Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

For the first time in more than 150 years, Alberta's electricity is coal free

theglobeandmail.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 227 posts

Re: For the first time in more than 150 years, Alberta's electricity is coal free

#31

Post by ThrowawayTestr »

nightowl_games wrote: post #12
photochemsyn wrote: post #11

Alberta's tar sands are even dirtier than coal - because large amounts of natural gas are required to convert the tar sands into syncrude, which is like a crude oil that requires more refining to produce gasoline, diesel and jet fuel from it. The residue from tar sands refining is petcoke, which gets burned in regional power plants and exported overseas: https://skepticalscience.com/legal-fight-leave-dirtiest-foss...…

As far as I understand it, Canada's economy is wholly dependent on the tar sands.

That used to be the case, now it's real estate.

Re: For the first time in more than 150 years, Alberta's electricity is coal free

#32

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

dagmx wrote: post #3
kalupa wrote: post #2

Now it's mostly natural gas, instead! With a good chunk of wind, but the current government seems to dislike "renewables"

Yep. The Alberta government has their head stuck in the sand (pun intended) around renewables as they existentially threaten their current economy. They have repeatedly shown that they’d rather double down than try and diversify. https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/canadas-alberta-set-b...

To boost your point - that is literally what the Alberta government has been doing. They instituted a seven-month renewable's pause to "evaluate" them (evaluating renewables in 2023????), which introduced a lot of investor uncertainty[1]. When the pause was over they introduced rules around preventing wind turbines and solar from being developed in areas to prevent obstruction in "viewscapes"[2].

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-renewables-pa... [2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-viewscapes-bu...

Re: For the first time in more than 150 years, Alberta's electricity is coal free

#33

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #26
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. The times they are a-changing, but we have a particularly regressive government at the moment that is actively blocking renewable production. The unfortunate bit about having the most sun is that during winter we still don't get much of it. It seems to me we need as much storage as we do production.

Alberta isn't very cloudy in the wintertime, the reduced insolation is mostly due to lower angles and shorter days. AFAICT, winter sunshine is more than a third of summer sunshine in Alberta. In Europe the number is often 10%. It's cheaper to size production for winter sunshine than to build a lot of storage. AKA it's cheaper to put down 3X as many panels than to build seasonal storage. Alberta doesn't lack for hills…

I like this idea, but I disagree with this:

> It's cheaper to size production for winter sunshine than to build a lot of storage.

This still doesn't work - storage is mandatory. Winter peak loads, which are often the most power that the grid will require all year, are before and after the sun.

Re: For the first time in more than 150 years, Alberta's electricity is coal free

#34

Post by tonyarkles »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #30

ElectricityMaps zone CA-AB: https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/CA-AB?wind=false&solar=... Total fossil gas generation capacity is ~12.7GW. Seems straightforward to replace with solar, wind, batteries, and interconnects with neighboring grids. Wind and Solar Potential resource: https://www.pembina.org/pub/wind-solar-alberta

If you're curious, you can actually see the real-time stats for what's going on in Alberta: http://ets.aeso.ca/ets_web/ip/Market/Reports/CSDReportServle.... There's lots of solar and wind installed but wind right now isn't producing much at all. Solar's doing decent though!

Re: For the first time in more than 150 years, Alberta's electricity is coal free

#35

Post by moralestapia »

nightowl_games wrote: post #12
photochemsyn wrote: post #11

Alberta's tar sands are even dirtier than coal - because large amounts of natural gas are required to convert the tar sands into syncrude, which is like a crude oil that requires more refining to produce gasoline, diesel and jet fuel from it. The residue from tar sands refining is petcoke, which gets burned in regional power plants and exported overseas: https://skepticalscience.com/legal-fight-leave-dirtiest-foss...…

As far as I understand it, Canada's economy is wholly dependent on the tar sands.

Not at all and has never been the case, maybe only in some regions of Alberta like a century ago [1].

The largest oil reserves in the planet, though, are in Canada, unfortunately it's all unconventional.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_petroleum_indus...

Re: For the first time in more than 150 years, Alberta's electricity is coal free

#36

Post by toomuchtodo »

tonyarkles wrote: post #34
toomuchtodo wrote: post #30

ElectricityMaps zone CA-AB: https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/CA-AB?wind=false&solar=... Total fossil gas generation capacity is ~12.7GW. Seems straightforward to replace with solar, wind, batteries, and interconnects with neighboring grids. Wind and Solar Potential resource: https://www.pembina.org/pub/wind-solar-alberta

If you're curious, you can actually see the real-time stats for what's going on in Alberta: http://ets.aeso.ca/ets_web/ip/Market/Reports/CSDReportServle... . There's lots of solar and wind installed but wind right now isn't producing much at all. Solar's doing decent though!

