Alberta’s wind power flatlines again this week, hitting 1 megawatt out of a capacity of 4748

At 11:38 a.m. on Tuesday, July 16, Alberta’s electrical grid saw wind power production fall to zero out of a maximum capacity of 4,748 megawatts. And it pretty much did the same thing, around the same time, on Friday, July 19.

X account @ReliableAB, which provides hourly logs of data provided by the Alberta Electric System Operator, recorded wind output at one megawatt at 10:38 a.m. Click the image in the X post to see the whole grid output.

Pipeline Online observed output of two megawatts at 11:28 a.m. At that moment, 44 of Alberta’s 45 wind farms, collectively costing billions of dollars, weren’t producing enough power to microwave your cold coffee.

There are 1,568 grid-scale wind turbines in Alberta.

That one megawatt at 10:38 a.m. reflected 0.02 per cent of nameplate capacity, or two ten-thousandths of capacity.

Two gen sets of this size could have produced the same amount of power as the entire Alberta wind fleet at that time:

Friday’s weather was dominated by heat warnings throughout nearly all of Alberta and much of Saskatchewan. Those warnings extended into large portions of British Columbia and Manitoba, and even into the Northwest Territories.

This is happening as Alberta’s grid is just 478 megawatts shy of summer peak records, established on July 17, having just broken the July 10 record. July 17 saw a peak of 12,219 megawatts.

At 12:16 p.m., Alberta’s wind was producing 9 megawatts, but demand was 11,741. The province was importing 527 megawatts from its neighbours.

 

Editor’s note: Edmonton Sun columnist Lorne Gunter quoted the Pipeline Online story regarding wind’s failure in Alberta on July 16 in his July 19 column.