Brian Zinchuk is editor and owner of Pipeline Online
If you were sitting Sunday afternoon, letting the turkey digest, so too was wind in Alberta taking a rest. And if your turkey was in the oven for supper, it wasn’t getting cooked by wind power.
According to the Alberta Electric System Operator, at 3:17 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 9, that province’s grid saw wind power production drop to just 3 megawatts, out of 2,734 megawatts of nameplate capacity across 29 wind farms. That’s one tenth of one per cent, or one one-thousandth of total wind capacity.
It was also 3 ten-thousands of total electrical generation across the entire Alberta grid.
Total Alberta electrical power generation at 3:17 p.m. on Thanksgiving Sunday. Wind generation dropped to 3 megawatts. Alberta Electric System Operator
It wasn’t that long ago that wind had dropped to 5 megawatts. Indeed, it was just the night before, at 9:18 p.m., 16 hours earlier.
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And it stayed at that level for at least an hour. Despite the flatline wind power production, the four battery storage facilities in Alberta were not being called upon to provide power to the grid. According to Dispatcho.app, which documents AESO data, not one of the four battery facilities were used during the previous 24 hours.
Only three of the 29 wind farms were producing any power whatsoever. And they were each putting out only one megawatt a piece.
The four batteries connected to the Alberta grid added exactly zero megawatts for the previous 24 hours. Dispatcho.app
Solar power was making up for some of the shortfall, as it was producing 782 megawatts at the time. Much of that came from the Travers solar facility, which was producing around 424 of its 465 megawatt capacity. That plant recently brought fully online.
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