Thanks for sharing that resource! ElectricityMaps parses it [1] for showing real time data as well as creating a data source for carbon intensity estimation models. Alberta has the most favorable wind and solar resources in Canada (citation in my root comment), so solving for the remaining fossil gas generation should occur in due time simply out of economics [2].

[1] https://github.com/electricitymaps/electricitymaps-contrib/b...

[2] https://archive.is/2024.06.24-223854/https://www.economist.c...

Re: For the first time in more than 150 years, Alberta's electricity is coal free

#37

Post by bryanlarsen »

pfdietz wrote: post #29
bryanlarsen wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alberta isn't very cloudy in the wintertime, the reduced insolation is mostly due to lower angles and shorter days. AFAICT, winter sunshine is more than a third of summer sunshine in Alberta. In Europe the number is often 10%. It's cheaper to size production for winter sunshine than to build a lot of storage. AKA it's cheaper to put down 3X as many panels than to build seasonal storage. Alberta doesn't lack for hills…

> It's cheaper to size production for winter sunshine than to build a lot of storage. Which means enormous amounts of surplus power in the summer (even with PV angled to optimize winter production.) So storage doesn't have to go far to be worthwhile, and in particular with nearly free input energy it doesn't have to be very efficient.

It doesn't have to be very efficient, but it is has to be cheap. Batteries aren't cheap but they discharge every night so their cost is spread out over ~365 days and their cost becomes feasible.

Pumped storage is ~10% the cost of batteries, but if used as seasonal storage so they only discharge once per year that makes them ~36X as expensive. Especially in Alberta where they're competing against Natural Gas which is also approximately free (it's often flared off as a waste gas from oil wells rather than captured and sold because the value is less than the cost of capture).

Re: For the first time in more than 150 years, Alberta's electricity is coal free

#38

Post by adrianN »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #33
bryanlarsen wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alberta isn't very cloudy in the wintertime, the reduced insolation is mostly due to lower angles and shorter days. AFAICT, winter sunshine is more than a third of summer sunshine in Alberta. In Europe the number is often 10%. It's cheaper to size production for winter sunshine than to build a lot of storage. AKA it's cheaper to put down 3X as many panels than to build seasonal storage. Alberta doesn't lack for hills…

I like this idea, but I disagree with this: > It's cheaper to size production for winter sunshine than to build a lot of storage. This still doesn't work - storage is mandatory. Winter peak loads, which are often the most power that the grid will require all year, are before and after the sun.

There’s a huge difference between load shifting a couple of hours and seasonal storage

Re: For the first time in more than 150 years, Alberta's electricity is coal free

#39

Post by photochemsyn »

nightowl_games wrote: post #12
photochemsyn wrote: post #11

Alberta's tar sands are even dirtier than coal - because large amounts of natural gas are required to convert the tar sands into syncrude, which is like a crude oil that requires more refining to produce gasoline, diesel and jet fuel from it. The residue from tar sands refining is petcoke, which gets burned in regional power plants and exported overseas: https://skepticalscience.com/legal-fight-leave-dirtiest-foss...…

As far as I understand it, Canada's economy is wholly dependent on the tar sands.

Once upon a time, whale oil from whaling was a major factor in the Canadian economy. Then whale oil was replaced by kerosene and then the electric lightbulb. Tar sands will go the same way, and Canada's booming wind turbine economy will replace it to some extent (wind power can be exported in several different forms).

Re: For the first time in more than 150 years, Alberta's electricity is coal free

#40

Post by randomdata »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #19
nightowl_games wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I understand it, Canada's economy is wholly dependent on the tar sands.

Mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction accounts for 8.21% of Canada's GDP. So, not so much, but let's all take a moment to stare at the horror show that is the 13% that is real estate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Canada Edit: I realize that source is from 2020, which may be skewing those numbers, but it seems that statista still roughly agrees in 2024. https://www.statista.com/statistics/594293/gr…

> let's all take a moment to stare at the horror show that is the 13% that is real estate.

12% in both USA (2023) and Mexico (2015). Other countries that use a similar classification seem to also be in the same range. Japan, for example, also sits at 12% (2022).

Is a single percentage point really that horrific?

Post reply on HN