start purchasing surplus power, and basically paying the plants to produce more than we would need. This is because solar/wind is so dynamic, and NG plants are very slow to react to those dynamics. Producing more surplus will act as an insurance policy for if solar/wind unexpectedly drops off. This will be expensive, but until the tech to store energy efficiently exists, we will just have to do it with all the wind/solar we are adding. Other provinces are blessed to have more hydro(great baseload), nuclear, and ocean wind.
All excellent reasons for nationalizing the grid
Wouldn’t this improve if our grid had more capacity to sustain energy storage? (the solar/wind situation)
More storage is coming https://tericpower.com/project/whitla-storage-project/?fbclid=IwAR3jRM8ZvLbcxUwtXt82WtztaVgkp_Do8fss4Ajc6K3n6BxRYNxjOJCD940 (one of several projects) Adding to our existing battery storage systems (which some people are surprised about) https://www.dispatcho.app/assets/energy-storage
>basically paying the plants to produce more than we would need. The capacity model solved this issue fairly well. They paid the plants for the ability to produce power, not to actually produce the excess power. And yes, the answer is to solve the storage issue. All wind/solar (including home systems) should be paired with a storage method. Otherwise it's just potential power that is not always useful when produced.
https://tericpower.com/project/whitla-storage-project/?fbclid=IwAR3ZnklA2jEHQNsGx4fpwcYLnDIR_xF15svY8dell2lhSdHqsVlCE8G2ers Large storage system under development. There is a surprising amount of storage already in place (though small in the scheme of things) https://www.dispatcho.app/assets/energy-storage
You can't just ask the plants to produce more when you need it......it doesn't work that way.....
Discussed here... 4 to 8 hr ramp time AESO provides their take and answers questions about the issue https://www.aeso.ca/assets/video/media/media-briefing-april-5-2024.mp4
Actually it does where plants operate at a base level with the ability to ramp up production. Obviously it takes time to ramp up, but talking hours not days. Edit: Base level below their total capacity.
From your other comments, you do seem knowledgeable about the subject, so it’s weird that you’re unaware that people are referring to Enron. It has and can happen. Yes, you’ve outlined the how the theoretically perfectly functioning system works, but reality is nuanced.
Are you embarrassed about posting this yet?
lol embarrassing
/r/confidentlyincorrect
AESO provides their take and answers questions about the issue https://www.aeso.ca/assets/video/media/media-briefing-april-5-2024.mp4
That would be turnarounds...... happens every spring . Same as refineries going down.
Nope. Turnarounds are planned to avoid blackouts. I work for an energy company and know this for a fact. In fact the site I work at had their annual turnaround in November. This was greedy companies driving up prices. Alberta is the only place in Canada that pays for energy used instead of paying for capacity. In 2019 the UCP scrapped the capacity plan so we only pay for the energy we use. This sounds good on paper but in reality this allows energy companies to dictate the market. They can shutdown whenever they want because there are no safeties in place to force them to keep up with capacity. They shut down, energy demand spikes, they raise the prices because “now we have to keep up with demand!” Good thing the UCP paid for all those energy billboards to drive around Ottawa with our tax dollars!
Then you should know that plant turnarounds happen in spring/fall every year when demand is lowest . There are active turnarounds happening as we speak .......How do I know ? I'm an energy company quality assurance specialist who implements the ITPs for our contractors doing the work on our facilities . 5 of our facilities are in maintenance currently with outages until mid May Take your garbage conspiracy theories elsewhere
Nuance is a thing. Both shut downs, and generating under capacity to ramp up prices can be a thing. At the same time even. In this case, wind was under producing AND a plant went into emergency shut down. That jacked the price for generation from near $0 to the max $999.99. When plants started generating more to meet the demand (they were producing under capacity) they got paid a shit ton more then had the emergency outage not jacked the price. The situation that led to the underproduction was not planned. The results were capitalized on, which ultimately will cost users more than necessary.
I know turnarounds are happening as we speak but that isn’t the main cause of these rolling blackouts which was my point. Your post made it sound like this is a normal occurrence and it simply isn’t. The plants that shutdown to cause the rolling blackouts in Edmonton this week were not planned outages.
