For the first time in more than 150 years, Alberta's electricity is coal free
theglobeandmail.com
theglobeandmail.com
https://skepticalscience.com/legal-fight-leave-dirtiest-foss...
Since the coke is being exported to India and China for consumption in power plants there, there's zero change in the amount of fossil CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere, so any effort to promote this as 'cleaning up the tar sands' is just fossil industry greenwashing.
https://www.argusmedia.com/en/news-and-insights/latest-marke...
According to the most recent Statistics Canada's National Economic Accounts, the Mining and Oil and Gas Extraction industry accounted for approximately 26% of Alberta's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2020, an increase from 23.3% in 2010.
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 case.
GPD != economy. GPD describes how money is spent, not necessarily in what order it is generated.
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.
Yes, of course it does. Why wouldn't it?
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/gross-domestic-pr...
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?
Japan, which has a completely different view, model, and concept of real estate that does NOT treat it as an investment, ends up with the same portion of GDP locked/used/coming from real estate.
I feel like there's important information in that tidbit, but I am not equipped to grasp it.
That developing, renovating, bankrolling, managing, and maintaining physical infrastructure is real work and creates real value.
I'm not too surprised that countries have similar housing, there is percent of rent that can afforded. I'm surprised that higher home prices aren't reflected, but that may show up as higher overall GDP.
Is it? I'd be interested in numbers to qualify that claim.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1319179/canada-oil-sands...
But it's 1/3 of Alberta's GDP.
The GHG impact is pretty huge though (2.2x regular oil extraction per barrel).
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...
I guess given that those two countries are keeping Russia afloat by buying their oil it shouldn't be a surprise, but its still disappointing to see those countries choosing the path they did.
As a Canadian (but not Albertan) I've never had direct access to the residual economic effects of oil resources, or the slight tax offset that comes with having no Provincial Sales Tax, aside from general gov redistribution. I've never not had electricity, and I've never not had renewable electricity, which is quite remarkable.
If BC's population went up by a factor of 1.1B/40M = 27.5x, most likely the hydroelectric resources in the province would become insufficient and BC would have to switch to alternate forms of electric power. Maybe that is solar+wind+nuclear, but maybe it's just gas and coal.
Please note that in Canada, electricity, heat, and transport emissions dwarf those from all other sectors [1].
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-emissions-by-sector?t...
https://financialpost.com/opinion/canada-may-already-be-carb...
This is frankly a dumb article. It’s an unhelpful reframing of the issue at hand by trying to take credit for what’s happening across large swaths of undeveloped land that happen to be within our border. It will quickly be abandoned the moment the natural carbon release of former permafrost regions cause us to be a colossal emitter instead.
Consider how unhelpful it would be if countries began trying to solve their emissions issues by laying claim to vast swaths of ocean, to take credit for algal carbon sinks.
China's coal capacity is increasing dramatically, but they're increasingly using their coal plants as peaker plants rather than for base production.
Every geopolitically relevant country will feel more secure with renewable, and therefore utterly independent, energy generation.
A reminder that Texas, a uniparty state literally run by Oil Barron families for decades, still gets at least a third of it's power from renewable sources, because it's so goddamned cheap. It doesn't matter how profitable oil is, or how much you pump, it will always be cheaper, and therefore more profitable, to replace it with power that just manifests itself out of the sky or wind for merely the cost of maintenance.
Each oil well requires tens of highly skilled, rather well paid tradespeople to manage, drill, run, explode, etc. An entire field of wind turbines requires one or two small teams of somewhat well paid maintenance engineers.
The rest of your post is spot on, though.
https://grid-analytics.ece.utexas.edu/chart/fuel-type-genera...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38861358
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2024/01/03/plan-to-...
What I do hear about is this (possibly outdated, I'm increasingly noticing the references there are not kept up to date) claim on Wikipedia:
> On October 13, 2009, the Tres Amigas SuperStation was announced to connect the Eastern, Western and Texas Interconnections via eight 5 GW superconductor links, although the Texas Interconnection does not intend to connect for regulatory reasons. The Eastern Interconnection withdrew from the project in 2015, rendering the project moot. Construction was never started.
