Brian Zinchuk: Too much wind, not enough wind? What’s going on in Alberta?

If you really want to bore yourself, periodically check out the Alberta Electric System Operator (AESO) AIES Event Log, found here.

It lets grid operators, and the world, know when things occur that impact the Alberta grid, like a natural gas unit tripping off, or coming back on. It also notes “grid alerts,” when the Alberta grid is in peril of going into rotating blackouts due to not enough power to meet the demand.

Generally speaking, there’s not much going on in the event log. But the last week, that hasn’t been the case. It hasn’t been boring, that’s for sure.

Right now Alberta’s interties to both British Columbia and Montana are down for maintenance, and will be into October. That makes sense, as this is the “shoulder season,” where demand is not expected to peak due to extreme cold or extreme heat. But the result is that, except for its relatively small intertie with SaskPower to the east, the Alberta grid is largely “islanded,” as in on its own.

I’ve been learning in recent days those interties are very important in keeping a grid’s frequency stable. North American electrical grids operate on a very precise 60.0 Hertz, or cycles per second. Not 59.9, not 60.1 Hz, but 60.0. Every generator on the system must be within sync of the grid’s frequency, or bad things start to happen. As such, key components of the grid, like generators, will trip off and separate themselves from the grid to protect themselves if the frequency varies too much for too long.

It is absolutely crucial that the grid frequency stay within a very narrow band around 60 hertz. If the grid frequency falls substantially outside of those parameters of ±0.5%, from 59.7 hertz to 60.3 hertz for a 60 hertz grid, then whole generators and plants start tripping off, leading to cascading failures and blackouts.

That’s precisely what happened on Feb. 15, 2021, when the historic blackout hit Texas for several days, leading to hundreds of deaths. At that time, ERCOT’s frequency fell below 59.4 hertz for four minutes, 27 seconds. If it had remained below that level for an additional four minutes and 37 seconds, most of the grid would have gone down.

And it would have taken weeks to bring that grid fully back online. As bad as it was, over 300 people in Texas died in that event, so this is not to be taken lightly. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith referenced this while speaking at the Lloydminster Heavy Oil Show on Sept. 11.

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What’s going on?

So what’s been going on in Alberta? Well, compared to both hot days in summer and extreme cold in winter, electrical demand has been relatively low, in the 9,500 to 10,500 megawatts range, but as low as 8,600 megawatts at night on the weekend.

What has been happening is a lot of wind power has been generated. Now, you would think that’s a great thing, right? Wind and solar during the day have been adding up to about a third of Alberta generation. Most would celebrate this.

But not if you actually generate power, including from wind and solar. Because for many hours of the day, for the better part of the week, the hourly price of power in Alberta has been zero. As in, you could get a megawatt-hour of power, enough to power 1,000 homes, for less than the price of a Timbit, because you have to pay at least something for a Timbit. Actually you can get a lot more than that – for less than a Timbit. The pool price for all the generation in the province, around 10,000 megawatts worth, was less than a Timbit.

As a result, the alert log has had frequent postings of “Supply Surplus in effect; restatements to reduce zero dollar block volume are now permitted within the T-2 timeframe.” It’s happened 10 times over the last seven days, and counting.

What that means is that generators can cut off their supply to the grid to reduce the amount of power being offered at zero dollars per megawatt. As a result, as I write this mid-afternoon on Sunday, Sept. 29, 13 of 48 grid-scale wind farms and 11of 43 grid-scale solar farms are contributing zero megawatts to the grid, despite it being both sunny and windy. A quick look at Windy.com shows ample wind throughout the wind producing areas of southern Alberta.

Now, normally, when there’s a lot of surplus power, Alberta sells (Gives? Dumps?) it into its neighbouring jurisdictions. Montana will often take a few hundred megawatts. I’ve seen British Columbia take around 900, and Saskatchewan max out at around 150 megawatts, its intertie capacity. For those neighbours, it’s a great deal. The price is usually very low in these instances, often “free,” as in zero. At the moment I type this, SaskPower is taking in 149 megawatts, or, as the Crown corporation likes to tell us, the equivalent of 149,000 homes, again, for less than a Timbit.

Good deal for us prairie chickens in Saskatchewan, I guess. For 11 hours today, alone, the AESO pool price has been zero. It was that for around 18 hours yesterday, and that pattern’s been going on for about a week now.