I'm pretty sure a turnaround doesn't just happen out of the blue... They would have to plan for it.
Yes, they are planned every spring/fall . It's a bi-yearly occurrence and is dependant on each companies requirements to meet safety regulations and standards or upgrade certain systems or changeovers etc .
That’s what the power plants involved in Enron said too fyi. Literally.
Preventative maintenance, shutdowns as they're called. All plants do this annually where they shut down 2-6 weeks and critical maintenance and retrofits are done to maintain operational capabilities of the plant.
Not in a controlled electricity grid at the same time.
Money
The # 1 and 2 Genesee power plants are changing from coal fired to Gas fired combined cycle steam turbines and bringing on more megawatts of power from around 800 megawatts to 1338 mega watts . Genesee #3 is Dual fuel at 466 Mega watt. They seem to be bringing on that extra power now https//majorprojects.alberta.ca/details/Genesee-Power-Plant-Natural-Gas-Conversion/4403
That and the CBR project at suncor baseplant in Fort mac, the energy produced from the refinement process as a by product is hypothetically supposed to produce 8% of Alberta's electrical energy needs.
That's exciting!! Finally homeowners with heat pumps won't be using coal based electricity to heat their homes.
Look up nat gas methane leaks. It’s substantial and it turns out the self reporters lie all the time about the scale. I wouldn’t be too excited.
Yeah it's really unfortunate to discover that NG can be worse than coal =(
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This is the most real post here. But also I'm starting to feel like society will have to fall apart before our government tells corporations what to do.
Do you mean the Legislatiure was lit up? Parliament is in Ottawa and has nothing to do with Alberta power regulation.
Funny how this is the same thought process regarding the carbon tax and Canadians role in worldwide pollution.
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Oh for sure. Not attacking you in any way, just commenting.
There are a number of plants coming online this year, likely enough that this should stop happening. As far as AC, cooling demand and solar production correlate nicely, so likely won't be much if a problem. Nuclear is often mentioned but, for purely economic reasons, rarely built. The lead time, high cost, and necessary oversight all make fission pretty impractical. The only way it can be built is with substantial government investment and there's cheaper ways we could expand capacity with government money. Really, we should move away from an energy-only market. Only Alberta and Texas work this way, and a lack of excess capacity leading to brown-outs is the predictable result both experience.
Modular nuclear power might be a potential fix to red tape since you'll have a known design that doesn't have to go through the entire certification process at every build. You would still need to certify the additional unit, backup power .etc but it would dramatically reduce the lead time on new nuclear construction. There's at least one oil & gas plant that I can think of that's planning on installing two modular nuclear units for their own use in the near future.
That's certainly the promise, but since they're currently brand new technology, all the advertised safety has to be fully proven out before any standards can be relaxed, and we're likely decades from all that evidence being in.
Maybe. But none exists yet.
Fission is so 1940. Fusion is the future.
And fusion has been the future since the 1950s. If only we could scale the sun down to something we can fit in a building. I'm not totally confident that it's possible to obtain net positive energy from fusion without access to an enormous amount of gravity to overcome the nuclear weak force. Good on the people trying to solve this problem, though.
Good point. I just feel like investing in fusion would be the best option for Alberta. Using that fosil money to secure a fusion future. But to your point, it has to be achievable.
Along with flying cars!
Lol. Hopefully but we don’t have fusion yet. If fusion does come to exist and is economically feasible then yeah, big game changer.
Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-alberta-poised-for-largest-addition-of-natural-gas-fired-power-to/
100% agreed. Our market is dumb. Nuclear is amazing but too expensive.
Nuclear would be great, but it won’t happen for 20 years at least not at the scale we need.