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/energy-storage/how-texa... ("How Texas became the hottest grid battery market in the country")
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/09/12/texas-power-grid-bat... ("As brutal heat tests Texas’ power grid, batteries play a small but growing role in keeping the lights on")
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/batteries-texas-consumers-6... ("Batteries saved Texas consumers $683M during 2-day January freeze: Aurora Energy Research")
https://web.archive.org/web/20240707022007/https://www.eia.g... (EIA 12 month forward looking generator deployment; scope to Texas and gray icons, which indicate battery storage)
vel0city's recent comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40504630: "Texas has 6.3GW of battery capacity installed largely in the last three years and is on track for another ~15GW (a bit over 20GW total) by the end of 2024. There's 141GW of battery projects in the queue for connection to ERCOT, with a large chunk of that coming online in 2025 and 2026."
If you look at California, what happens is that renewables grow rapidly, pushing out fossil generation (coal first, and then fossil gas, as fossil gas is more flexible from a generation perspective wrt throttling and commodity cost). At some point, you arrive at a situation where your spot prices drop below zero during daylight hours (as you're generating power in excess of grid demand, renewables can bid to give away the power or curtail, fossil gas and coal cannot, they'll take the L to keep spinning while paying for fuel and the per hour O&M costs). This is when battery deployment takes off, as batteries can charge when power is almost free, and discharge in the evening hours after sunset when it is profitable to do so. You can see California's ~10GW of batteries "breathe" daily in the data doing this. This revenue, combined with grid services (synthetic inertia, black start capability readiness [jump starting fossil generators during a grid outage]), makes batteries a strong economic proposition from an investment perspective.
Battery firmed renewables compete directly with fossil gas from a cost perspective. As of ~6 months ago, Texas had 100GW of solar in ERCOT’s interconnect queue, in comparison to ~65.8GW of fossil gas generation and ~14.3GW of coal generation currently operating. Even assuming worst case capacity factor (20% hypothetical vs 25% actual per https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...), 75GW of solar with a storage component is enough to push that coal generation out of the mix. It's also unlikely solar deployments stop or slow down.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40601878 ("HN: Lazard: IRA brings LCOS of 100MW, 4hr standalone BESS down as low as US$124/MWh")
https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/2023-levelized-cost... ("Lazard 2023 Levelized Cost Of Energy+")
Related citation wrt battery costs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40919052 ("HN: China’s Batteries Are Now Cheap Enough to Power Huge Shifts")
Short term - nothing much is happening. Rome wasn't built in a day.
The US can idly sit around and burn it's own natural gas and oil. The US at least has the option to maintain the status quo for a long time (it won't). But China doesn't even have this option.
Additionally, auto manufacturing (ICE cars) accounts for ~5% of US employment. For China ICE auto manufacturing is ~0, and they have the opportunity to produce a huge chunk of the worlds EVs. They're not only incentivized massively to get off oil - they're incentivized to get EVERYONE ELSE off of oil, too.
China needs to IMPORT natural gas and oil. They'd much rather lead the world in renewables EXPORT EVs and renewable generation than be reliant on Russia & KSA for energy (the basis of their current economy)...
China will likely cut their emissions faster than the US has - which if you're realistic - the US has done an impressive job.
The US emits ~30% less carbon per capita than it did in 2000. And we're on pace to be at ~40% less by the end of 2030: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1049662/fossil-us-carbon...
In 20 years, China is likely to be around ~75% less than today. The US probably won't get from ~40% to ~75% over that time.
The lobbying from our own energy producers will too much to cut that deep that quickly.
The US and China are close to ~50% of emissions: https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-emi...
No one else besides India is really going to move the needle (certainly not in the wrong direction - no one else is growing fast enough).
India will be the wild card. Will they import renewable energy generation from China or fossil fuel from Russia and KSA?
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-leads-renewabl...
Oof. Before we start pointing fingers, over 50% of China's energy consumption is manufacturing, and a significant chunk of that manufacturing is western countries outsourcing their manufacturing needs, i.e. claiming to be coal-free while really just burning the coal elsewhere and then blaming the landowner.
If you want to truly be coal-free, don't just pay for it to be built in Canada for your wooden house that consumes a few kilowatts. Pay for it to be built in China for all your manufacturing outposts that make your computer, TV, phone, kitchen gadgets, kitchen ware, disposable items, containers for food delivery, and everything else, that take an enormous amount of power to create. They are equally a part of your energy footprint.
Do you have iPhones in Alberta? It takes about 1 GJ or 278 kWh to make a single phone [1], which is about enough to heat an entire house for a month. For a computer you're looking at about 1 MWh, about a large house's heating usage in an entire year.