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With two of those three interties down, Alberta can’t sell (give) any more to its neighbours. So with the “supply surplus” the wind and solar farms are shutting down instead. Seven of the largest natural gas units are also shut down, but you can bet a good number of those are likely on maintenance shutdowns in the “shoulder season.” And nearly all the simple cycle natural gas fire power, usually used for “peaking,” have also been shut down.

Here are the event log posts from the evening of Sept. 27 to the afternoon of Sept. 29. Pay particular attention to the frequency deviations, something I’ve never seen before, such as “Frequency deviation to 59.53 due to loss of generation” and “Frequency deviation to 59.808 due to sudden variability of renewables.”

 

Date/Time	Comments
09/29/2024 10:29	Supply Surplus in effect; restatements to increase export interchange transactions are now permitted within the T-2 timeframe
09/29/2024 10:29	Supply Surplus in effect; restatements to reduce zero dollar block volume are now permitted within the T-2 timeframe.
09/29/2024 08:07	Supply Surplus is no longer in effect. Restatements to increase export interchange transactions within the T-2 timeframe are no longer permitted
09/29/2024 08:07	Frequency deviation to 59.86 due to sudden variability of renewables.
09/29/2024 08:07	Supply Surplus is no longer in effect. Restatements to reduce zero dollar block volumes within the T-2 timeframe are no longer permitted
09/29/2024 07:43	Supply Surplus in effect; restatements to increase export interchange transactions are now permitted within the T-2 timeframe
09/29/2024 07:43	Supply Surplus in effect; restatements to reduce zero dollar block volume are now permitted within the T-2 timeframe.
09/29/2024 05:47	Supply Surplus is no longer in effect. Restatements to reduce zero dollar block volumes within the T-2 timeframe are no longer permitted
09/29/2024 05:47	Supply Surplus is no longer in effect. Restatements to increase export interchange transactions within the T-2 timeframe are no longer permitted
09/28/2024 23:47	Supply Surplus in effect; restatements to increase export interchange transactions are now permitted within the T-2 timeframe
09/28/2024 23:47	Supply Surplus in effect; restatements to reduce zero dollar block volume are now permitted within the T-2 timeframe.
09/28/2024 21:00	Cascade 1 online.
09/28/2024 19:54	Frequency deviation to 59.53 due to loss of generation.
09/28/2024 19:53	Cascade 1 offline.
09/28/2024 17:24	Frequency deviation to 59.84 due to sudden variability of renewables.
09/28/2024 10:57	Frequency deviation to 59.808 due to sudden variability of renewables
09/28/2024 10:09	Frequency deviation to 59.843 due to sudden variability of renewables.
09/28/2024 00:16	Frequency deviation to 59.84HZ internal to AIES.
09/28/2024 00:06	Sheerness 1 on line.
09/27/2024 23:32	Frequency deviation to 59.88HZ internal to AIES.
09/27/2024 18:33	Supply Surplus is no longer in effect. Restatements to increase export interchange transactions within the T-2 time frame are no longer permitted.
09/27/2024 18:32	Supply Surplus is no longer in effect. Restatements to reduce zero dollar block volumes within the T-2 time frame are no longer permitted.
09/27/2024 18:00	Frequency deviation to 59.83HZ internal to AIES.

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Balancing act

It turns out having interties plays a big part in keeping a grid balanced. As one person with a career in electrical and automation told me on LinkedIn about Alberta’s interties, “It’s about the basically limitless capacity on the other side of it, instantaneously it’s considered infinite.”

So a large part of the issues with the Alberta grid over the last week appear to have everything to do with those two interties being down. Fair enough.

But there’s more

I keep seeing correlations between grid instability and the increasing reliance on wind and solar, but particularly wind. One person took me to task on this on Facebook, saying, “Every other post from you has been wind and solar doesn’t work and they’re a big waste of money. Now you’re arguing wind and solar are too efficient and the cheap electricity they generate is bad.”

And he has a point. But so do I.

As I am finding out, wind and solar are problematic in many ways. When they don’t work, they don’t work (every night for solar, calm, cold or hot days for wind).

But I’m also seeing that, on occasions, when they do work, even at half capacity, it’s causing multiple problems. One of which is its destroying the price point so not only do the solar and wind operators not get paid for their power, but no one else does, either. As I keep repeating, the problem with no one getting paid is no one is getting paid.

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This was sort of brushed off by AESO in my discussion with them a month ago. I was told, “A single day doesn’t make up the entire revenue stream of your organization. You have a whole year longer term horizon to make back money, and the Alberta price fluctuates. And so, in some instances it drops down below pricing, like we saw on Saturday, and some instances it goes to our price cap, which is a $999.”