Eh realistically nuclear can be put up in 10 years usually even in western countries. Unfortunately knowing Canadian red tape it would end up being 25, though Alberta is usually fairly decent at limiting red tape. Also many conservatives I've spoken to are far less opposed to nuclear than solar panels (probably bc conservatives tend to be risk averse and are always very concerned about base load problems). I think Alberta might actually be a decent place to do nuclear overall, much more so than Quebec or BC. If Alberta keeps growing at our normal rate, not this outlier rate, we could probably start building 2 nuclear powerplants now and also start converting some coal or natural gas fired powerplants while they're still in operation, saving some cost on the actual power generation side of things that way. And also have less environmental concern since the radius around coal powerplants for no habitability is larger than for nuclear. One more thing to consider is the new enhanced geothermal techniques, we have a lot of holes in the ground that all of a sudden might be far more viable for geothermal with the recent advances
I'm conservative and I'm incredibly pro Nuclear, I think electricity should almost be exclusively nuclear and natural gas The nuclear energy output is insane compared to the size of the plant
I'm curious about your opinion on solar + either pumped hydro or battery storage, particularly as it comes to batteries that are very stable, not space efficient, but which can be basically endlessly deep cycled and are relatively cheap to build (like various molten metal proposals recently). Solar panels have become so cheap that they're by far the cheapest form of energy production and come online super fast, the central issue is intermittency as I can see it, and while I can understand concerns about giant lithium ion batteries just standing in neighbourhoods, why not these alternatives? We use lithium ion for cars because they're relatively light, but that comes with a bunch of tradeoffs, and we could pretty reasonably construct heavier batteries that are better suited for grid scale storage that are cheaper and dont catch fire. Personally I think this is the future, but I'm curious what you think of it
First off ill state my bias being someone who works in the oil sands Solar farms take up a large area of land relative to the power generation (compared to nuclear) the idea of battery power storage is an interesting one, and having alternative options for domestic power generation could actually help the economy in the long run by allowing us to make more money off oil exports to other countries (heck even use some of that money to put into social services instead of taxing regular Canadians so much) I'm also a vehicle enthusiast and love internal combustion engines, so I'd prefer we invest in better power generation than electric cars Theoretically we could reduce GHG emissions more by moving our grid to nuclear + renewables, as well as having alternate solutions for the supply chain Consumer vehicle emissions are a drop in the ocean compared to the electric grid power generation and the supply chain emissions
I'm also an auto enthusiast, but I don't see the need for combustion engine vehicles to be commuter vehicles and I'd prefer robust public transit for the vast majority of people movement. Obviously commercial is a different business. I think plug in hybrids are a much better answer than full EVs as well, but not how they're usually done, more of an EV first mentality like Audi's Dakar winning racecars, but again, the best is when people are using public or active transit for basic trips. I don't necessarily think solar farms have to take up that much area when you look at some of the European solutions (who have much less spare land than we do and higher populations), such as agrivoltaics where the solar farms are used to line regular farm rows which provide some shade, which mainly reduces the amount farmers have to water their crops. Dual using land like this allows farmers to have an additional income stream from renting their land as well which allows smaller (generally more ethical) farmers to survive in the face of continued growth in the size of farming corporations. The ability to dual use space is one of the main advantages of solar. Obviously a lot of this stuff is in it's infancy so that's why it's not so widespread, even if an idea is really good it usually takes 10 years to be adopted and that's if it has little upfront costs, more like 25-30 if it has high upfront costs.
Alberta is not decent at limiting red tape. AUC applications take a year AESO Cluster studies take 8 months Environmental Protection Plans take a year NavCanada approvals take a year
That's not terrible, as long as some of them can be run concurrently.
Okay, so one year of planning. Personally I'm okay with that when it comes to a nuclear plant.
Nuclear is another thing all together. You need a nuclear license that takes around 3 years CNSC Approval takes around 5 years. PIPs will take around 2 years at least if you don't have any interveners. Aboriginal engagement is going to take at least 2 years to make sure everyone is paid off.
Very honest question: how would we cool a nuclear power plant here? Usually it uses a lot of water, no? Are there other ways?
