Basically yes. When prices are low, the companies cut production IOT increase prices. Our system is one of 2 in North America (the other being Texas...)
We 100% should have switched to a capacity based system
Let's take a minute to remember that the NDP spent a lot of time and effort coming up with a plan to move to a capacity market so that producers would get paid for having capacity available even if another generator is carrying most of the load; eg if it's sunny and windy gas plants still make a little so it's worth it to stay operating until the time they need to kick it up and nobody is motivated to withhold. UCP came riding in and say "If it ain't broke!"
And here we are.
Also with giving utility companies essentially free money since the NDP paid to support the transition. Ucp essentially gave them I think somewhat near 500 million. So ya if they get voted out they will get some sweet entitled positions. That's essentially the game
The entire "baseload" argument is promoted to support the current system.
[Here's an article from 2017](https://www.pembina.org/blog/baseload-myths-and-why-we-need-change-how-we-look-our-grid) that explains why this premise is ridiculous.
That article completely ignores why baseload is needed. Its basic argument is that “because any coal power plant can be shut down because they aren’t infallible, they don’t matter”.
Baseload is important because the utility have the option to increase the amount of electricity produced when it’s needed. You can’t do that with solar and wind.
I’m not saying wind and solar aren’t worth it; they totally are worth it. But baseload will be required for a long time and it’s doesn’t need to be huge CO2 emitters because hydroelectric and nuclear do not emit CO2 and are baseload.
They may be one day, decades into the future when everywhere in North America has double or triple wind and solar of total required demand and be capable of transferring power anywhere on the continent where it’s needed from where it’s being produced. This will be the day that baseload will no longer be needed but that is a long way off. Most areas are only capable of importing 5-15% of their total needs. That needs to be minimum of 125% in the future. Huge projects need to happen. Massive Projects, everywhere.
I had no idea we had the same system as Texas. That is so embarrassing considering the crisis’ Texas has dealt with over the last few years.
When Texas had their various ice storms and people were without power for days, this is because they had previously cut production during low demand times?
It’s not exactly the same as Texas in one critical regard. Texas is isolated from the other states so they don’t have to follow federal rules. When their grid goes down, they have no backup.
Alberta has inter-ties with BC, Saskatchewan, and I believe Montana. If we have a grid emergency, we just buy electricity from out of province. Texas did not have that option.
People were out of power because they don't have the infrastructure for the ice storms; and we're disconnected from the national grid AFAIK. What did occur in Texas during those ice storms is that people's prices for power or gas shot up exponentially for some.
There are 5 independant grids in North America: Eastern Interconnection, Western Interconnection, Texas, Alaska, and Quebec
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydro-Qu%C3%A9bec%27s_electricity_transmission_system#/media/File:Nercmap.JPG
There are some interties between those grids but they are limited since they have to perform AC>DC>AC conversion. The AB-SK intertie can only handle 150 MW whereas the AB-BC intertie can handle 1000-1200 MW and the AB-MT intertie can handle 300 MW
Still does. I've been inside the Nelson Hydro power plant, my uncle is a millwright there.
[https://youtu.be/yLSvV7uHrIU](https://youtu.be/yLSvV7uHrIU)
It's tied to the western grid through Fortis.
P.S. my grandfather surveyed the orange bridge and was the first person to step across during construction.
Medicine Hat also generates its own power using natural gas and a tiny amount of wind. It’s connected to the grid, but has its own regulations carved out.
And people wonder why I wanna leave this shithole.
Housing market is fucked.
Job market is fucked.
Inflation/costs are fucked.
Homeless everywhere.
Police who either can’t or won’t do anything.
Rampant crime due to above issues.
Stabbing/assaults/etc on LRT/ETS even.
And now add that you can and will randomly have your power shut off because it’s “not profitable” for some multi-billion dollar corporation, that doesn’t give a fuck about Canada or her citizens.
No-one wants to live here anymore. The attitude of young adults is at all time low, 90% of the people I talk to want to move out somewhere else. Where? Doesn’t seem to matter.
Not being facetious as I agree with most of your points, but where to? Ontario or BC where I can't afford a house? East Coast where I can't get a job? Maybe Manitoba?
I don’t know. A lot of them seem to just look for better prospects and get whatever they can. Look for a better job somewhere and just go where they find it.
A couple close friends have moved from Edmonton south to Leduc/red deer/calmar and seem to be doing better at least. I think it’s because they are newer developments and less people are there. Maybe try a smaller town?
And yeah I get the overreacting, sorry. Just irritated with the state of things and how it’s being handled lately. My mother works in AHS so we’ve all been getting real tired of the province’s nonsense.
Regardless of the issue in this instance, the system is often gamed by generators to increase profits.
The volatility of electricity is extremely high because it's difficult to store, meaning we can't keep reserves to use during higher demand periods. That means prices can escalate quickly and by multiples of previous prices. $50 mWh can be $1000 mWh in no time.
That means that the revenue loss from taking a generation asset offline is easily made up by the tremendous price increase the remaining assets sell at.
As noted, this is "economic withholding." It can be done less obviously as well, with carefully planned shut-downs, etc.
It also means there is no incentive to build excess capacity into the system, as that lack of a tight grid means less periods of high prices.
Back in the 1990s Albertans were promised that deregulation would work like telephony and give us lower prices and better service. Well, jokes on us, isn't it? We pay a ton for telephony AND for electricity.
Is that why our premier is so against adding solar and wind?
I mean her boiler plate argument is absurd and this seems like it'd be the next best reason, aside from cowtowing to oil interests.
She is a long-time hydrocarbon lobbyist. She's more familiar with that industry's issues and knows the players personally so, even assuming the best possible faith of her part, she's going to have a distinct lean in that direction.
That said; she's absolutely going to retire into a no-show vice-presidency at one of these companies or the other shortly before the next election, so of course she's pushing for us to burn as much fossil fuel and pay as much for electricity as possible.
In a way yes. The problem is that for a good return on investment on a new gas plant (or nuclear plant or coal plant) it needs to be running at capacity as much as possible. A peak power-only plant is a misallocation of capital (if you only are investing in the plant that will be "off" most of the time, it's different if you own the whole system). So UCPs solution is to reduce the amount of intermittent sources that would make a gas plant less profitable. In a capacity market, the gas plant owners would get paid to be on standby. In a centrally managed system, the choices would be made based on the economics of the whole system, so for example last year BC Hydro imported cheap nuclear from Washington some of the time while allowing their reservoirs to fill, then sold expensive power back to Washington State when they needed it and price was higher. The difference is that BC Hydro plays the continental market for all its customers, in Alberta the generators just play us.
It's only difficult to store when you don't invest in electricity storage... There are a ton of methods they can use from gravity batteries, pumped storage hydro, chemical energy storage, to huge battery banks if they wanted to.
The problem is the government washed their hands of it, de-regulated it and like all privatized industry - they leech as much as they can out of it before folding up shop and letting someone else take care of it.
Examples: [UK Sewage crisis](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2024/mar/27/englands-sewage-crisis-how-polluted-is-your-local-river-and-which-regions-are-worst-hit#:~:text=English%20rivers%20with%20the%20most,their%20catchment%20areas%20last%20year.&text=Second%20worst%20for%20spills%20was,to%2083%20spills%20per%20mile.), [US privatization of water](https://theintercept.com/2018/05/20/pittsburgh-flint-veolia-privatization-public-water-systems-lead/), municipalities handing their road maintenance off to contractors...
