Brian Zinchuk is editor and owner of Pipeline Online
Wind turbines near Pincher Creek, Alberta. Photo by Brian Zinchuk
Yet again on Jan. 5, wind power in Alberta flatlined, with just 27 megawatts being produced out of a maximum capacity of 5,688 megawatts.
That was at 11:53 a.m., according to minute-by-minute data published by the Alberta Electric System Operator (AESO, which can be followed here.
Those 27 megawatts were just 0.5 per cent of the nameplate capacity of a total of 50 wind farms costing collectively many billions of dollars.
Alberta power generation at 11:53 a.m. on Sunday, Jan. 5. MC is maximum capacity, in megawatts. TNG is total net to grid. DCR is dispatched and accepted contingency reserve. AESO
And since it was the noon hour, again, solar in Alberta was having a tough day, outputting just 228 out of 1,812 megawatts capacity, or 12.6 per cent.
Dispatcho.app
At that moment, Travers Solar Facility in Vulcan County, Canada’s largest, was producing 45 megawatts out of a capacity of 465 megawatts. If you think that’s exceptionally low, it’s not for this time of year. Looking at the last two years of data from AESO, as recorded by Dispatcho.app found here, you see that during December and January Travers routinely dips substantially. And looking closer at the last six months, with the fidelity to show daily output, more trends arise. The high points show that Travers does indeed often reach its maximum capacity during the day in the summer months, but during the winter, it’s an entirely different story. When shown on the same scale compared to July, early January output hardly registers.
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Natural gas comes to dominate Saskatchewan’s power
Over in Saskatchewan, it’s widely known that if you want to know what the weather will be like today, look at what it was in Alberta the day before. According to SaskPower’s Where Your Power Comes From webpage, the data from Jan. 3 showed exactly that. As Pipeline Online reported, Jan. 2 saw next to no wind power generation in Alberta. And the following day, SaskPower’s 24 hour average power generation from wind was 51 megawatts out of a 817 megawatt nameplate capacity. That’s 6.2 per cent output. But as that’s an average, there were times when the output would have been higher, and lower, than that 51 megawatts.
The Where Your Power Comes From had several important updates in recent days correcting errors in reporting. Until X account @SkElectricity reported it, the new natural gas-fired Great Plains Power Station was erroneously showing up under “other” instead of natural gas, and the new Bekevar Wind Energy Facility wasn’t showing up at all. Upon being notified of this, SaskPower swiftly made corrections.
And the updated data now shows how natural gas-fired power generation has become dominant in this province, eclipsing the old standby of coal. Natural gas averaged 2,119 megawatts, or 60 per cent of total power generation across Saskatchewan on Jan. 2, whereas coal produced 756 megawatts, or 22 per cent of total generation.
The reason behind this is simple – for every megawatt of power SaskPower generates with combined cycle natural gas, it produced roughly half the greenhouse gas emissions compared to conventional coal. And that, in turn, results in half the carbon tax being levied.
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