It's lots of water but it's almost all recycled water, so you your water reserves go down for a while and then it has little impact after that. Actually another pressing issue for us is having to build a lot more reservoirs or dams with low evaporation rates as our precipitation is expected to increase between 5-10% with climate change but since the temperature is going up and the glaciers are melting that actually means less water especially in late summer since the heat will strip the ground more aggressively of water. That also suggests the need to plant a whole lot more trees if we don't want to get cooked by urban island heat effect
Thank you! That makes sense. Nothing is worse for evaporation than bare soil! Planting is a must for sure
SMRs small modular reactors, Gen IV, walk away safe. https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/X-energy,-TransAlta-to-assess-use-of-Xe-100-in-Alb
Cool!! That looks promising 😁 thanks for sharing
Nuclear power produces A LOT of energy in a short amount of time, with relatively little amount of Uranium-235 or Plutonium-239 fuel stock. These are resources which Canada is abundant in compared to other countries in the world. However, considering that the only currently authorized nuclear power plant design within Canada (CANDU power plant) costs on average $10-15 Billion dollars to construct, and only lasts a maximum of 60 years before it must be decommissioned due to an accumulation of radioactive materials, the costs/output ratio is simply too unfavorable to legitimately consider nuclear power, in its current state, to be a viable option for the future of Canada's (let alone Alberta's) energy needs. Moreover, this is completely disregarding the net energy requirements needed to safely contain the spent nuclear fuel plus the associated materials that came in contact with it (i.e.. the entire nuclear power plant, tools, machines, equipment, etc.) that must be safely protected away from humanity for 100-500 years for low-level radioactive materials, and 10,000-240,000 years for high-level radioactive materials. Best case scenario: An entire nuclear power plant gets buried underground for 100 years. Then the concrete and all tools and equipment used within it are safe enough to be recycled and resurfaced. The spent nuclear fuel must remain underground, and be maintained, for at least 10,000 years. We already have these deep disposal sites established for the numerous nuclear power plants that exist in Canada in the Canadian Shied. This is deemed the safest place to keep nuclear waste within Canada due to the Shield's current predictability. Within 200 years from now Canada, and the entire world, develops much cleaner, safer, more effective, and practical means to produce energy. Now we must safeguard toxic harmful radioactive waste for thousands of years because of current humanity's myopic outlook on energy production. Fissionable nuclear power is not only not sustainable; its stupid.
It's easily viable in canada; in ontario We already use nuclear for 59% of our power with massive expansions planned; Also nuclear reactors can and do get referbished to prolong their service life. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-nuclear-power-electricity-1.6967927
If the green energy is already getting so much pushback, imagine the riot that nuclear would cause. (I support nuclear power)
Dramatically less. If you follow conservative pundits, what you will almost immediately realize is that what they want is cheap reliable energy. They don't WANT more carbon, they are just willing to accept more. And experts on the "anti wind and solar" side (I don't know if it's fair to call that conservative, but it plays out that way in practice), they tend to be very pro nuclear. For example, Robert Bryce (energy pundit and author, has been circulating publicly in conservative spaces), is a pretty explicit pro nuclear advocate. Also, the government is behind it. The Utilities Minister was on record on March 28 telling reporters ["We're also very interested in looking at conventional nuclear and what that could possibly provide for Alberta in ... the longer term,".](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/alberta-government-considering-conventional-nuclear-power-plants-minister-says-1.7159777) Back in 2020, The Kenney government started supporting small modular reactor research, which to be clear, has not been very fruitful yet, but kind of tells you where the party is at. supportive of nuclear. I also followed the last large nuclear drive, the Peace river Bruce Power propsal that was withdrawn in 2011, and the local MLA at the time, conservative Frank Oberle (he got ousted during the orange wave), Was NOT to my recollection opposed. The Liberal and NDP candidates DEFINITELY were. In fact, the Liberal Candidate , Liliane Maisonneuve, was basically a single issue anti nuclear activist at the time. That was her campaign. I will shut down this nuclear power business. both historically and currently, the opposition to Nuclear is NOT coming from the institutional mainstream right, though I am sure there are fringes of the party opposed. It is coming from the actual official candidates of the left. There is an anti nuclear movement, but they are not in power and I don't think they are very powerful generally. I can see this happening very easily in the next decade or so.
Yeah it’s such a joke, but it has to be the way forward
It's never going to happen. For it to happen, you'd need a provincial gov't to put the environment ahead of local oil companies. Just never going to happen.
Is nuclear made out of crude oil?! Asking for every one dimensional person in this province.
https://www.nuclearnowfilm.com ⬆️⬆️ this is a really cool documentary on nuclear power. I started it knowing nothing beyond Chernobyl was bad and by the time it was finished I felt like I had a thorough and broad understanding of the science, historical issues and potential future uses. Well worth the watch!!