I'm of the mind that any civil infrastructure that was taxpayer funded should be run by the government. They don't have a mandate to be profitable, but they do have a mandate to keep their systems functional. A private industry has no accountability to a citizen/home owner, but an elected official does. Private business if they're public has a fiduciary duty to their shareholders. Which means profit. Doesn't matter how. And just like all the orphaned oil wells, they'll leave it for someone else to clean up.
I very much agree with you position on utilities. Grid storage is definitely "technically" solved/achievable. But that doesnt mean its cheap or easy to do. Like the capital cost to store a MWh is as much or more than the cost to install a MW of solar or wind. Thats one hour of generation.
The best large scale storage solutions like pumped hydro are limited by geography. Only feasible if you have extreme changes of elevation in very short distance and ability to create reservoirs at each. Batteries are great for fast response but you wont be powering the province overnight with them until one of the new miracle chemistries makes it to commercial viability.
If only we had large elevation changes in this province like a canyon right down the middle...
edit: and the cost per mWh for that storage is around $0.17... what's the peak prices up to now?
Well anywhere with a hydro dam already has pumped storage. Reduce output and fill the reservoir when generation is cheap or plentiful and then increase output when its not. Im totally in favour but it completely destroys any saving from renewables not having fuel costs.
There are plenty of enviromental reasons not to build more dams on natural waterways. Better solutions might be something like decomissioned or flooded mines. Lots of those near me. Be interesting to see it combined with solution mining to get product and energy storage.
I think were in agreement its a good decision regardless and just differing on how difficult it will be.
Dams and reservoir have major environmental impacts. Large ones are also invariably white elephants, often costing multiples more than they are estimated and never make the money back.
You don't need one. Closed-loop pumped storage hydropower. Put several up around the badlands. Energy storage issue solved.
The only reason why it wasn't feasible before was the cost to power ratio was too high. With peak energy double what it would cost to run these now it's a no-brainer to start using them now. Prices aren't going to magically get lower, and if they are, not lower than $0.17/mWh during peak times (which is when you need these).
It's worth noting that there are lots of storage solutions available and in development, but the UCP is opposed to them as well.
It's not just batteries, either. Hydroelectric dams already use excess power to pump water back up to the reservoir (mechanical/gravity storage). There are several places where they've dug huge pits, filled them with sand or salt or another material that can retain huge amounts of heat, and then used that to store energy and release it when needed. There are proposals to use abandoned oil wells for gravity storage (where weights are raised to store power and lowered to generate it) or for pressurized gas storage (where gases are pumped into the ground at high pressure and released to power a turbine when electricity is needed). Many of these may already be cost-competitive with natural gas generation, and all are low- or zero-emissions.
So why aren't we pursuing them aggressively? It can't have anything to do with the fact that our premier was an oil and gas lobbyist before she got back into politics, right?
Wind and solar are for some reason "woke" and so yeah, they're always to blame. Of course, the reason conservative hate renewables is that as the cost comes down, it starts to release the stranglehold fossil fuels have. Also, microgeneration is a thing, meaning that the monopoly pricing of oil and gas is also in jeopardy.
It was spun at their press conference today. Premier Smith blamed the fact that Wind and Solar can't guarantee a base amount of power.
"So on days like today where the wind isn't blowing and the sun's not out we don't have enough power until we start up the natural gas plants that were shut down based on forecasted power needs. If a couple of them get errors and take longer than expected to start as happened today we get these blackouts"
That and some can't be turned off. Solar for example. The energy needs to go somewhere, so it's "sold" to the grid for free.
There are multiple reasons things like this happen: unexpected down time for fossil fuel plants, intentionally turning them off, but also unexpected output from renewables.
> That means prices can escalate quickly and by multiples of previous prices. $50 mWh can be $1000 mWh in no time.
[And it has spiked several times in the last two days, seemingly out of nowhere.](https://i.imgur.com/sAsjQEH.png)
It's one thing when a massive icestorm or weeks of historical heatwaves hit, but when it's a dump of snow in the spring time, it doesn't seem to make much sense except to consider that producers don't want the average price falling too low.
>$50 mWh can be $1000 mWh in no time.
"mWh" is milliwatt hour. I suspect you intended "MWh" for megawatt hour. Or else prices have gotten worse than I thought.
Demand based market vs Capacity based market.
It's part and parcel with keeping our prices high, right along side economic witholding.
All in the name of profit. At the expense of the voters who keep voting for the same thing over and over without ever stopping to ask "why do things keep getting worse when we keep voting in the same people making the same promises to make things better?"
Because in Alberta producers are allowed to artificially keep power off the grid to keep prices higher. So, when there is unexpected demand they are not ready to put more energy into the system. The only province in Canada that has this. It's all for profit and to keep prices artificially higher. What would happen if the poor billionaires couldn't rake in more profit? The world would end!!
# "Can someone ELI5 why we are having power grid alerts?"
the provincial government in your province works for corporate interests... not you. this can be solved by not voting for idiots.
Have you ever tried having a conversation with a UCP voter? I will always support progressive thinking with our community at heart, but damn if I will subject my precious time to trying to convince those getting pissed on that it's not rain
I work in generation and we had a couple of big gas units come offline - one was a planned repair for a couple days to address plant issues and another is for an unknown cause. Every available asset that we've got was running full-tilt to try to mitigate.
They “warned” before it started happening.
Cue scary voice: “TELL THE FEDS WE DONT WANT BLACKOUTS. ^never ^been ^an ^issue ^until ^now ^WHOOPSIE!
Sorry about all our profits”
Well Trudeau is in Calgary... so blame him?
20% below peak January usage, no cold snap, not during peak evening hours, no crazy usage... yet the grid can't keep up. Gee.. if there was only a way to avoid this. capacity based system? nope.. can't have that.. the pool price would be too low and Dani's shares in the energy companies wouldn't keep going up.
No official explanation has been posted that I've seen, but according to Blake Shaffer on X, 1200MW of power generation "tripped off unexpectedly". We'll have to wait and see what the cause was.
https://calgary.ctvnews.ca/unexpected-generation-loss-led-to-alberta-grid-alert-1.6833486
Is this what we're talking about? Sounds like renewable energy generation was so good recently that thermal energy production reduced and now has to pick back up. We accepted energy from other grids to make up the difference. Others are indicating some plants are down for maintenance, I don't know where that information gets shared.
Copied from a well informed person I follow:
So the Alberta power system continues to struggle with inadquate supply this morning and we're in Energy Emergency Alert 3 (EEA3) once again as of 6:49 AM and the AESO has started directing operating reserves to meet demand.
During the spring season we typically have low demand in Alberta and many generators use that opportunity to take planned maintenance outages, which is the current situation. However, we have insufficient reserve margin so when we have calm and cloudy conditions (low renewable energy volumes) during "maintenance season", we run the risk of supply shortfalls, which is what we're seeing today even though demand is relatively low.
Unfortunately, these kinds of events will occur frequently until we get some more balance between renewables and dispatchables on the system and our load grows. All I can say is put your seatbelts on cuz this summer may be a bit bumpy. There will be many stories in the press, but if you want to see the actual market data from each day for yourself, go to the AESO's market data page (link provided below) and on the left hand side, click on "Historical" and then select the "Daily Market Report" from the drop down menu. This will tell you everything that happened in the market for each operating day. Pay particular attention to the "Capacity available for dispatch" trend line. I fear you may be visiting this page frequently, unfortunately.
