Santa gave Alberta free power again on Christmas and Boxing Day

Santa was so generous this year, he gave Albertans enough wind power to have zero dollar pool pricing for all Albertans for several hours on Christmas Day, and a hell of a deal on Boxing Day, too.

For the first seven hours of Christmas Day, starting at midnight, the pool price of power in Alberta was zero – as in free. That’s according to data from the Alberta Electric System Operator (AESO), as logged by X account @ReliableAB.

While Santa was heavy into his deliveries of gifts and lumps of coal at 2:59 a.m., Alberta’s pool price continued at zero dollars per megawatt.

 

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At that moment, Alberta’s fleet of now 50 wind farms was producing 51.8 per cent capacity, churning out 2,944 megawatts out of a new nameplate capacity of 5,688 megawatts. There was enough surplus power on the grid that Alberta generously provided British Columbia with 813 megawatts and Montana with 111 megawatts for the princely sum of less than one glass of milk and a few cookies to go with it. Since Saskatchewan’s intertie with Alberta is currently down for maintenance, it was unable to cash in on the free power bonanza.

This Christmas was a little different for Santa, however, in that he couldn’t stop by any coal-fired power stations to stock up on lumps of coal to distribute to naught earthmuffins, since the last one in Alberta had closed in May. But Alberta still exports plenty of coal – just not for power generation within its own borders.

@ReliableAB recorded zero dollar pool pricing at 4:59 a.m., 6:59 a.m., and 8:59 a.m., and their graph shows intervening hours were also at zero dollars. Zero dollar pricing resumed in the evening as well, and extended into Boxing Day. In total, 11 hours saw zero dollar pricing on Dec. 25, including the morning and evening. The common element was relatively strong wind performance, if you consider 47 to 60 per cent ‘strong.’

The free power the evening of Dec. 25 extended into Dec. 26, with a block of 11 hours of zero dollar pool pricing. If you’re counting, that’s seven hours early Dec. 25, then another 11 hours Dec. 25 into Dec. 26, for a total of 18 hours.

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Boxing Day blowout  

Once Santa parked his sleigh for the year, there was a Boxing Day special on power in Alberta for the first half of the day. Those pool prices were better than you’d ever get from standing in line for three hours before the opening of a big box store.

That’s because the big screen TV you might have picked up would have had free power if you plugged it in early. (That’s at least for power generators. Consumers aren’t likely to see that directly.)

Once again data from the Alberta Electric System Operator showed the outsized influence of wind power generation on pricing, both on the high side and the low side. This time it was a surplus of wind causing prices to yet again hit zero dollars per megawatt-hour.

For that 11 hours block, the pool price was totally flatlined. The pool price to power every Christmas tree, refinery, pumpjack, streetlight, mixmaster, refrigerator and block heater in the province, combined, was less than one singular fruitcake. That’s for a province with a population of 4,888,723.

Some power generators have side deals, such as Amazon buying power from the Travers Solar Facility in Vulcan County. But they didn’t get much, as it 465 megawatt capacity topped out at 204 megawatts at 3:50 p.m, according to Dispatcho.app, which logs the minute-by-minute AESO data. But that was a brief spike, as during the noon hour, when the sun is highest in the sky, it was producing 52 to 69 megawatts. For the day its capacity factor was 5.3 per cent.

The pattern over Christmas reinforced several narratives. When Alberta wind power is in surplus, and it often only has to be in the 45 to 60 per cent output range for that to happen, pool prices often drop to zero. Alberta’s neighbours take about as much as they can of the free power. And unless they have side-deals, all the other generators relying on pool pricing get paid nothing during those hours, even though they have fuel costs (e.g. natural gas) and other operational expenditures.

Also, when wind power flatlines, Alberta will frequently import copious amounts of power, but at much, much higher prices. It really is frequently a case of buy high, sell low (or, over Christmas, give it away like Santa).

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Wind can suck here and blow there

But wait, there’s more! At 12:22 a.m. on Dec. 27, something remarkable was showing up on AESO’s grid monitoring website. Many of the now 50 wind farms were operating at near maximum capacity, while 10 were generating zero power. For instance, these facilities were putting out their maximum rated capacity (in megawatts): Ardenville (68), Cypress 1 (196), Cypress 2 (46). Several more were withing just a few megawatts of maximum output – levels rarely seen in three years of monitoring by Pipeline Online.

So if so much of the wind fleet was running full out, why were some facilities showing zeros? Were they curtailed?

Actually, probably not. Looking up various facilities showing zero output showed there were indeed pockets of next to no wind in southern Alberta the same time there was a howler going on elsewhere.

Garden Plain, for instance, is located south of Castor, Alta., was showing zero output. Weather website Windy.com showed just 2 knots of wind in that area. Also in that area, Halkirk 1 and 2, and Paintearth were showing zero output, again, because there was simply no wind there. Wild Rose, Alberta’s 50^th grid-scale wind project, was just added to the listing on Dec. 18 and is still in commissioning. Cowley Ridge has been offline since March.

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Meanwhile in Saskatchewan

On Christmas Day, SaskPower reported wind power generated a 24 hour average of 462 megawatts output. That’s 56.5 per cent output of the nameplate capacity of 817 megawatts. As a result, 15 per cent of power generated over the day came from grid-scale wind.

Coal output continues to decline markedly, with just 642 megawatts coming from coal, or 22 per cent of total generation over 24 hours. Boundary Dam Unit 5’s last days are literally hours away, although it will be kept for emergency use for a while yet. But with it shutting down, that leaves just two generating units operating on a regular basis at Boundary Dam Power Station, a facility that once had six generating units.

SaskPower puts out several orders of magnitude less data than AESO does, in large part because it is a closed market and Crown corporation.

This bears repeating. Originally published on Nov. 20, but applicable ehre.

Hi fidelity data in Alberta vs low fidelity in Saskatchewan

In contrast to the high fidelity of Alberta’s publicly available grid data, since September of 2022, SaskPower publishes 24 hour averages of each class of power generation in Saskatchewan. That information is delayed by two days, and posted at midnight. SaskPower, as a closed market which participates in sales and purchases of power to other markets, delays this data so as to not show its hand in those market dealings.

Those 24 hour averages indicate the average power, in megawatts, per class, and the percentage of total generation. The classes are hydro, wind, solar, natural gas, coal, and “other.” Every five minutes, the total grid system load is published here. A daily log of all this information is posted by X account @SkElectricity.

The distinction in publicly available data between Alberta and Saskatchewan is massive, literally several orders of magnitude. In one singular day, Alberta puts out:

(219 generating stations x 3 parameters + 3 interchanges x 1 parameter + 7 summary points x 1 parameter) x 60 minutes/hour x 24 hours/day = 934,560 data points per day.

That does not include hourly pricing, renewable energy forecasts, supply adequacy, outage and system log information, none of which are available from SaskPower except for outages.

For generation data, SaskPower puts out:

6 classes of generation x 2 data points per day + 3 system points + 12 system load outputs/hour x 24 hours/day = 306 data points per day.

934560 Alberta data points / 306 Saskatchewan data points = 3,054.1: 1 ratio

In other words, each day Alberta publicly publishes 3,054.1 times as much data as Saskatchewan, or greater than three orders of magnitude more data than Saskatchewan.

X account @SkElectricity informed Pipeline Online that in April, 2023, SaskPower reduced its system load updates from every five minutes to once per hour.  That means 306 data points per day is the former number. It’s now 39 data points per day, meaning the ratio is now 23,963:1, or four orders of magnitude.

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