[1] https://conferences.sigcomm.org/hotnets/2011/papers/hotnetsX...
Both governments are actually very pro-clean-energy and more willing to deploy it, given the money, than a certain two ~80-year-old farts that take turns every 4 years playing stupid politics games and picking fights.
Eh, nuclear sure but in general no. That's the whole reason solar is becoming so popular is that it's cheaper [2].
If you have to pair solar with storage then it becomes more expensive [1] (general X+Y is more expensive than just X or Y). But uh, people tend to work when the sun shines so you can add a ton of solar to offset the increased energy usage during the day.
[1]: https://www.powersouth.com/is-solar-cheaper-than-natural-gas...
[2]: https://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/natural_g...
New builds in developed countries can be 100% renewable because there's enough installed non-renewable capacity available as fallback. Developing countries don't have that.
If their economies are growing, the grids are constantly playing catch-up with demand. Otherwise they're in a state of managed decline, or are an actual dumpster fire.
Whatever the case may be, the one thing they don't have is reliable base generation capability. A safety net for when renewables can't produce enough.
Developing -> Developed in my original comment.
https://www.aeso.ca/market/market-updates/2023/new-assets-ca...
how exactly do you propose India meet the growing electric demands of her residents?
The Russian gas and oil story is more pragmatism than evil intent.
One part of your comment is accurate - India’s exports are tiny relative to its population and economic size.
lol they did just that. China is not "growing so many people" anymore, and neither is India, really. I suppose they could cull some of the previously grown people to get under 5 million like Alberta and to make your advice actually useful. But maybe your obvious solutions just haven't occurred to them yet.
> someone who lives in Canada and has spend so much money
Which means Canada has money. India is much poorer on a per-capita basis. They can become wealthy by developing their economy. India can't spend as much per-capita on clean energy as Canada or any other wealthy nation.
India has much more to lose from climate change compared to Canada. The heatwaves are already horrific, and many cities have water supply problems so drought due to climate change could spell disaster.
The air quality in most Indian cities is terrible. No one is burning coal for fun.
Gasoline is CA$1.81/l in Mumbai, in a country with a fraction of the per-capita income of Canada. Cars are much smaller on average and most people take public transport.
The electricity grid isn't as reliable as Canada and of course most people don't live in houses. It's mostly apartments, often with no assigned parking. Despite that I saw many electric cars and scooters on my last trip, even in small towns. I don't know how they charge. But I began to question why the US or Canada can't build enough charging for apartment-dwellers.
The "choice" India and China are making is no choice at all. They can either develop their economies or languish in poverty. Poverty means less food, less medical care, less education. It means lower life expectancy, higher infant and maternal mortality, an overall lower quality of life. Staying poor means when climate change gets worse, they'll have less money to mitigate it.
If you want developing countries to decrease their carbon emissions, invest in cheaper clean energy. Support programs and policies that give developing countries subsidies on clean energy technologies.
India's population density (people/land) is about the same as the Netherlands. The birth rate is nearly at replacement and continues to drop, and it's still a poor country! That's nearly unprecedented.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
Remember, poor countries can't just print dollars to buy batteries from China. If they don't have domestic manufacturing capacity, they have to spend foreign exchange reserves to pay for the imports. That gets expensive real quick.
Developing countries also often lack the technical talent available in wealthier ones. Quickly spinning up battery manufacturing can be difficult to do.
All I'm saying is: don't assume these countries haven't done the math for themselves. Saying "just use solar" might be sound advice. But it might also be a rich person telling a poor person to buy a Costco membership because it saves money. It's objectively correct but it may not be feasible for the poor person.
If anything developing countries are more open to the cheapest solution. They can't afford to get into ideological debates about whether climate change is real or worry about saving coal jobs by promoting "clean coal".
In India where the biggest load will be air conditioning and thus correspond with sunshine? Definitely.
But the answer was different two years ago. Electricity projects are often decades in scale and takes time to propogate.
But you're right about costs. Solar and batteries are all the cost up front. Poor people and poor countries are often forced to buy more expensive things just because they can be purchased on an installment plant. A fossil fuel plant is cheaper up front but you have to continuously buy fuel. It only becomes more expensive after ten years or so.
Helping with the financing would go a long way.
But Co2 doesn't only count in 'last years'. It counts as a cumulative effect. The Co2 damage of Canada per capita is way beyond that of China, cumulatively.