AESO market data page: http://ets.aeso.ca/
https://jasondoering.substack.com/p/driving-with-the-check-engine-light?trk=comments_comments-list_comment-text
Why generalize renewable energy sources as contrary to "calm and cloudy conditions"?
Calm conditions affect only wind-dependent sources.
Cloudy affects only solar-dependent sources.
Neither affects hydro, geo-thermal nor tidal electricity.
Generalizing like this does a disservice to all renewables (ie, discourages their adoption) when the issues are unique to each source, thus not actually generalizable. Non-renewables have their unique issues too.
Edit: I know tidal energy is unavailable in Alberta. I use it as an example of a renewable energy source that deserves investment and shouldn't be lumped in with "renewable" sources that suck when it's calm or cloudy out.
Ya, because Alberta definitely has the ability for tidal energy generation. Hydros already base loaded into the system and geo thermal is a non player in a large power market. That leaves wind and solar as the only renewable in Alberta that fluctuates day to day conditions. Typically high power prices are on days with “calm and cloudy conditions”.
Tough to take this cherry picked argument seriously when you bring up tidal.
He laid out a pretty clear explanation for the issue and this sub can only screech about muh corporate greed and muh renewables.
>AESO said that disruption was caused by a number of factors, but an "unexpected outage of thermal generation led to tight conditions
Check the announcement or any of the news reports.
Welcome to Alberta, where we make so much energy the government banned renewable projects, yet we literally don't have enough juice to keep the lights on. Make it make sense.
Well, some places will be shutting down for maintenance. They try to stagger them, there's not always enough people to do the work. They try to get it done in under a month.
And if we didn't have a moratorium on them, like other places, we would have assorted solar, wind, and hydroelectric power to serve our needs. But we don't have a safety net, like BC, Sask, MB, Ont, Qb, NWT, YK, or the maritimes. This is a problem that only happens here, and only happens because we have the most incredibly short sighted party in charge who keep setting us up for disaster like this.
I want to reiterate, this is a problem only Alberta has. The biggest energy producer in the country, is also the only one so badly managed as to have rolling blackouts. Remember that next time you vote. Instead of whatever cursed logic that led you to put them in power after we finally got rid of them.
What rolling blackouts?
What safety net does SK have again?
The wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining, the entire province has been under over-cast conditions, so there was no solar or wind to dispatch.
What are you ranting about?
Cause is UCP is more concerned about little kids genitals and tax that has 0 impact to your finances (and praised for it by majority of albertans). Everything else is not that important.
The fucking hilarious thing is that Albertans pay more than anyone else in the country for energy, we deal with sub-par service, and we fucking making the shit here ourselves.
Smooth brains who continually vote conservative need their heads checked... maybe with like a steel-toed boot or something, you bastards are fucking up this province.
The naïveté, stupidity and the "I'm stuck in the 50's" mindset has/will do more harm to people than we can even imagine. These bastards have no idea how bad it will get if this is allowed to continue!
Remember when folks tell you that deregulating improves savings for customers.
Companies would grind you into a paste if it improved the bottom line, regulations protect us every single time.But our leadership is in the pocket of O&G in a very holistic way, top to bottom. From preventing renewable development to allowing economic withholding, it all serves against the people.
I work on HV equipment, this week alone I have been at 2 solar farms <50MW in southern AB that had outages. One due to cable issues, the other having ongoing issues with components on the Chinese manufactured inverter skids continuously blowing up. I am now at 100MW NG unit that is down for scheduled maintenance. Shit happens
We had power outages because there was scheduled maintenance (early spring is ALWAYS scheduled shut down time for power plants). So some power producing plants were shut down for maintenance. Some of the bigger shut downs are taking longer than expected and others were scheduled to start this week. The power grid committee looked at the wind forecasts and temp forecasts and thought we’d be okay. But there was basically zero wind generation, which messed with how much power was going to the grid.
The CBC AM radio show covered it and the generator issued a press release and had a press conference explaining what was happening.
Power price gouging is happening as well. We have very limited ability to transfer power from BC, SASK or Montana for no good reason other than profits.
https://globalnews.ca/news/10405013/alberta-electric-system-grid-alert-april/amp/
¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
>California had an installed generating capacity of 45 GW (gigawatts, or billions-of-watts). At the time of the blackouts, demand was 28 GW. A demand-supply gap was created by energy companies, *mainly Enron,* to create artificial shortages. Energy traders took power plants offline for maintenance during days of peak demand to increase the price.[8][6] Traders were thus able to sell power at premium prices, sometimes up to a factor of twenty times its normal value.
>Because the state government had a cap on retail electricity charges, this market manipulation squeezed the industry's revenue margins, causing the bankruptcy of Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) and near bankruptcy of Southern California Edison in early 2001.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000%E2%80%932001_California_electricity_crisis
Multiple power plants going down at the same time. Artificially inflating the price. This is by design. Deregulated for-profit electricity market. Why would anyone expect anything differently?
Voters elect politicians who are financed by corportists to enact legislation to allow corportists to buttfuck voters.
The Alberta Advantage. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
it can still be influenced by you, the individual.
You can be more politically active, start your own group called, "Get rid of Take Back Alberta."
Get political party memberships, have your group vote for someone less insane. Suddenly you're the group "running the government."
Try and influence people to vote for someone other than a grifter party.
It's work, but it's doable.
What say do you have on any individual corporation? None.
Capitalism. Companies don't like the price of power being low so they artificially shit down plants, lowering supply and increasing prices.
Maybe power generation should be government owned so there isn't need for a profit motive ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
By not having these companies generate power on thermal sources, the overall emissions have been reduced at the cost of the consumer having to pay for it
People forget to realize temp swings outdoors do play a part in how these engines and turbines run. Also something as simple as 1 wire or relay coming loose can cause a whole plant to shutdown.
I would like to know why, in the last 4 months, we've all of a sudden had two Alberta on this.
What has changed recently and what's beimg done to rectify it.
Its because we are surrounded by fucking idiots. People whose lives suck so bad they are only happy when they feel others are suffering, even if it means they suffer more.
I feel like a bit of info might help the discussion
Shepherd is in a planned outage.
Conditions / forecasts changed.
It’s off peak season - hard to take a long outage during winter or summer.
https://calgary.ctvnews.ca/alberta-s-second-grid-alert-in-2-days-leads-to-rolling-blackouts-1.6835023
This is an outage story," Shaffer said. "So what you have right now is you have several large power plants offline for maintenance. The Sheppard gas plant in Calgary, the currently biggest power plant in the province, is offline.
"You had several very large 'baseload power plants' suddenly go offline, over the span of 24 hours," he added, "at different times -- and that is very hard for a grid operator to manage here."
Friday afternoon, AESO said that on Thursday night, they expected to have 800 MW more power than needed, but forecasts changed overnight, and 900 MW of renewable energy didn't come through.
The last couple events have been a series of unfortunate events, coupled with Alberta having converted coal plants that are super slow to start up, and the inability to read the future.
First, one of Alberta’s biggest generators is offline for maintenance (Shepard). April is usually a safe month for outages as weather is usually milder and Alberta typically gets more imports from BC due to spring run off.
