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

theglobeandmail.com

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

#61

Post by pfdietz »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #37
pfdietz wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

For seasonal storage, it would be either an e-fuel (like hydrogen) or bulk storage of thermal energy (basically, artificial geothermal). The latter could produce very hot rock at rather shallow depth, yet still have thermal time constants of many years.

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

#62

Post by softfalcon »

Hey folks, I live in Alberta. This isn't as big of a win as you all think it is. We replaced coal burning with natural gas and gasoline burning power generation.

For those who will say, "but Alberta has wind and solar!" please know that our current premiere (similar to a governor) is actively attacking all of our renewable energy investments. Her name is Danielle Smith and she's quite literally a former oil and gas lobbyist.

The only reason this is being touted is because big oil in Alberta is happy we've switched over to burning their carbon emitter of choice.

Take that into account when you read this feel good piece about Alberta being "coal free".

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

#63

Post by hollerith »

mywittyname wrote: post #57
_aavaa_ wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However that 23.3% undersells its importance. Primary industries like mining, oil and gas extraction have large knock on effects on the rest of the economy. Many of the retail and service companies would go out of business if the fossil fuel industry were to disappear overnight.

Right. I wish we had a better metric than GDP for capturing the downstream impacts of an industry. Say a town grows up around a single manufacturing plant. That plant might only account for 30% of the town's GPD because people use their wages to buy food, housing, etc. But when that plant closes up and 90% of the towns income disappears, it's hard to argue that the plant only contributed 30% of the economy in that ca…

Does the notion of a GDP even make sense for a town? I've never seen it applied to any unit except nations as a whole (or the EU).

I suspect you need to collect reliable information on imports and exports and capital flows to calculate GDP, and a town can't collect it because it doesn't have, e.g., a customs bureacracy.

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

#64

Post by bryanlarsen »

pfdietz wrote: post #61
bryanlarsen wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For seasonal storage, it would be either an e-fuel (like hydrogen) or bulk storage of thermal energy (basically, artificial geothermal). The latter could produce very hot rock at rather shallow depth, yet still have thermal time constants of many years.

Both of those are more expensive than pumped storage.

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

#65

Post by ryandrake »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #21
bryanlarsen wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their current source of income. Alberta has more sun and more wind than any place else in Canada so renewables could be quite profitable to them in the future, but what government cares about anything further out than the next election? Alberta also used to be the only place in Canada where you could just build a solar power plant and hook it up to the grid with minimal red tape so had a massive advantage in terms of…

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.

> The times they are a-changing, but we have a particularly regressive government at the moment that is actively blocking renewable production.

I guess Canadian politics are not unlike US politics in the area of energy production. You'd think that most of the jobs in non-renewable energy could just transition over to jobs in renewable energy and everyone's happy. But sadly, like everything, the energy source itself has been politicized. The left favors renewables regardless of the pros and cons and the right favors non-renewables regardless of the pros and cons, so it looks like yet another ideological battle rather than a battle over concrete things like jobs and the environment.

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

#66

Post by mywittyname »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #14
MisterDizzy wrote: post #8

Let's see how long it takes them to realize they should have gone with the latest nuclear power tech and will eventually be unable to meet demand with anything but coal or nuclear (unless something changes).

I'm wondering what scenario you're considering that natural gas won't suffice but coal will. Alberta is celebrating simply transitioning from one fossil fuel to another, slightly cleaner burning, one. They are certainly still struggling with renewables when they are needed the most, such as -35 at 7PM, long after the sun has gone down and the wind turbine's hydraulics are too cold to function safely and all our furna…

> This is also when nuclear isn't a great solution, as it's a huge spike in demand.

Overproduce electricity, then burn off the excess to match load to demand.

It's counter-intuitive, but the cost structure of producing electricity via nuclear is different from fossil fuels. The unit costs per kW/h of nuclear is negligible compared to the capital costs of building a plant. Making it economically viable to "waste" electricity to match load to demand.

At some point down the road, people will do the cost benefit on capturing excess production in battery packs vs expanding the existing nuclear facilities to meet demand.

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

#67

Post by softfalcon »

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.

Ah yes, you've been fooled by the oil and gas propaganda. The entire oil and gas industry is only 3.2% of Canada's GDP. However, you'll never hear that from the army of O&G lobbyists who permanently reside in Alberta 24/7.

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

#68

Post by softfalcon »

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…

Modern numbers at a provincial level show that it's much higher than 13% in 2024. Canada is slowly becoming a massive housing/real-estate bubble.

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

#69

Post by octocop »

energy123 wrote: post #51
Teever wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems straightforward but it isn't. Alberta is about twice the size of Germany, 50% larger than California and has a meager population of 4.3 million spread out across that area.With a latitude that ranges from 48' to 60' and a wide variety of geography there's a range of availability in solar and wind. Alberta politics is also a factor. Alberta is a complete aberration in North American democracy in that more or…

Being larger isn't a disadvantage. Wind correlation drops exponentially as a function of distance. Land use becomes a non issue.

>Wind correlation drops exponentially as a function of distance.

By what principle? I'm just curious, first time I'm hearing this.

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

#70

Post by speed_spread »

nightowl_games wrote: post #13
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it's hard to get someone to hate their source of income.

As far as I understand it, the whole country is dependent on the tar sands, but the east still hates it.

Canada's economy is built on primary resource extraction and production in general but would have done fine without the tar sands. Most of the oil money leaves the country; the money that stays mainly fuels self-serving private agendas, pressuring other parts of the economy and stuffing politics. This could have been averted had a solution like Norway's state oil fund been adopted but would have been too socialist a measure for the empire to tolerate.
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