Brian Zinchuk is editor and owner of Pipeline Online
Alberta publicly puts out 3054x more data on its grid each day than SaskPower does. At least it used to. Now it’s 23,963x
Alberta wind power generation fell to less than one per cent of capacity, again, the afternoon of Wednesday, Nov. 20.
Pipeline Online was able to get a screen capture of wind output falling as low as 44 megawatts as of 3:16 p.m., MST, although it was reportedly substantially lower than that a little earlier.
This is the re-jiggered summary generation in Alberta, as of 3:16 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 21. MC is maximum capacity in megawatts, TNG is total net to grid, and DCR is dispatched and accepted contingency reserve. AESO
That’s according to minute-by-minute data from the Alberta Electric System Operator, which you can follow here.
That 44 megawatts is 0.8 per cent, or eight one-thousandths, of the 5,340 megawatts of installed grid-scale capacity across 48 windfarms costing collectively billions of dollars.
This is a frequent occurrence that Pipeline Online has reported on dozens of times over the last three years, which you can find here.
For perspective, the Kipling, Saskatchewan, located Bekevar Wind Facility, at 200 megawatts nameplate capacity, cost in excess of $300 million. It just went online on Nov. 15, when Pipeline Online found it producing zero power for two hours as no turbines were turning during that time.
And that’s also what happened across all of Alberta’s 48 wind farms that same evening, with zero output recorded from those 48 wind farms. Step forward to Nov. 20, and 36 of the 48 wind farms in Alberta were registering zero output at 3:16 p.m.
And even though it was still mid-afternoon, solar output had also tapered off substantially. The 1,812 megawatts of installed grid-scale solar capacity was putting out just 87 megawatts, or 4.8 per cent capacity.
Oh, and that 48 wind farms will be 49 as of Nov. 21, as the 136 megawatt Winnifred Wind Project LP will be connected to the grid. That will bring total wind capacity to 5,476 megawatts nameplate capacity.
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Interties
The low wind conditions, combined with the sun going down and the advent of winter had a notable impact on pool power prices in Alberta. That evening, the price per megawatt hit $781.62 per megawatt during the 5 p.m. hour, and was $773.85 an hour later. The province was pulling in 467 megawatts at 6:18 p.m. from British Columbia and Montana.
So while power producers in BC and Montana were cashing in on the cha-ching of high power prices sold into Alberta, Saskatchewan, could not partake. That’s because the sole intertie connecting Wild Rose Country to the Land of Living Skies is down for maintenance until May except in emergency situations.
AESO said on their website on Nov. 13:
ATCO Electric has informed the AESO that the McNeill converter station has suffered a component failure and is recommending that, except under emergency situations, McNeill not be utilized for energy flow until repairs can be completed. As such, the AB-SK intertie ATC will be posted as zero for both import and export during this period. The expected schedule for this operating condition is below. Please note that the schedule is subject to change as repairs are progressed.
- Dec 2, 2024 (12:00 pm): McNeill available for emergency energy use only
- May 5, 2025 (12:00 pm): McNeill returned to normal operation
Further, ATCO Electric will be performing tests of the McNeill converter station on Dec 3rd that will affect the import (SK to AB) and export (AB to SK) flows on the Alberta – Saskatchewan intertie. The expected testing plan is given below but is subject to change as repairs are progressed. Please note that energy flows during the testing periods may be variable and change unexpectedly and the volumes given are meant to represent an expected range.
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Dec 3, 2024 (10:00 to 11:00): 50 MW AB to SK
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Dec 3, 2024 (11:00 to 12:00): 50 MW SK to AB
That means this winter, if Alberta should end up in grid alerts and multiple power shortage crises, as it did last winter, Saskatchewan and SaskPower’s ability to respond may be limited. Last year it able to come to the rescue with 150 megawatts of power, although that, in itself was a stretch, as the temporary limits that had been imposed on the intertie were superseded on an emergency basis. The intertie’s capacity had been reduced during that time.
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Price spikes
The spike in pool prices is significant, as well, as situations like, when demand is high but renewable power is essentially off the table tend to see prices spike, often to the upper limit of $999.99 per megawatt-hour. However, one of the proposed reforms to the Alberta grid would be the expansion of those limits, from -$100 to +$3000 per megawatt-hour. That means that if the price were to limit up, it could very well triple the current limit. And limit-ups have been a common, if infrequent, occurrence on the Alberta grid. The integral under that graph, which adds up to what power consumers pay, could be substantial in just a short period of time.
As a side note, in recent days, the AESO minute-by-minute report has been re-jiggered. Formerly all natural gas generation was combined under one heading in the overall generation report. That has since been broken up into three subgroups – cogeneration, combined cycle and gas-fired steam. The last one is the group of former coal-fired power stations that have been converted to natural gas-fired. The list was revised to reflect the removal of the last vestiges of coal-fired power from the Alberta grid. Coal and “dual fuel” (coal and natural gas) are no off the report.
Finally, the listing was sorted by descending order of maximum capacity. And this was revealing, as the wind category is now a close second to cogeneration from natural gas, coming in at 5,340 megawatts after cogen’s 6,090 megawatts. The contrast, however, could not be more stark. At that moment on Wednesday afternoon, cogen was producing at 73.2 per cent capacity, while, as noted above, wind was at 0.8 per cent capacity.
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Hi fidelity data in Alberta vs low fidelity in Saskatchewan
In contrast to the high fidelity of Alberta’s publicly available grid data, since September of 2022, SaskPower publishes 24 hour averages of each class of power generation in Saskatchewan. That information is delayed by two days, and posted at midnight. SaskPower, as a closed market which participates in sales and purchases of power to other markets, delays this data so as to not show its hand in those market dealings.
Those 24 hour averages indicate the average power, in megawatts, per class, and the percentage of total generation. The classes are hydro, wind, solar, natural gas, coal, and “other.” Every five minutes, the total grid system load is published here. A daily log of all this information is posted by X account @SkElectricity.
The distinction in publicly available data between Alberta and Saskatchewan is massive, literally several orders of magnitude. In one singular day, Alberta puts out:
(219 generating stations x 3 parameters + 3 interchanges x 1 parameter + 7 summary points x 1 parameter) x 60 minutes/hour x 24 hours/day = 934,560 data points per day.
That does not include hourly pricing, renewable energy forecasts, supply adequacy, outage and system log information, none of which are available from SaskPower except for outages.
For generation data, SaskPower puts out:
6 classes of generation x 2 data points per day + 3 system points + 12 system load outputs/hour x 24 hours/day = 306 data points per day.
934560 Alberta data points / 306 Saskatchewan data points = 3,054.1: 1 ratio
In other words, each day Alberta publicly publishes 3,054.1 times as much data as Saskatchewan, or greater than three orders of magnitude more data than Saskatchewan.
UPDATE: X account @SkElectricity informed Pipeline Online that in April, 2023, SaskPower reduced its system load updates from every five minutes to once per hour. That means 306 data points per day is the former number. It’s now 39 data points per day, meaning the ratio is now 23,963:1, or four orders of magnitude.
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