Okay, but we’re now getting to the better part of a week with zero dollar hours making up much of the day, and many hours of minimal pricing besides that.

 

Wind and solar could be paid in private arrangements or carbon credits through bilateral agreements. This excerpt comes from an interview I did with the AESO in late August with Alberta Electric System Operator’s Ryan Scholefield, manager for load forecasting and market analytics, by Teams meeting on Aug. 28.:

Are there some generators getting paid in some other manner during these periods, such as carbon credits, tax credits or some other form of remuneration? Scholefield said, “Within our deregulated structure, it does allow bilateral contracts, and we do observe some of that.

“I think I kind of alluded to some examples where there are some industrial processes that require the heat, and value the heat probably a little more than the power, and they see power as a byproduct. Cogen is one example.”

He continued, “There are carbon prices, like carbon credits, that can be achieved. So even by producing a megawatt, they still technically receive the tier credit, and that can be monetized as well.

“So there can be, within the deregulator framework, (companies) can create bilateral contracts. There’s also a forward market, where any participant can hedge their power production forward. They kind of accept a price, a positive price, for the next X amount of time they’re willing to sign up for, and then they would settle that outside the market.

“So, from the AESO perspective, in those zero dollar hours, we wouldn’t pay any money. But that’s not to say that participants wouldn’t receive money from an arrangement they may have outside.”

 

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So in the past month I’ve been seeing zero dollar hours happening as low as 32 per cent output for wind but generally around 50 per cent. And from what I’ve seen at least for this time of year, in 2024, when wind exceeds 50 per cent, a supply surplus is declared and multiple wind farms – I’ve seen over 10 at a time, reduce their output to zero. As in, they would collectively make wind probably around 70 per cent total output, but the grid can’t hack it. And today, again, wind is too high, even at 32 per cent. (Almost every simple cycle natural gas plant, used for peaking generation, is at zero.) It’s too much wind for the grid, and the price is zero.

How long can McDonalds sell Big Macs for zero? No business model can sustain that for long. It’s been happening for about a week now, almost every day.

And I noted “in 2024” for a reason. Never before has Alberta had so much wind and solar on its grid. And it’s growing.

How much is too much?

I must point out that the proportion of wind and solar generation, but particularly wind, on the Alberta grid has grown tremendously for the last nearly three years since I wrote my first wind story on Dec. 30, 2021. Both have effectively doubled. New facilities are being added continuously. And as stated above, this Sunday afternoon, wind solar and a smidgeon of hydro were accounting for about a third of Alberta generation.

What happens when even more wind and solar are added as even more of these facilities come online, bidding zero dollars for their power generation (as they commonly do) and then taking whatever the market settles at? We’ve seen this week, even this day, the Alberta grid at times simply cannot take even 70 per cent of fleet capacity. Maybe in winter, or mid summer, it could. But it can’t right now, especially without the interties to dump surplus power.

The supposedly more enlightened would say, “Simply shut down more gas-fired generation, dummy!”

To which I say, then why, in the last 28 hours, have we seen four notices reading “Frequency deviation to 59.84 due to sudden variability of renewables”? If it wasn’t significant, why is AESO posting notices about it? If half the power in Alberta was coming from wind and solar, and sudden variability caused even greater swings in frequency, would that be a good thing?

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Conclusions

After 33 months of close observations of what’s happening to the Alberta grid, its become abundantly clear that the increasing reliance on unreliable, intermittent wind and solar have caused crazy price fluctuations, from limit up ($999.99 per megawatt hour) to limit down (zero dollars). When they fail, as they do, frequently, the grid is in peril and prices max out. And when there’s too much on the grid, it’s way too much, meaning that we’ll likely rarely, if ever, see the fleet used anywhere close to its supposed nameplate capacity. And now, in recent days, we’re seeing frequency issues raise their head too as a result of renewables, threatening the grid in yet another way.

Also, this week’s issues are also tied to the limited interties. In each direction, Alberta has one intertie to British Columbia, Montana and Saskatchewan. If there were two interties going in each direction, the redundancy would likely alleviate many of these issues.

Ask yourself this: who is going to build any massive new power generating facility, be it natural gas or nuclear, if the price keeps going to zero for longer and longer durations? Who would risk it?

Increased reliance of the Alberta grid on wind and solar is pushing the limits of reliability. Those are limits we don’t want to cross, because lives will be at stake.

 

Brian Zinchuk is editor and owner of Pipeline Online. He can be reached at brian.zinchuk@pipelineonline.ca.

 

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