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...
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 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.
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...
Hmm, seems to me several US states have been the same: Vermont, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, Idaho...
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
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..
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...
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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.
Solar Energy reduces the load of the grid because the renewable energy will be consumed locally first. This puts less strain on it.
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
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.
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".
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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.
you know we had a majority left-leaning (NDP) government < 10 years ago, right?
The province splits pretty predictably between Calgary, Edmonton and Rural.