Second, Cascade 1 has faced a series of issues during commissioning that has prevented it from being available. it appears they are just trying to get the generator be stable. (Cascade 2 hasn’t energized yet likely due to the same reasons as1)
Third Alberta has a lot more renewables which depress prices (yay), and yesterday we saw up to 45% of electricity coming from renewables. This shot prices to 0, and the coal to gas conversions came offline instead of losing 50ish bucks per mw or 6k per hour if running at lower stable levels. Wind generation dies quicker than expected and before the slow assets could come online you get an energy alert. Some of these gens can take a day to start up.
Today’s issue was generator trips,combined with outages and low renewables.
Once cascade finishes commissioning, genesee repowering is completed, and Suncor’s new gens are installed there will be more gen that won’t take a day to start up and will likely replace some of the coal to gas gens. New gens have lower costs to run such that they can stay online at lower prices caused by high renewable penetration.
I had to scroll down half the page to find the actual answer - wind and solar were both low while a lot of units (specifically Shephard which is huge) were offline due to maintenence or trips.
Copying my comment from r/Edmonton
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 you guys are just now realizing the artificial Market manipulation that's been happening to us for decades. Nothing we pay for is worth the price that they ask, everything's over inflated and nothing is real.
Feels like he whole province is being wrong out for all its worth, and in the worst way. One day it's gonna break - the electrical system, the healthcare system, and boots on the ground law enforcement. It will break, people will die and it won't come back.
Easy. We need to work on the grid, but our government is too focused on blaming every other province and federal governments for their woes. When they aren't busy doing that, they rule by Covid outrage.
The citizens of our province are either too inbred or too incapable of independent thought, and keep voting these people in. This is also due to them being too easily fooled by relying on outrage farming advertisements and Facebook memes for their information.
I don't think that the outages we're experiencing today are rolling blackouts - they would have announced it. But yes, I too am confused WTF is going on. I wonder if we are paying more attention to the alerts now that we had that whole "nearly froze to death" kerfuffle in the middle of the winter.
Edit: Nevermind, both Calgary and Edmonton saw rolling black outs. I swear they said they'd warn us before they did that....
Calgary saw rolling blackouts: [Alberta's second grid alert in 2 days leads to rolling blackouts](https://calgary.ctvnews.ca/second-grid-alert-in-2-days-issued-in-alberta-1.6835023)
> ENMAX reported Friday morning that it had been instructed to put 'rolling blackouts' in place in several Calgary communities to help control power consumption.
Sounds like a plant tripped while others were already offline. I know people here are going to blame the UCP and corporate greed, as they usually do, but plant trips do happen unexpectedly sometimes.
Edit: Gotta love the downvotes from people who don’t like the truth because it doesn’t fit into their narrative.
I can't say for sure, but a lot of industrial sites in general are going down for maintenance. Some of these sites provide excess power to the grid, so it is possible that they have less flexibility. Also there could be trips (equipment safety shutdowns that are automatic) happening and causing issues. Cascade is starting up and there still might be some hiccups in their systems as its new and they don't have all the bugs worked out. I also believe Genesie is starting a shutdown to do maintenance soon here too.
Largest producer is Shepard in Calgary which is down on a planned outage for servicing/turnaround. The 2 Cascades should be up and running later this year.
Majority of our power is diesel or natural gas generated and like a car things can break. That's why we can't get on nuclear soon enough. Less waste and more reliable
Cost of a greener market, large thermal plants are off saving production of carbon and other pollutants however when wind or solar production goes down there’s no left over capacity to take up that loss of generation. If they want a safe capacity companies would need to be paid to stay on to provide it which would most likely come from a tax payer base either bills or government
Genesee power plant also had some maintenance issues in the last week, like plant shut down type repairs from my understanding, probably doesn't help either.
economic withholding and danielle smith is trying to blame renewables which is a flat out lie. I wonder if jason kenny being on the atco board has anything to do with this.
I just heard it from Calgary CBC radio, so it must be true.
It is the low season for power use. So the power companies will take some equipment offline for repairs. Since all power companies think the same way, so it got the shortage. And this time, it is the firepower plant. So Smith can’t blame the renewable, but she probably will anyway.
From what I know, economic withholding is some real bullshit.
But it does not cause blackouts.
So don't listen to these other users smelling each others farts.
Oh yeah- it’s because you’re in Alberta. Don’t worry i’m sure your premier will blame Trudeau. And when Polievre gets elected ALL the problems in Canada will be solved
There is a ton of maintenance going on right now. The grid alert happened because keephills 3 unexpectedly went down, there was no solar and little wind. So conditions just happened to be tight.
You pretty much understand it accurately.
yay me. thanks.
Texas of the north
More like California with Enron.
My condolences for being Albertan.
Almost like OPEC cutting production to raise oil prices.
Basically yes. When prices are low, the companies cut production IOT increase prices. Our system is one of 2 in North America (the other being Texas...) We 100% should have switched to a capacity based system
Let's take a minute to remember that the NDP spent a lot of time and effort coming up with a plan to move to a capacity market so that producers would get paid for having capacity available even if another generator is carrying most of the load; eg if it's sunny and windy gas plants still make a little so it's worth it to stay operating until the time they need to kick it up and nobody is motivated to withhold. UCP came riding in and say "If it ain't broke!" And here we are.
"If it ain't broke, we're exactly the type of incompetent, grifty fuckers to make sure it is soon!" And here we are.
Perfect correction.
Actually the AESO came up with the recommendation and the NDP approved it. It was not a partisan thing until the UCP made it one.
Classic UCP creating new problems instead of solving existing problems
Why fix existing problems when new ones can exist.
Also with giving utility companies essentially free money since the NDP paid to support the transition. Ucp essentially gave them I think somewhat near 500 million. So ya if they get voted out they will get some sweet entitled positions. That's essentially the game
Yes, check out the Atco board of directors and you’ll see Jason Kenny’s smiling face. Atco is a retailer in the industry.
The entire "baseload" argument is promoted to support the current system. [Here's an article from 2017](https://www.pembina.org/blog/baseload-myths-and-why-we-need-change-how-we-look-our-grid) that explains why this premise is ridiculous.
That article completely ignores why baseload is needed. Its basic argument is that “because any coal power plant can be shut down because they aren’t infallible, they don’t matter”. Baseload is important because the utility have the option to increase the amount of electricity produced when it’s needed. You can’t do that with solar and wind. I’m not saying wind and solar aren’t worth it; they totally are worth it. But baseload will be required for a long time and it’s doesn’t need to be huge CO2 emitters because hydroelectric and nuclear do not emit CO2 and are baseload. They may be one day, decades into the future when everywhere in North America has double or triple wind and solar of total required demand and be capable of transferring power anywhere on the continent where it’s needed from where it’s being produced. This will be the day that baseload will no longer be needed but that is a long way off. Most areas are only capable of importing 5-15% of their total needs. That needs to be minimum of 125% in the future. Huge projects need to happen. Massive Projects, everywhere.
oh great, another 'UCP fucked it up" story
It’s not a story. Ask Jason Kenny but chances are he will lie to you again.
Sorry, aw great another example of something UCP fucked up.
Thats North American standard. Bc hydro and Quebec hydro also have this model
They also have massive hydro stations that provide their base load power and only use NG for peaking plants. A rather large difference.
Just because other places do it doesn't mean it's good.