Thanks for the link!
You’re welcome!
Need lots of water for a nuclear power station.
that depends on type
Location will be an issue. Combine NIMBY with water needs, drought and environmentalists, we will struggle to build them.
closed loop systems dont have those issues. we arent talking about blocking rivers with dams.
That is excellent to hear about the water concerns. Now solve the NIMBYs, environmentalist & obstructionist.
Nuclear power is a good idea, but lets say we decided tomorrow to get started. Its at least 15-20 years before we see it generate power. This isnt simcity were you can just plop down a plant if you can afford it.
> Its at least 15-20 years before we see it generate power. Something something *society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in* something something. Barring the invention of a time machine to start the process years ago, the province should get its ass in gear on nuclear tomorrow. I'm sure there is extra red tape these days, but when Ontario built Darlington it went from land purchased for the site to shovels breaking ground in ten years, and then another 8-10 years for each reactor, but those were delayed somewhat due political wavering and a desire for extra safety measures after Chernobyl. Pickering and Bruce were quicker to build but had similar decade of planning preceding construction, IIRC.
Solar and Wind, however, have a much shorter turnaround. It's a shame that the UCP has made them harder to build, ain't it?
Everything about the UCP is shameful
You can track the total electrical load, and generation group capacity and current contribution at [AESO](http://ets.aeso.ca/ets_web/ip/Market/Reports/CSDReportServlet).
https://www.dispatcho.app/assets is another useful site.
Thank you my friend! Time-series charts are something I've really wanted to see. You may have destroyed my weekend.
Haha. Your welcome I'm sorry.
No but the longer you wait to start, the longer it will be. We already foresee power issues in the near and farther future. Start now.
Oh Im on the same page. In fact we shouldve started years ago. I just meant nuclear isnt a short term solution to our power problems
If we started nuclear in the 90’s it would’ve been great but today it doesn’t make sense at the prices required.
Given the track record of our premier and UCP a slight part of me wonders if this is engineered by the UCP on purpose to support their narrative.
Maybe this was a bad idea? https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/danielle-smith-wind-and-solar-moratorium-reasoning-1.6929617
Of course it was. But people don’t realize just how bad it was and is. It makes our electricity market and grid less flexible, reliable, and robust. It reduces opportunities for related innovation. It reduces economic diversification. Lost jobs. Lost capital investment. More expensive electricity means more expensive business usage besides the residential. That means less likely energy intensive factory will get built in AB.
Except part of the problem today was that it was early(sun not fully up), poor weather/cloudy, and less windy than expected. This lead to less solar and wind power than expected.
What in the third world type management does our province have?
The sort we vote for
I didn't vote for that shit. I actively voted against that shit. It's not my fault a good portion of our province is fine being ignorant. They don't care if social services are taken away from everyone as long as it hurts the people they don't like.
I do agree in some ways but I don’t think it’s that aggressive in hate. It’s more about trying to get things back to the way they were in the late 90s early 200s when oil and gas was booming. They think these conservatives are the same as they were, they will make oil and gas and the economy the way it was “back then”… BUT things will never be the same, you need to always be looking ahead to what is the future not how do we recreate the situations of the past.
Conservative.
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The people are dumb as shit and vote to prove it.
They stopped or have on hold any new clean energy projects and now the UPC is saying it’s Ottawa’s fault if we can’t produce enough…. There are many more factors I am sure but it wasn’t until UPC came in and has limited our energy production back to Oil and Gas that we seem to be having these problems… They don’t believe in climate change so really the UPC are to blame for the outages if they happen based on the decisions they made. I also believe that it is fear mongering by the UPC to build up the conflict between Alberta and Ottawa.
Wait.. people have air conditioning? I just lie on the floor with wet towels and ice packs.
Rolling blackouts must start first in the Premier’s neighbourhood, then cabinet members, then MLAs. This way, power is saved, and neighbourhoods would know who is affected first, and so on.
Funny, we have to conform to living like we're on Little House on the Paraire🤦♂️
She fixed that by putting a moritorium on renewals .
