Brian Zinchuk is editor and owner of Pipeline Online
Wind turbines near Drumheller. Photo by Katrina Zinchuk
The Alberta Electric System Operator’s minute-by-minute reporting of the Alberta electrical grid showed that, once again, Alberta’s wind power generation output has fallen below 1 per cent capacity.
X account @ReliableAB provides hourly logs of the data. At 10:38 a.m. on Sunday, Sept. 8, wind output was 44 megawatts out of a nameplate capacity of 5,214 megawatts. That’s 0.8 per cent, or eight one-thousandths of capacity. And it remained close to that level for several hours.
A few minutes after that, Pipeline Online observed on the AESO site that 27 of 47 wind facilities in Alberta were producing zero power. Only one, Forty Mile Granlea was producing as much as five megawatts, and its capacity was 200.
At this moment 82.1% of Alberta's electricity is being produced by fossil fuels. Wind is at 0.8% of capacity and producing 0.4% of total generation, while solar is at 79.7% of capacity and producing 13.23% of total generation. At the same time we are exporting 449 MW pic.twitter.com/QWeEQOdKfP
— Reliable AB Energy (@ReliableAB) September 8, 2024
For fourteen hours until the time of writing late Sunday night, wind output did not exceed 5 per cent, according to the hourly log. While it may have come above that level in the intervening time, the hourly samples were consistent throughout the day.
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While the wind failed to blow, solar didn’t suck on that day. When wind was 44 megawatts, solar was 1,326, or 79.7 per cent of the nameplate capacity of 1,663 megawatts. And at that moment, natural gas was supplying 82.1 per cent of Alberta’s power.
That’s significant, because the proposed federal Clean Electricity Regulations would have natural gas power eliminated by 2035 unless expensive carbon capture units (which use about one quarter or more of the generating unit’s power to operated) are installed on each unit. Those without carbon capture would only be allowed to operate a maximum of 450 hours a year, which wouldn’t make it past January 19.
And put in context, Alberta’s 5,214 megawatts of nameplate wind capacity is just a 131 megawatts shy of the entire Saskatchewan power grid, if every single coal, gas, hydro, cogen, wind, biomass, waste heat and solar facility was putting out its maximum at the same time, something which has never happened.
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