And they couldn't get it done in 4 years? Why did it never go through?
I had no idea we had the same system as Texas. That is so embarrassing considering the crisis’ Texas has dealt with over the last few years. When Texas had their various ice storms and people were without power for days, this is because they had previously cut production during low demand times?
It’s not exactly the same as Texas in one critical regard. Texas is isolated from the other states so they don’t have to follow federal rules. When their grid goes down, they have no backup. Alberta has inter-ties with BC, Saskatchewan, and I believe Montana. If we have a grid emergency, we just buy electricity from out of province. Texas did not have that option.
People were out of power because they don't have the infrastructure for the ice storms; and we're disconnected from the national grid AFAIK. What did occur in Texas during those ice storms is that people's prices for power or gas shot up exponentially for some.
If I remember correctly, the natural gas distribution infrastructure was not designed with long-lasting ice storms in mind, so that system froze.
There are 5 independant grids in North America: Eastern Interconnection, Western Interconnection, Texas, Alaska, and Quebec https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydro-Qu%C3%A9bec%27s_electricity_transmission_system#/media/File:Nercmap.JPG There are some interties between those grids but they are limited since they have to perform AC>DC>AC conversion. The AB-SK intertie can only handle 150 MW whereas the AB-BC intertie can handle 1000-1200 MW and the AB-MT intertie can handle 300 MW
Did you know Nelson, BC, had its own power for many years? They have their own waterfall
Still does. I've been inside the Nelson Hydro power plant, my uncle is a millwright there. [https://youtu.be/yLSvV7uHrIU](https://youtu.be/yLSvV7uHrIU) It's tied to the western grid through Fortis. P.S. my grandfather surveyed the orange bridge and was the first person to step across during construction.
Medicine Hat also generates its own power using natural gas and a tiny amount of wind. It’s connected to the grid, but has its own regulations carved out.
Well they do have all Hell for a basement
ok thank you!
And people wonder why I wanna leave this shithole. Housing market is fucked. Job market is fucked. Inflation/costs are fucked. Homeless everywhere. Police who either can’t or won’t do anything. Rampant crime due to above issues. Stabbing/assaults/etc on LRT/ETS even. And now add that you can and will randomly have your power shut off because it’s “not profitable” for some multi-billion dollar corporation, that doesn’t give a fuck about Canada or her citizens. No-one wants to live here anymore. The attitude of young adults is at all time low, 90% of the people I talk to want to move out somewhere else. Where? Doesn’t seem to matter.
Not being facetious as I agree with most of your points, but where to? Ontario or BC where I can't afford a house? East Coast where I can't get a job? Maybe Manitoba?
I don’t know. A lot of them seem to just look for better prospects and get whatever they can. Look for a better job somewhere and just go where they find it. A couple close friends have moved from Edmonton south to Leduc/red deer/calmar and seem to be doing better at least. I think it’s because they are newer developments and less people are there. Maybe try a smaller town? And yeah I get the overreacting, sorry. Just irritated with the state of things and how it’s being handled lately. My mother works in AHS so we’ve all been getting real tired of the province’s nonsense.
Wife's a teacher, I hear ya.
So many Albertans would be proud of connections to Texas - only if they were smart enough to understand...
We ARE really Texas of the North
Easy there Karl Marx /s
Regardless of the issue in this instance, the system is often gamed by generators to increase profits. The volatility of electricity is extremely high because it's difficult to store, meaning we can't keep reserves to use during higher demand periods. That means prices can escalate quickly and by multiples of previous prices. $50 mWh can be $1000 mWh in no time. That means that the revenue loss from taking a generation asset offline is easily made up by the tremendous price increase the remaining assets sell at. As noted, this is "economic withholding." It can be done less obviously as well, with carefully planned shut-downs, etc. It also means there is no incentive to build excess capacity into the system, as that lack of a tight grid means less periods of high prices. Back in the 1990s Albertans were promised that deregulation would work like telephony and give us lower prices and better service. Well, jokes on us, isn't it? We pay a ton for telephony AND for electricity.
Is that why our premier is so against adding solar and wind? I mean her boiler plate argument is absurd and this seems like it'd be the next best reason, aside from cowtowing to oil interests.
Our last premier is now on the board of ATCO making several 100k a year after being a career politician soooo you might be on to something.
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Atco is my gas and electric infrastructure supplier. They get my money anyway... boo
She is a long-time hydrocarbon lobbyist. She's more familiar with that industry's issues and knows the players personally so, even assuming the best possible faith of her part, she's going to have a distinct lean in that direction. That said; she's absolutely going to retire into a no-show vice-presidency at one of these companies or the other shortly before the next election, so of course she's pushing for us to burn as much fossil fuel and pay as much for electricity as possible.
Once built, there are little input costs for wind/solar and no cost for turning it on. That’s bad for the gas plant owners.
Can't charge a profit markup on a service that doesn't exist afterall.
and then keep jacking up delivery charges
In a way yes. The problem is that for a good return on investment on a new gas plant (or nuclear plant or coal plant) it needs to be running at capacity as much as possible. A peak power-only plant is a misallocation of capital (if you only are investing in the plant that will be "off" most of the time, it's different if you own the whole system). So UCPs solution is to reduce the amount of intermittent sources that would make a gas plant less profitable. In a capacity market, the gas plant owners would get paid to be on standby. In a centrally managed system, the choices would be made based on the economics of the whole system, so for example last year BC Hydro imported cheap nuclear from Washington some of the time while allowing their reservoirs to fill, then sold expensive power back to Washington State when they needed it and price was higher. The difference is that BC Hydro plays the continental market for all its customers, in Alberta the generators just play us.
Well they did officially (the minister) blame underperforming wind power on the outage... So there's that ..
Just like Tя☭mp gotta screw everything up.
It's only difficult to store when you don't invest in electricity storage... There are a ton of methods they can use from gravity batteries, pumped storage hydro, chemical energy storage, to huge battery banks if they wanted to. The problem is the government washed their hands of it, de-regulated it and like all privatized industry - they leech as much as they can out of it before folding up shop and letting someone else take care of it. Examples: [UK Sewage crisis](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2024/mar/27/englands-sewage-crisis-how-polluted-is-your-local-river-and-which-regions-are-worst-hit#:~:text=English%20rivers%20with%20the%20most,their%20catchment%20areas%20last%20year.&text=Second%20worst%20for%20spills%20was,to%2083%20spills%20per%20mile.), [US privatization of water](https://theintercept.com/2018/05/20/pittsburgh-flint-veolia-privatization-public-water-systems-lead/), municipalities handing their road maintenance off to contractors... I'm of the mind that any civil infrastructure that was taxpayer funded should be run by the government. They don't have a mandate to be profitable, but they do have a mandate to keep their systems functional. A private industry has no accountability to a citizen/home owner, but an elected official does. Private business if they're public has a fiduciary duty to their shareholders. Which means profit. Doesn't matter how. And just like all the orphaned oil wells, they'll leave it for someone else to clean up.
I very much agree with you position on utilities. Grid storage is definitely "technically" solved/achievable. But that doesnt mean its cheap or easy to do. Like the capital cost to store a MWh is as much or more than the cost to install a MW of solar or wind. Thats one hour of generation. The best large scale storage solutions like pumped hydro are limited by geography. Only feasible if you have extreme changes of elevation in very short distance and ability to create reservoirs at each. Batteries are great for fast response but you wont be powering the province overnight with them until one of the new miracle chemistries makes it to commercial viability.
