Can solar power essentially flatline for a whole day? It did in Alberta on Monday

Brian Zinchuk

Brian Zinchuk is editor and owner of Pipeline Online

It was flatlines across the board for all of Alberta’s solar facilities on Monday. Don’t be fooled by the peak seen on the Travers graph – it’s peak of 51 megawatts was just 10.9 per cent of the facility’s rated capacity. Dispatcho.app

Just because the sun comes up in the morning, it does not mean its going to produce much in the way of usable solar power.

Winter weather blew through Alberta on Monday, Oct. 23, and with it came increased need for power, but decreased capacity to produce it – through solar panels, anyways.

Despite having 1,292 megawatts of installed solar power, Alberta saw less than one-thirteenth of that throughout the whole day, and of course, none when the sun went down.

The Travers Solar Project in Vulcan County was touted by Alberta Energy Minister Brian Jean on Friday, Oct. 20 as the largest in Canada. It has a nameplate capacity of 465 megawatts, and frequently hits that number on sunny days. But that solar facility maxed out at 51 megawatts at 1:16 p.m., according to Dispatcho.app, which logs data from the Alberta Electric System Operator. That’s 10.9 per cent of its capacity. And most of the day, its output was much lower than that.

As for the 35 other solar farms in Alberta besides Travers, which is in a class of its own, not one solar farm produced more than 7 megawatts the entire day. Indeed, only one made it to 7 megawatts. Most of the larger facilities topped out at 5.

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X bot account @ReliableAB provides hourly snapshots of the Alberta electrical grid generation. And while it is possible that solar generation briefly spiked, the highest hourly sample recorded was 93 megawatts, at 12:39 p.m. That time is corresponds within 38 minutes of the Travers peak. That means at 12:39 p.m., during the noon hour when the sun is highest, Alberta’s solar generation topped out at 7.2 per cent of nameplate capacity.

However, at the same time, Alberta’s two remaining coal generators were operating at 98.5 per cent capacity, producing 808 megawatts out of 820 nameplate capacity. That one remaining coal facility was producing more than 8x the entire fleet of 36 solar farms were at their mid-day peak.

For context, the federal government, through its Clean Electricity Regulations, is pushing the implementation of non-emitting power generation, especially wind and solar. Those regulations would see unabated natural gas power generation prohibited by 2035, allowed to operate only if extremely efficient and costly carbon capture is implemented. Without carbon capture, natural gas power generation would only be allowed to operated for 450 hours per year, an allotment Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has said would be used up before the end of January.

SaskPower is on course to add another 3,000 megawatts of wind and solar projects by 2035, to be built and operated by independent power producers.

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• 0059 Southeast College Heavy Equipment Operator
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• 0058 Royal Helium Steveville opens anonymous rocket
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• 9002 Pipeline Online 30 sec EBEX
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• 0055 Smart Power Be Smart with your Power office
  0055 Smart Power Be Smart with your Power office
• 0015 Latus Viro
  0015 Latus Viro
• 0052 Predator Inspections
  0052 Predator Inspections
• 0051 JML Hiring Pumpjack assembly
  0051 JML Hiring Pumpjack assembly
• 0049 Scotsburn Dental soft guitar
  0049 Scotsburn Dental soft guitar
• 0046 City of Estevan This is Estevan
  0046 City of Estevan This is Estevan
• 0043 ALX ten sizes
  0043 ALX ten sizes
• 0039 Summit ESP Saskatchewan lower third
  0039 Summit ESP Saskatchewan lower third
• 0041 DEEP Since 2018 now we are going to build
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• 0032 IWS Summer hiring rock trailer music
• 0022 Grimes winter hiring
• 0021 OSY Rentals S8 Promo
• 0018 IWS Hiring Royal Summer
• 0013 Panther Drilling PO ad 03 top drive rigs
• 0011
• 0006 JK Junior
• 9001
• 0002