In cumulative terms, China has emitted 'only' 7.5 times as much Canada despite having 35x the population. In other words, Canada's per capita cumulative emissions are about 4.5x those of China.
And that's a lot. It means Canada has damaged way more, and should have a bigger burden to reduce future damage, or undo damage already done.
Generally yes it's always frustrating to see any country keep emitting Co2. But Canada is a worse offender, both in the past, as well as now, and that's a pretty sad record for one of the richest countries in the world which also happens to be the country with probably the biggest per-capita natural renewable resources of all time. (land for wind and solar, as well as insane hydro).
I don't doubt that on a per capita basis Canadians emit more than Chinese do; furthermore, China is the source of many of the goods that western nations consume, and so they're producing emissions "for" the western nations in a sort of de facto shell game.
However, China has no interest in giving its manufacturing base "back" to the west, and does not take emissions reduction seriously. It is a deceptive claim that Canada is "worse than China"; China is out-emitting Canada, doesn't take emissions reduction seriously, and plans to continue to out-emit Canada into the future.
Then the solution is to ban Chinese imports or tax them to a level that it's no longer economically viable to import them.
Problem "solved," right?
I kind of want all that to happen, though, so I think it's a good move. I don't like living in a nation that is able to consume at a functionally unlimited level for very little national sacrifice or engagement in manufacturing and production. If manufacturing is inherently pollution-heavy, then it would be healthy for Americans, Canadians, etc. to actually bear the consequences of pollution in their own countries and then decide as nations whether or not to sustain the current levels of production, or curtail their consumption habits properly.
What does China to do their forests? They chop them down
"Canada's Record-breaking 2023 Wildfires Released Nearly 4 Times More Carbon than Global Aviation"
Slightly unfair because climate change makes those forest more likely to burn down. But still.
All your claims in your last sentence I'd like to see sources for as well, because it appears to be the opposite. They're at the forefront of renewable energy production, has ambitious goals for reduction, despite already producing less per capita emissions than much richer countries with cumulatively larger emissions.
And as others have mentioned sources for numbers greatly help the collective conversation.
Of course all on a per capita basis, I thought I was sufficiently clear.
What is the apples to oranges comparison?
The goal is the maximum production per unit of CO2 - for every unit of CO2 you maximize what is produced from it.
Yes, the US produces 13.49% of all global CO2, but it also produces 25.22% of all output.
China produces 31% of all CO2 emissions, but only 17% of all production.
The data doesn’t help us inform an opinion of whose carbon use is better than others.
Whatever profit you captured can be spent on whatever.
So the US imports 2% of its GDP from China.
Rounding error.
Imports power GDP growth. Let me illustrate.
60% of Wal-Mart's imports in 2023 came from China.[1] Wal-Mart is also the largest private employer in the world.[2] Wal-Mart generates billions of dollars of revenue and profit - GDP in other words - by selling imports from China.
Imagine the economic hardship if even just Wal-Mart was cut off from Chinese imports. They'd lose at least half their sales overnight. Up to half their stores might close, or half the workforce might lose their jobs. That's almost 800k people. The unemployment rate goes up 60 basis points overnight. That's just one company.
Extrapolate that to the rest of the US economy.
1. https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/walmart-shifts-to-indi...
As Canadian, the only disapointment is influence ops against Canadian fossil industry has stalled development so much for so long that we're not a larger fossil exporter and reaping in benefits of current geopolitical turmoil. EU could have been buying overpriced Canadian oil + lng.
China is building an unbelievable amount of renewables and nuclear, more than the rest of the world combined. Like every other part of the world, they're backstopping these variable power sources with fossil generation -- mainly by building modern coal power plants that can be spun down when renewable generation is high. They've also developed a framework to pay coal plants not to generate. And of course they're leading the world on the deployment and pricing of battery storage, pumped hydro and HVDC grid upgrades.
I'm posting this because your conclusion ("China has said FU" to the world) is almost the polar opposite of what's actually happening. If we survive the climate crisis, it's going to be because of what China is doing with renewable buildouts and manufacturing.
Its amazing how most western countries bash coal so much and then proceed to generate electricity using natural gas.
To me it's Canada that is saying FU to the world and then preaching about it.
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
[1] https://github.com/electricitymaps/electricitymaps-contrib/b...
[2] https://archive.is/2024.06.24-223854/https://www.economist.c...