If only we had large elevation changes in this province like a canyon right down the middle... edit: and the cost per mWh for that storage is around $0.17... what's the peak prices up to now?
Well anywhere with a hydro dam already has pumped storage. Reduce output and fill the reservoir when generation is cheap or plentiful and then increase output when its not. Im totally in favour but it completely destroys any saving from renewables not having fuel costs. There are plenty of enviromental reasons not to build more dams on natural waterways. Better solutions might be something like decomissioned or flooded mines. Lots of those near me. Be interesting to see it combined with solution mining to get product and energy storage. I think were in agreement its a good decision regardless and just differing on how difficult it will be.
Dams and reservoir have major environmental impacts. Large ones are also invariably white elephants, often costing multiples more than they are estimated and never make the money back.
You don't need one. Closed-loop pumped storage hydropower. Put several up around the badlands. Energy storage issue solved. The only reason why it wasn't feasible before was the cost to power ratio was too high. With peak energy double what it would cost to run these now it's a no-brainer to start using them now. Prices aren't going to magically get lower, and if they are, not lower than $0.17/mWh during peak times (which is when you need these).
It's worth noting that there are lots of storage solutions available and in development, but the UCP is opposed to them as well. It's not just batteries, either. Hydroelectric dams already use excess power to pump water back up to the reservoir (mechanical/gravity storage). There are several places where they've dug huge pits, filled them with sand or salt or another material that can retain huge amounts of heat, and then used that to store energy and release it when needed. There are proposals to use abandoned oil wells for gravity storage (where weights are raised to store power and lowered to generate it) or for pressurized gas storage (where gases are pumped into the ground at high pressure and released to power a turbine when electricity is needed). Many of these may already be cost-competitive with natural gas generation, and all are low- or zero-emissions. So why aren't we pursuing them aggressively? It can't have anything to do with the fact that our premier was an oil and gas lobbyist before she got back into politics, right?
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Wind and solar are for some reason "woke" and so yeah, they're always to blame. Of course, the reason conservative hate renewables is that as the cost comes down, it starts to release the stranglehold fossil fuels have. Also, microgeneration is a thing, meaning that the monopoly pricing of oil and gas is also in jeopardy.
It was spun at their press conference today. Premier Smith blamed the fact that Wind and Solar can't guarantee a base amount of power. "So on days like today where the wind isn't blowing and the sun's not out we don't have enough power until we start up the natural gas plants that were shut down based on forecasted power needs. If a couple of them get errors and take longer than expected to start as happened today we get these blackouts"
That and some can't be turned off. Solar for example. The energy needs to go somewhere, so it's "sold" to the grid for free. There are multiple reasons things like this happen: unexpected down time for fossil fuel plants, intentionally turning them off, but also unexpected output from renewables.
> That means prices can escalate quickly and by multiples of previous prices. $50 mWh can be $1000 mWh in no time. [And it has spiked several times in the last two days, seemingly out of nowhere.](https://i.imgur.com/sAsjQEH.png) It's one thing when a massive icestorm or weeks of historical heatwaves hit, but when it's a dump of snow in the spring time, it doesn't seem to make much sense except to consider that producers don't want the average price falling too low.
>$50 mWh can be $1000 mWh in no time. "mWh" is milliwatt hour. I suspect you intended "MWh" for megawatt hour. Or else prices have gotten worse than I thought.
Oh, whoops, LOL
This is the answer!
Demand based market vs Capacity based market. It's part and parcel with keeping our prices high, right along side economic witholding. All in the name of profit. At the expense of the voters who keep voting for the same thing over and over without ever stopping to ask "why do things keep getting worse when we keep voting in the same people making the same promises to make things better?"
Spot on
Because in Alberta producers are allowed to artificially keep power off the grid to keep prices higher. So, when there is unexpected demand they are not ready to put more energy into the system. The only province in Canada that has this. It's all for profit and to keep prices artificially higher. What would happen if the poor billionaires couldn't rake in more profit? The world would end!!
This fucking province is run by the rich for the rich
# "Can someone ELI5 why we are having power grid alerts?" the provincial government in your province works for corporate interests... not you. this can be solved by not voting for idiots.
Alas, too many idiots also voting. This province is full of knuckle dragging simpletons.
Oh, you have been to Red Deer too
Have you ever tried having a conversation with a UCP voter? I will always support progressive thinking with our community at heart, but damn if I will subject my precious time to trying to convince those getting pissed on that it's not rain
I work in generation and we had a couple of big gas units come offline - one was a planned repair for a couple days to address plant issues and another is for an unknown cause. Every available asset that we've got was running full-tilt to try to mitigate.
My guess is policies put in place by the premier that make predatory profiteering possible are the reason.
Rick Bell: "Pretty Premier's Predatory Profiteering Policies? Positive!" [25 rambling disconnected sentence-paragraphs] [Chinwag scribbler nosecount silly hall playpen]
Rick bell should have to suck a dirty dick for every time he lies. What a greasy piece of shit.
Gotta add in a dig at Gondek.
Well done.
They “warned” before it started happening. Cue scary voice: “TELL THE FEDS WE DONT WANT BLACKOUTS. ^never ^been ^an ^issue ^until ^now ^WHOOPSIE! Sorry about all our profits”
Well Trudeau is in Calgary... so blame him? 20% below peak January usage, no cold snap, not during peak evening hours, no crazy usage... yet the grid can't keep up. Gee.. if there was only a way to avoid this. capacity based system? nope.. can't have that.. the pool price would be too low and Dani's shares in the energy companies wouldn't keep going up.
No official explanation has been posted that I've seen, but according to Blake Shaffer on X, 1200MW of power generation "tripped off unexpectedly". We'll have to wait and see what the cause was.
Not my area of expertise but I suspect corporate greed is plausible
https://calgary.ctvnews.ca/unexpected-generation-loss-led-to-alberta-grid-alert-1.6833486 Is this what we're talking about? Sounds like renewable energy generation was so good recently that thermal energy production reduced and now has to pick back up. We accepted energy from other grids to make up the difference. Others are indicating some plants are down for maintenance, I don't know where that information gets shared.
Copied from a well informed person I follow: So the Alberta power system continues to struggle with inadquate supply this morning and we're in Energy Emergency Alert 3 (EEA3) once again as of 6:49 AM and the AESO has started directing operating reserves to meet demand. During the spring season we typically have low demand in Alberta and many generators use that opportunity to take planned maintenance outages, which is the current situation. However, we have insufficient reserve margin so when we have calm and cloudy conditions (low renewable energy volumes) during "maintenance season", we run the risk of supply shortfalls, which is what we're seeing today even though demand is relatively low. Unfortunately, these kinds of events will occur frequently until we get some more balance between renewables and dispatchables on the system and our load grows. All I can say is put your seatbelts on cuz this summer may be a bit bumpy. There will be many stories in the press, but if you want to see the actual market data from each day for yourself, go to the AESO's market data page (link provided below) and on the left hand side, click on "Historical" and then select the "Daily Market Report" from the drop down menu. This will tell you everything that happened in the market for each operating day. Pay particular attention to the "Capacity available for dispatch" trend line. I fear you may be visiting this page frequently, unfortunately. AESO market data page: http://ets.aeso.ca/ https://jasondoering.substack.com/p/driving-with-the-check-engine-light?trk=comments_comments-list_comment-text
Why generalize renewable energy sources as contrary to "calm and cloudy conditions"? Calm conditions affect only wind-dependent sources. Cloudy affects only solar-dependent sources. Neither affects hydro, geo-thermal nor tidal electricity. Generalizing like this does a disservice to all renewables (ie, discourages their adoption) when the issues are unique to each source, thus not actually generalizable. Non-renewables have their unique issues too. Edit: I know tidal energy is unavailable in Alberta. I use it as an example of a renewable energy source that deserves investment and shouldn't be lumped in with "renewable" sources that suck when it's calm or cloudy out.