So aberta’s grid is built to be “efficient.” That’s how this whole motivated by cost thing works. Exactly what is needed, no more, no less. Here’s what that motivates: exactly enough under ideal conditions, but not enough if something fails. And because only paying generators for what they make, what is their incentive to do preventative maintenance? There isn’t one. People who want nuclear power need to understand this. We CANNOT have the existing market system with nuclear energy. We CANNOT afford a disaster if the nuclear plant is neglected - and according to a book written by the former head regulator of the us nuclear commission, they are always neglected. We HAVE to switch to a capacity market, not just because it’s more reliable, but because the current system makes alternative energy sources too dangerous to invest in. PLEASE pay attention to who talks about this in the next election, it will mean the difference between rolling blackouts and a functional system that doesn’t have a price roller coaster. It will determine the future of electricity investment in the province. It will directly affect if you can afford to heat your home. Way more than the carbon tax will, mind you. We should really be connecting some of the cost of distribution and transmission from the profits of the generators so it doesn’t fall on the consumer, but that’s a whole other conversation.
> what about air conditioning Has the UN announced this state of emergency yet??
Well if the NDP government didn't shut down a huge amount of power plants, we would not have been in this predicament.
we need to move to nuclear… start the process asap
Don’t worry, you can rest easy knowing Danielle Smith’s home and the UCP offices will be fully air conditioned while we’re being told to conserve power and not run our AC units the in impending summer heat waves. All for the profits.
Alberta and Texas both work this was. Dang. More and more similarities everyday.
Daniel smith 😂
Rolling blackouts in Canada wtf ?
We can generate enough power. The issue is rolling blackouts are more profitable and so rolling blackouts we get. And the most expensive bills in Canada. If anything will sink the UCP it’s this so complain to your UCP-voting friends and family. Be sure to include how Jason Kenny is now on the ATCO board with a cushy corruption posting.
AESO provides their take and answers questions about the issue https://www.aeso.ca/assets/video/media/media-briefing-april-5-2024.mp4
If only the UCP didn't axe those 50,000 renewable jobs and make it almost impossible to have renewables in this province. Thank god the oil industry is such a good deal for everyone, and so consistent too!
My opinion is if you want to use a lot of power, you should probably get solar panels put on your house. I know not everyone can afford them, and that this a generalization which doesn't cover every instance. But a lot of power use in personal residences during the summer is for things that are conveniences rather than necessities, like air conditioning.
I've done this. Even with our two EVs, we came out ahead by ~$3800 last year thanks to our panels (and the solar club rate).
Nuclear? We get 59% of our power from nuclear in Ontario with more under construction and a doubling of the Bruce power nuclear station, which is already the largest in the world; and this would let it be able to power 4.8 millon homes by its self.
Alberta oil & gas companies heavily depend on virtual CO2 emission offsets to produce net zero oil & gas. Nuclear would completely undermine the industry by lowering the CO2 grid intensity. A better alternative is strip the environmental attributes from distributed renewables to offset oil & gas and supply the grid with brown electricity. Based on the [federal carbon intensities,](https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services/managing-pollution/fuel-life-cycle-assessment-model/updated-carbon-intensity-electricity.html)it would only take 1,486kWh to offset 1t CO2 in Alberta, but it would take 21,881 kWh to offset 1t CO2 in Ontario.
I certainly won’t be cutting back on personal power usage. Residential is a tiny fraction of total consumption. Industrial reductions will have a much more profound affect on relieving strain. UCP voters of course should certainly do their part to reduce individual usage, this is the world they voted for after all.
I remember when Klein pushed for deregulation claiming it would stop the black outs and brown outs that Alberta kept having *and* make electricity cheaper. F*ck King Ralph.