Alberta uses a bid system where everyone who bids under the price that (based on demand) ends up getting set, gets to participate and get paid. Because renewable is tough to store, they almost always bid zero to make sure it gets included. The same thing happens for the renewable portion of integrated providers; they bid low on the renewable to make sure they're included, and high on the variable fossil fuels (i.e. gas can be turned off or brought on line) to drive up the price. It's a complicated system with lots of opportunities for manipulation, but renewable tends to be prioritized for participation because it's hard to store for later.
The area west of Edmonton and Red Deer where it’s more like 5-6kt (still not particularly windy) is in the Rocky Mountains and would be pretty challenging to build wind turbines in.
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 less one party have been in power there for over 50 years. While the party has always been blatantly pro O&G industry at the expense of everything else when they issued an unexpected moratorium on a solar and wind projects last year.
This has thrown the renewable industry in Alberta into chaos and has likely damaged investor confidence in Alberta for decades[0]
https://www.theenergymix.com/tsunami-engulfs-alberta-renewab...
By what principle? I'm just curious, first time I'm hearing this.
For example, if wind is in 5 different locations across Alberta (for sake of example), you're less likely to run into issues with losing it all at once like you would if all your wind came from a single area and the wind stopped blowing there or dropped to a very low value.
There's also a diversification benefit for solar due to two reasons, one reason is rainfall is less likely to impact a large land mass at the same time, second is the sunset occurs at different times so you can have a one hour window to offset the evening peak of the other side of the country and vice versa in the morning. Although I don't believe these benefits are exponential as they are for wind.
It most certainly is for distribution and generation near population density.
But hey good that we talked about it :D
Germany is a relativly small country even compared to Alberta. therefor the population is pretty centralized with makes it far easier to supply with energy.
Alberta has 2 larger cities but the population is spread far a nd wide which makes distribution and supplying power that much harder.
And the ever-useful "The True Size Of…": https://www.thetruesize.com/#?borders=1~!MTU1OTcwMjU.MTI5MjQ...
I think you're overstating the difficulty given that population distribution.
And those two large splotches on the map representing Calgary and Edmonton and with most of the population pretty close by, they're only 282.6 km apart.
A 10cm^2 cross section of aluminium between them would have a resistance of 7.3 Ω, and even when bought from the first random supplier I found on Amazon that would only cost about €14m:
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=resistivity+aluminium+%...
https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Aluminium-Square-Solid-Material-S...
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=282.6+kilometers+*+€5%2...
It would be about 12% of that price, €1.7m, if bought at bulk rates: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=282.6+kilometers+*+10cm...
At 1e6 V, 12.7 GW is 12.7 kA; I^2R losses over a 7.3 Ω link for that current is 1.18 GW: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%2812700+amperes%29%5E2...
--
But even without any of that, there is one very important point you've overlooked:
Alberta has already got a power grid.
My only point is that Alberta being larger than Germany means its more expensive to deliver power to all its various small towns distributed around the province.
That seems pretty tautologically correct to me given that power lines have a cost and must be constantly maintained and built to support new power demands.
I'm unsure about what the cross section of aluminum has to do with the size of a province, but i'm willing to learn:)
Run a simple thought experiment. Would it be easier to deliver power 100 meters or 100 km's? That's what we are debating here.
What you're debating is the cost of using a grid that already exists and is already in use.
> I'm unsure about what the cross section of aluminum has to do with the size of a province,
The answer is right there in the same post. Multiply them together to find out how much material you need (and by extension cost); likewise resistive losses.
The material costs for making an extremely efficient grid are trivial compared to everything else involved in the supply of energy that already exists and has already connected all those "various small towns distributed around the province".
--
Also, I demonstrated with my maps that if you put a copy of the German borders around the Calgary-Edmonton conurbation, you'd get almost the entire population of Alberta, so your stat is misleading.
Solar Energy reduces the load of the grid because the renewable energy will be consumed locally first. This puts less strain on it.
The grid which connects the Suncor Fort Hills mine in Alberta to Tijuana in Mexico.
Even if you want to expand that grid to the level of everyone getting their winter midnight electricity from the midsummer sun on the opposite side of the planet, the material element of the "electric highway" isn't what stops it, it has a low cost compared to the last-mile stuff that already exists.
The biggest issue in germany regarding grid and renewable is a distance of 800km between north germany which has a lot of wind and south germany which has a lot of solar.
Diverge it a little bit better and no issues
They're all over the place in my area. I've seen them in church parking lots, supermarkets, you name it. Added benefit: you and your car are shaded from sun, snow, rain..