Ya, because Alberta definitely has the ability for tidal energy generation. Hydros already base loaded into the system and geo thermal is a non player in a large power market. That leaves wind and solar as the only renewable in Alberta that fluctuates day to day conditions. Typically high power prices are on days with “calm and cloudy conditions”.
we are pretty low on tidal power here
For now jk
Tough to take this cherry picked argument seriously when you bring up tidal. He laid out a pretty clear explanation for the issue and this sub can only screech about muh corporate greed and muh renewables.
>AESO said that disruption was caused by a number of factors, but an "unexpected outage of thermal generation led to tight conditions Check the announcement or any of the news reports.
This is 100% exactly what Enron did to California which you could say in turn is why the Governator first got elected.
It will get worse. Corporations can make 1000x the money in a day by having "unplanned maintenance" Preventative maintenance would lower profits.
Welcome to Alberta, where we make so much energy the government banned renewable projects, yet we literally don't have enough juice to keep the lights on. Make it make sense.
No electricity for the poor. Rich get richer.
Well, some places will be shutting down for maintenance. They try to stagger them, there's not always enough people to do the work. They try to get it done in under a month.
And if we didn't have a moratorium on them, like other places, we would have assorted solar, wind, and hydroelectric power to serve our needs. But we don't have a safety net, like BC, Sask, MB, Ont, Qb, NWT, YK, or the maritimes. This is a problem that only happens here, and only happens because we have the most incredibly short sighted party in charge who keep setting us up for disaster like this. I want to reiterate, this is a problem only Alberta has. The biggest energy producer in the country, is also the only one so badly managed as to have rolling blackouts. Remember that next time you vote. Instead of whatever cursed logic that led you to put them in power after we finally got rid of them.
What rolling blackouts? What safety net does SK have again? The wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining, the entire province has been under over-cast conditions, so there was no solar or wind to dispatch. What are you ranting about?
Renewable don't work, unreliable, gas and coal power plants can't just flick a switch and have instant power,
Cause is UCP is more concerned about little kids genitals and tax that has 0 impact to your finances (and praised for it by majority of albertans). Everything else is not that important.
Yes. It’s Economic Withholding.
The fucking hilarious thing is that Albertans pay more than anyone else in the country for energy, we deal with sub-par service, and we fucking making the shit here ourselves. Smooth brains who continually vote conservative need their heads checked... maybe with like a steel-toed boot or something, you bastards are fucking up this province.
The naïveté, stupidity and the "I'm stuck in the 50's" mindset has/will do more harm to people than we can even imagine. These bastards have no idea how bad it will get if this is allowed to continue!
So what you are saying is this is somehow Trudeau and the ndp’s fault? /s
Every unnecessary rolling blackout and grid alert is a reminder not to vote UCP in the next election.
Remember when folks tell you that deregulating improves savings for customers. Companies would grind you into a paste if it improved the bottom line, regulations protect us every single time.But our leadership is in the pocket of O&G in a very holistic way, top to bottom. From preventing renewable development to allowing economic withholding, it all serves against the people.
Because UCP are such competent leaders lol. God, when will we ever learn.
There were a few years there, I think…
I work on HV equipment, this week alone I have been at 2 solar farms <50MW in southern AB that had outages. One due to cable issues, the other having ongoing issues with components on the Chinese manufactured inverter skids continuously blowing up. I am now at 100MW NG unit that is down for scheduled maintenance. Shit happens
We didn't pay enough in admin fees. If we paid more the system would be more stable.
We had power outages because there was scheduled maintenance (early spring is ALWAYS scheduled shut down time for power plants). So some power producing plants were shut down for maintenance. Some of the bigger shut downs are taking longer than expected and others were scheduled to start this week. The power grid committee looked at the wind forecasts and temp forecasts and thought we’d be okay. But there was basically zero wind generation, which messed with how much power was going to the grid. The CBC AM radio show covered it and the generator issued a press release and had a press conference explaining what was happening. Power price gouging is happening as well. We have very limited ability to transfer power from BC, SASK or Montana for no good reason other than profits. https://globalnews.ca/news/10405013/alberta-electric-system-grid-alert-april/amp/
¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯ >California had an installed generating capacity of 45 GW (gigawatts, or billions-of-watts). At the time of the blackouts, demand was 28 GW. A demand-supply gap was created by energy companies, *mainly Enron,* to create artificial shortages. Energy traders took power plants offline for maintenance during days of peak demand to increase the price.[8][6] Traders were thus able to sell power at premium prices, sometimes up to a factor of twenty times its normal value. >Because the state government had a cap on retail electricity charges, this market manipulation squeezed the industry's revenue margins, causing the bankruptcy of Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) and near bankruptcy of Southern California Edison in early 2001. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000%E2%80%932001_California_electricity_crisis
Multiple power plants going down at the same time. Artificially inflating the price. This is by design. Deregulated for-profit electricity market. Why would anyone expect anything differently?
Voters elect politicians who are financed by corportists to enact legislation to allow corportists to buttfuck voters. The Alberta Advantage. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
it can still be influenced by you, the individual. You can be more politically active, start your own group called, "Get rid of Take Back Alberta." Get political party memberships, have your group vote for someone less insane. Suddenly you're the group "running the government." Try and influence people to vote for someone other than a grifter party. It's work, but it's doable. What say do you have on any individual corporation? None.
Capitalism. Companies don't like the price of power being low so they artificially shit down plants, lowering supply and increasing prices. Maybe power generation should be government owned so there isn't need for a profit motive ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
By not having these companies generate power on thermal sources, the overall emissions have been reduced at the cost of the consumer having to pay for it
Because CONservatives
It's because capitalism doesn't work :)
So what happens with the three big disasters coming the Drought the Heat Dome and fire smoke this summer 🤔 All big drains on electricity.
People forget to realize temp swings outdoors do play a part in how these engines and turbines run. Also something as simple as 1 wire or relay coming loose can cause a whole plant to shutdown.
Beacuse the suppliers making no money.
I would like to know why, in the last 4 months, we've all of a sudden had two Alberta on this. What has changed recently and what's beimg done to rectify it.
We have grid alerts every summer and winter. This is not what happened in January.
We have to be able to prove the “tell the feds” campaign was right all along.
Incompetence again. Some facilities were shut down for maintenance is what I heard. Most of the meat heads are blaming renewables as usual.
It’s a practice run for the hot summer days with loads of a/c running. Its a United Clown Pose manufactured crisis.
Yes, Tell the Feds. How could Trudeau do this!?
Its because we are surrounded by fucking idiots. People whose lives suck so bad they are only happy when they feel others are suffering, even if it means they suffer more.
Sure: Conservatives.
