Brian Zinchuk is editor and owner of Pipeline Online
That’s because you have to pay at least something for a Timbit. The pool price has been zero
Imagine you own a McDonalds in Alberta. Burger King across the street has a surplus of beef right now, so they are flooding the market with Whoppers priced at precisely zero dollars. And they’ve been doing this for 34 hours. How many hours, or days, will you tolerate this condition before you’re not very happy? After all, the problem with no one making money is no one is making money.
Your Burger King competitor is making zero dollars. So is the Dairy Queen down the block. And the Tim’s. You, clearly, are making no money, because either you’re not selling your product, or you are forced to give it away for free, because the Burger King is doing just that.
It may be good for the consumers, for now, but if your business case, and that of Dairy Queen, and indeed even the Burger King, is destroyed by giving away a product with intrinsic value for nothing, how will you or your competitors stay in business? You, and the Dairy Queen, and the Tims, and even the Burger King, still have to pay for your staff, your supplies, capital costs, taxes, bank loans, utilities and yes, even your power bills. But now you have zero income coming in the door.
And how will consumers benefit when multiple restaurants decide they’ve had enough of this, and close their doors, since you can’t make money at zero dollar pricing?
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This analogy is very much the case with Alberta power markets on May 30-June 1. According to the Alberta Electric System Operator, the pool price for power generated in that province has been precisely zero dollars for at least 34 hours as of 9 a.m. Monday, June 1. Except for cases of special deals between power generators and buyers, the entire province of Alberta saw the total amount of money collected for power generated to be less than one, singular Timbit. That’s for the price paid for power across a province the size of Germany, with every school, business, pumpjack, home and street light included.
As of 10 a.m. on Monday, June 1, the pool price for power in Alberta has been precisely $0 for the previous 34 hours. This chart shows the previous 24 hours flatlined. Alberta Electric System Operator
As of 9 a.m. on June 1, the AESO reported $0.00 per megawatt-hour for the pool price. It has been flatlined at that since at least 11 p.m. on Saturday, May 30, a period of 34 hours. According to X account @ReliableAB, which logs hourly reports on the AESO, the pool price has either indicated $0 or “no data,” which generally correlates to zero whenever that happens. So for a period of at 34 hours, the entire electrical grid in Alberta has been paying its generators zero dollars per megawatt hour. At 10 a.m. on June 1, the pool price rose to $5.23 per megawatt-hour.
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What factor has the biggest impact? Wind output.
You see, wind and solar routinely bid into the market at zero dollars per megawatt-hour, a rate which no business can sustainably maintain any business model. Yet they do so anyhow, and as a result they flatline the price when there is surplus wind and/or solar. Wind has by far the most impact. And it was also the largest variable over this time period.
Even though wind output was nowhere near capacity, it turns out that with wind output in the 50s percentage, day or night (when solar produces nothing), it is still enough surplus to zero out prices. For the 32 hour period, wind hovered between 45.6 and 60.7 per cent output, or 2583 to 3449 megawatts out of a total of 5684 megawatts of grid-scale capacity on the Alberta grid.
In Saskatchewan, wind and solar producers are considered “independent power producers” and are paid a fixed rate for power, but only when they produce it. As a regulated market under SaskPower, there is no open market pool price for Alberta. SaskPower routinely buys power from Alberta when the price is zero (or rather, freely accepts free power). But there have again been issues with the McNeill Station of late which allows power to cross the border at our one intertie, and thus that’s likely why the interchange over this period stayed at zero megawatts.
Ironically, Alberta was also importing small amounts of power from both Montana and British Columbia for most of that time, at zero dollars, indicating they, too had surpluses, since they weren’t getting paid for any power sent to Alberta.
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