Alberta wind power generation took a holiday on Labour Day

Sep 1, 2025

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These high voltage transmission lines on the south end of Edmonton stood against a smoky sky on Labour Day, Sept. 1, 2025. Photo by Brian Zinchuk

EDMONTON – Alberta’s wind laboured little on Labour Day.

Throughout the day, wind output from the 1722 wind turbines (at last count) totalling 5,688 megawatts of total generation capacity hovered around the 1 per cent output mark, ranging from 1.9 to 0.8 per cent.

According to X account @ReliableAB, which logs minute-by-minute data from the Alberta Electric System Operator, at 4:59 a.m., wind output fell to 108 megawatts, or 1.9 per cent. It would remain at that level or lower for most of the day. As it was still dark out, solar output at the time was nil. At that moment, 93.4 per cent of Alberta’s power generation came from natural gas.

For 13 hours, wind output remained at 1.9 per cent or lower, falling as low as 45 megawatts or 0.8 per cent capacity,

Here’s those 13 hours in a table:

Time Output (MW) Total Capacity (5688 MW) % Output
4:59 108 5688 1.9
5:59 103 5688 1.8
6:59 106 5688 1.9
7:59 79 5688 1.4
8:59 62 5688 1.1
9:59 46 5688 0.8
10:59 45 5688 0.8
11:59 55 5688 1.0
12:59 86 5688 1.5
13:59 86 5688 1.5
14:59 85 5688 1.5
15:59 50 5688 0.8
16:59 55 5688 1.0

And here they are as a graph, compared to capacity. The blue portion on the bottom represents the output, whereas the orange is the total capacity. If you can’t see much blue its because that output fell to as low as 0.8 per cent. In other words, the orange is all the capacity that did not show up to work on Labour Day, so to speak.

 

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So why is this significant? When wind power generation is ample, it is indeed cheap. But as has been evidenced repeatedly over the last two weeks in Alberta, it frequently falls below 2 per cent output, and even fell to 0.1 per cent briefly. (Pipeline Online has reported numerous times where it has fallen to zero output across the entire grid-scale wind fleet.) The federal Clean Electricity Regulations are still very much on the books and seek to eliminate natural gas and coal-fired power generation in Canada. And without natural gas providing 93.4 per cent of its power, nearly alll of Alberta would have literally been in the dark on Labour Day.

And those same regulations apply to Saskatchewan, which has openly said it will rejuvenate its coal fleet instead of shutting it down in four years, three months and 27 days, as federal coal regulations require.

As noted in this excerpt from Aug. 26 when Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe attended a barbecue in Estevan to celebrate the rebirth of coal:

Pipeline Online:

So you know, what do you say to that sort of thing, when people are such the Saskatchewan Environmental Society are saying we have to shut down coal and use wind, but you couldn’t power the corridor that you were speaking at with the entire Alberta wind fleet.

Scott Moe:

Oh, there isn’t enough wind mills, and there isn’t enough batteries to make it viable or even work, to provide reliable power. And if there was, they could provide it for 36 hours.

It just doesn’t work. It’s not sensible and it’s not realistic. So, and I would say that when it comes to what are, essentially, ideological or, to some degree, frivolous lawsuits, simply because you don’t like nuclear, you don’t like coal-fired power, you don’t like natural gas. We need to have power of some sort, and wind, and wind associated with batteries simply isn’t going to do it.

So we’re having a realistic discussion that is the best interest of the folks with IBEW and all of the folks that work with SaskPower here today. We’re having a realistic discussion that’s going to provide Saskatchewan families and our industries with reliable and affordable power for years into the future, and we’re going to continue to have just that realistic discussion on how we provide power for the next number of years, but also how we’re going to provide it for the next number of decades, and what that power is going to be used for. We’re going to need more in years ahead than we have today. So it’s going to be an exciting discussion to have.

The basis of it all, and the you know that what really gives us a core position of strength is to remain producing power the way we are today, to not transition power generation sources out early, and that’s what we’re going to do.

 

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