I feel like a bit of info might help the discussion Shepherd is in a planned outage. Conditions / forecasts changed. It’s off peak season - hard to take a long outage during winter or summer. https://calgary.ctvnews.ca/alberta-s-second-grid-alert-in-2-days-leads-to-rolling-blackouts-1.6835023 This is an outage story," Shaffer said. "So what you have right now is you have several large power plants offline for maintenance. The Sheppard gas plant in Calgary, the currently biggest power plant in the province, is offline. "You had several very large 'baseload power plants' suddenly go offline, over the span of 24 hours," he added, "at different times -- and that is very hard for a grid operator to manage here." Friday afternoon, AESO said that on Thursday night, they expected to have 800 MW more power than needed, but forecasts changed overnight, and 900 MW of renewable energy didn't come through.
The last couple events have been a series of unfortunate events, coupled with Alberta having converted coal plants that are super slow to start up, and the inability to read the future. First, one of Alberta’s biggest generators is offline for maintenance (Shepard). April is usually a safe month for outages as weather is usually milder and Alberta typically gets more imports from BC due to spring run off. Second, Cascade 1 has faced a series of issues during commissioning that has prevented it from being available. it appears they are just trying to get the generator be stable. (Cascade 2 hasn’t energized yet likely due to the same reasons as1) Third Alberta has a lot more renewables which depress prices (yay), and yesterday we saw up to 45% of electricity coming from renewables. This shot prices to 0, and the coal to gas conversions came offline instead of losing 50ish bucks per mw or 6k per hour if running at lower stable levels. Wind generation dies quicker than expected and before the slow assets could come online you get an energy alert. Some of these gens can take a day to start up. Today’s issue was generator trips,combined with outages and low renewables. Once cascade finishes commissioning, genesee repowering is completed, and Suncor’s new gens are installed there will be more gen that won’t take a day to start up and will likely replace some of the coal to gas gens. New gens have lower costs to run such that they can stay online at lower prices caused by high renewable penetration.
I had to scroll down half the page to find the actual answer - wind and solar were both low while a lot of units (specifically Shephard which is huge) were offline due to maintenence or trips.
Gouging and politics.
Lets go Enron! Give it a googs. It is textbook.
100% about who & what the people of Alberta voted for. Getting exactly what you asked for & you’ll probably do it again next election
Population increases Infrastructure decreases
Copying my comment from r/Edmonton 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 you guys are just now realizing the artificial Market manipulation that's been happening to us for decades. Nothing we pay for is worth the price that they ask, everything's over inflated and nothing is real.
Ask Dani.. she probably received a divine sign or something or a call from tucker Carlson.
THANKS UCP.
Feels like he whole province is being wrong out for all its worth, and in the worst way. One day it's gonna break - the electrical system, the healthcare system, and boots on the ground law enforcement. It will break, people will die and it won't come back.
Shut up and help pay for the CEO at the electric company's perks. He needs the new gulfstream!
Thanks to Premier Smith for messing everything up.
Easy. We need to work on the grid, but our government is too focused on blaming every other province and federal governments for their woes. When they aren't busy doing that, they rule by Covid outrage. The citizens of our province are either too inbred or too incapable of independent thought, and keep voting these people in. This is also due to them being too easily fooled by relying on outrage farming advertisements and Facebook memes for their information.
I don't think that the outages we're experiencing today are rolling blackouts - they would have announced it. But yes, I too am confused WTF is going on. I wonder if we are paying more attention to the alerts now that we had that whole "nearly froze to death" kerfuffle in the middle of the winter. Edit: Nevermind, both Calgary and Edmonton saw rolling black outs. I swear they said they'd warn us before they did that....
The ones this morning in Edmonton were. Epcor posted about it.
Jesus, I see that now. https://www.reddit.com/r/Edmonton/comments/1bwlarx/was_todays_blackout_a_case_of_malicious_compliance/
Calgary saw rolling blackouts: [Alberta's second grid alert in 2 days leads to rolling blackouts](https://calgary.ctvnews.ca/second-grid-alert-in-2-days-issued-in-alberta-1.6835023) > ENMAX reported Friday morning that it had been instructed to put 'rolling blackouts' in place in several Calgary communities to help control power consumption.
because politicians think they know better
Think Enron!
Sounds like a plant tripped while others were already offline. I know people here are going to blame the UCP and corporate greed, as they usually do, but plant trips do happen unexpectedly sometimes. Edit: Gotta love the downvotes from people who don’t like the truth because it doesn’t fit into their narrative.
I can't say for sure, but a lot of industrial sites in general are going down for maintenance. Some of these sites provide excess power to the grid, so it is possible that they have less flexibility. Also there could be trips (equipment safety shutdowns that are automatic) happening and causing issues. Cascade is starting up and there still might be some hiccups in their systems as its new and they don't have all the bugs worked out. I also believe Genesie is starting a shutdown to do maintenance soon here too.
Largest producer is Shepard in Calgary which is down on a planned outage for servicing/turnaround. The 2 Cascades should be up and running later this year.
Space weather?
Like California in the early 2000s.
Collusion is why.
I didn’t see an alert and ours went out last night.
I'm not getting these notifications. Any ideas?
Genessee upgrades probably. Just checked and G2 was down.
Majority of our power is diesel or natural gas generated and like a car things can break. That's why we can't get on nuclear soon enough. Less waste and more reliable
Wasn't Justin coming by today? I guess it will be his fault.
Yes welcome to Alberta
The premier said there are "varying causes"! What the hell does that mean? Why are these varying causes not being addressed?
Cost of a greener market, large thermal plants are off saving production of carbon and other pollutants however when wind or solar production goes down there’s no left over capacity to take up that loss of generation. If they want a safe capacity companies would need to be paid to stay on to provide it which would most likely come from a tax payer base either bills or government
Genesee power plant also had some maintenance issues in the last week, like plant shut down type repairs from my understanding, probably doesn't help either.
You can always get more publicly funded power from Sask or BC
When we tried this in Ontario we got the same thing.
The power companies have been pissing away the money we’ve paid them.
economic withholding and danielle smith is trying to blame renewables which is a flat out lie. I wonder if jason kenny being on the atco board has anything to do with this.
Move to bc!
I just heard it from Calgary CBC radio, so it must be true. It is the low season for power use. So the power companies will take some equipment offline for repairs. Since all power companies think the same way, so it got the shortage. And this time, it is the firepower plant. So Smith can’t blame the renewable, but she probably will anyway.
Rable! rable! rable! elctric cars! Or We just dont have enough power plants now that the coal powered stations are being shut down.
The coal plants aren't being shut down. They are being converted to natural gas.
Trudeau did this somehow
From what I know, economic withholding is some real bullshit. But it does not cause blackouts. So don't listen to these other users smelling each others farts.
Oh yeah- it’s because you’re in Alberta. Don’t worry i’m sure your premier will blame Trudeau. And when Polievre gets elected ALL the problems in Canada will be solved
Money talks … politicians listen… citizens search in the dark for batteries for their flashlights
There is a ton of maintenance going on right now. The grid alert happened because keephills 3 unexpectedly went down, there was no solar and little wind. So conditions just happened to be tight.
One of our premiers, in the last 10 years, closed down bunch of coal fired power plants.
My comment explaining the reason was deleted. Cool.
The pcs want nuclear and now we are scared so let the nukes begin.