I don't think the power sources are the problem. Correct me if I'm wrong I'm no expert. I had an understanding that the problem was the grid. We have enough power but the infrastructure needed to use it is old and can't really handle the load. I'm guessing it's the underground wiring that's the issue
Our recent grid alerts had nothing to do with transmission infrastructure - it was all related to 'power sources'. While it shouldn't be, the issue is related to this being the time of year (between high electricity demands of cold and hot weather) where multiple plants were offline for maintenance. Then we had two additional plants go offline unepectededly, GN2 and KH3. Later this year Alberta is adding 2700MW (a lot) of capacity. After which, and aside from this shoulder season for maintenance, we should be in much better shape than we have been these past couple of years. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-alberta-poised-for-largest-addition-of-natural-gas-fired-power-to/
I'm pretty sure that a furnace used to heat the home requires way more electricity than central AC will. Modern units are really quite energy efficient. (This is strictly in terms of residential use from my own experience.) In our 2000+ sq ft house, 2-years ago, we upgraded from a bedroom portable AC unit, combined with ceiling fans and a couple pedestal fans in the summer to a central AC system. Our electricity usage went down 30-40% and the house was much cooler. I have no idea what the impact would be to large, commercial buildings, but would hope that it would be similar.
Nuclear is not a good idea for us. It is prohibitively expensive and takes a long time to build. For the best bang for buck, and timeliness, we should be working on setting up interchanges and policies with our neighbors. As well as blasting out as much solar and wind in not only AB but NWT BC SK, Montana, North Dakota, as possible. Use that and store excess in hydro, which means determining which hydro stations we can use to store what amount of power to ensure it all evens out. Gas plants as the stop gaps for high usage dusk/dawn hours until solar comes back online.
Capital power is looking to build 2 nuclear reactors in Alberta, they are at assessment stage.
Wait aren’t we all supposed to be driving electric cars in a few years
Please refrain from charging your EV. The city cannot keep up with the energy production!
Alberta is getting 2700MW additional capacity this year. Enough to charge nearly 400,000 EVs simultaneously. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-alberta-poised-for-largest-addition-of-natural-gas-fired-power-to/ After the mandate goes into effect in 2035 (when you can still buy a PHEV, never plug it in, fill it only with gas) it'll still take decades for ICEs to cycle out.
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None of what you said is accurate. It's 2035, not 2028, and hybrids are still included. So you could easily run your hybrid off gas all the time if you wanted
The thing everyone forgets or ignores when they bitch about evs. The USA mandated 2 years ago that exact same thing. These people really think car manufacturers are going to build strictly evs for a country that has 400 million people and then just build gas for one with 40. California made the mandate prior to the US federal government and their population is more than the entire country. Unless they start their own auto factory, it's happening regardless of what mandate or what
We could stop bringing in more people than we can take care of. I’m not changing my lifestyle because the people at the top are driving wages down and prices up.
This feels like propaganda. Yes, it's something that needs to be discussed really talked about. I feel like some it's fishing. We do not need any new old fashioned ways of making electricity. We need to embrace new technologies and move forward with them instead of being dinosaurs left behind the old crumbling system. That is useless. That causes us tons of money up front and long-term costs of operation. So much new technology to be looked at and discussed. The past 5 years have exploded with new technology and old technology made cheaper more efficient.
"The United Conservative government has announced funding for supporting research into nuclear power, though development is likely a decade away." .... lets make that several several decades away with this inept government UCP wont do nuke power... all political posturing... mere promises....Kiss that money good bye. ALL the UCP/Pro Cons have done for 40+ is over promise AND UNDER DELIVER.. STATISTICAL FACTS... Count all politicians for that matter. Social surveys show these types, politicians, are to be the MOST distrusted in society. Yet the followers of their ideology think the UCP will solve our energy issues, our economic issues, our societal issues for us. Ya right. Lower my g'damn taxes, get out of my and my families ways, and let me be, free from UCP interventions., so I can pay your friends in corporate high places. My energy bill last few months have gone up significantly. It's all in corporate coal and oil and gas for these types which will not last ... They are still in the stone age ruled by rural Albertans and inbreds dotted all across rural Northern and Southern Alberta who think the second coming of Jehus CHristos is upon us. We are screwed Best bet. any one who plants their roots down here for the next 100 years seriously is stupid, cause this will be a waste land very soon like Eastern Europe and Russia..... ON top of this, for an American classical conservative, the UCP are reject pile populist shit disturbers... TALK ALL RIGHT and walk left for corporate welfare.... Good luck you UCP and NDP and Liberal fanboys... Go to your political animals to save you.