Hmm, seems to me several US states have been the same: Vermont, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, Idaho...
you know we had a majority left-leaning (NDP) government < 10 years ago, right?
The province splits pretty predictably between Calgary, Edmonton and Rural.
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".
There have been periods of rolling brown outs due to high industrial demand where I live. I know people in the industry and also watch the local news where they report that the gasoline backups have been activated and the brown outs should stop. Can confirm, they sometimes burn gasoline for power generation.
The provincial government suspended planning permission for all renewable energy projects across the province for six months, then outright banned the installation of grid-scale solar in much of the province. This resulted in the cancellation of tens of billions of dollars worth of private investment in renewable energy in Alberta.
Solar is also not as cheap as elsewhere in the world, as Canada has import duties on the cheap Chinese solar panels are driving the change elsewhere. The duties roughly triple the price, with a tax of ~160% on the purchase price and per-watt charges on the panel's rated output.
I'm sure that in five years things will start to shift. Heck, there's workers installing solar panels on my neighbour's roof right now — but it's not going to change much while Danielle Smith is in charge.
It's technically easy to shutdown, restart, and take Nat Gas plants in and out of standby to make up for shortfalls in solar and wind production. Where you can't do that with coal and nuclear for both technical and economic reasons.
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/canadas-alberta-set-b...
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-renewables-pa... [2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-viewscapes-bu...
Instead of "natural gas", we should just switch to saying methane, which is what that generally is.
Which is still bad, but not worse or as bad.
To make up the difference in CO2 you'd have to be losing ~5% of the methane to the atmosphere along the way from extraction to burning.
Do you have reason to believe anywhere near that much is lost?
"Worse than coal" has set a very low bar for how not-bad methane needs to be.
[1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warmin...
[2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=molecular+weight+of+CO2...
That study puts it at 9.4% of gross production. Many other sources exist which put 5% at a very realistic number. Fossil gas is dirt cheap, invisible, and leaks are large self-reported, so the companies have 0 reasons to properly test for or stop leaks.
The important metric is CO2e, not CO2. Critically, CO2e includes measurements of methane emissions.
The problem with methane is that the methane leaks are self-reported, by an industry who have every incentive to under-report and who have a history of massively underreporting. Methane isn't clearly better than coal, and might well be worse.
https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/heritage-fund-reaches-all-time-h...
Also Alberta is next door to BC which has vast sources of hydro-electric power so it could easily trade solar & wind power to BC when the sun is shining and/or the wind is blowing in exchange for hydro power when it isn't.
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, which is what's needed to build pumped storage which is what's cheapest for seasonal 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.
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).
Alberta, as it turns out, is underlaid by kilometers of sedimentary rock that includes salt formations.
> 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.
From what I understand, BC has a lot of hydro dams. I wonder if there is a way to use them for pumped storage.
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.
Similar, investing a dollar in wind & solar will pay itself back very quickly. Investing that dollar into transport or industrial decarbonization will have a much longer return.
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 furnaces are running and everyone is cooking and doing laundry. This is also when nuclear isn't a great solution, as it's a huge spike in demand.
My mechanic father has a saying - badly maintained stuff breaks down at -30 C, but everything can break at -40 C.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90429887/sustainable-living-less...
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.
If we look at the population numbers for the last 24 years there's nothing particularly out of the ordinary going on [1].
Sure, the last two years could be the start of an explosive increase, but the drop in year-over-year increase as indicated by the charts from your own link suggests it's far more likely to return to the overall trend.
But of course: even if the population doubled over the next 5 years, Alberta is still the size of Texas, and has plenty of room to address those energy needs using renewables.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/569880/population-estima...
"Alberta’s population growth continues to accelerate. In the 12 months preceding April 1, 2024, the province’s population expanded by 204,677 people, or 4.41%." [1]
"This represents a significant increase from the previous year (3.67% between 2022-23) and the highest April 1 year-over-year growth rate since 1981. Alberta’s population expanded by 49,138 residents over the first quarter of 2024, or 1.02%." [1]
The vast majority (over 160,000) of those new residents of Alberta were immigrants to Canada, driven by the federal government's massive immigration ramp-up. The immigration levels plan targets a continued increase in immigration through 2026 [2] and with Alberta having a comparatively low cost of living and very high quality of life, it's hard to believe that trend in population growth will not continue.
[1] https://www.alberta.ca/population-statistics
[2] https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/co...