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Comment by Teever | Hacker News Reader

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 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...

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>Alberta is a complete aberration in North American democracy

Hmm, seems to me several US states have been the same: Vermont, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, Idaho...

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.

They just mean if you have geographical diversity, it helps with the availability of renewables.

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.

Yeah but the downside to that in a place the size of Alberta is that you need to run electrical infrastructure that can handle the load of 4.3 million people across a 1000km distance.

Sounds like Sweden or Norway, not very hard to do.

Yeah, and notably it's exponential in distance, not linear.

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.

> Being larger isn't a disadvantage.

It most certainly is for distribution and generation near population density.

the nice thing about solar is that it's naturally diffuse, it's actually more effort to push it into a dense urban area than to have it spread over a rural place

Or easier. With germany you can't just put solar panels around a big city because either the city is too big or the land is occopied by something else.

But hey good that we talked about it :D

wow, i think you really missed the point:)

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.

Judging by this population density map: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/01/Canada_P...

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.

Appreciate the response but I'll be honest I don't understand what point you are making.

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.

> 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.

We currently transport already energy from big producers to small towns left and right.

Solar Energy reduces the load of the grid because the renewable energy will be consumed locally first. This puts less strain on it.

But you will still need to maintain a grid that's sized to handle situations when there's no solar.

The grid which already exists because it was built before solar was interesting.

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.

I already have a grid which handles this situation. I'm lost on what your issue is with the grid?

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

There's plenty of land in cities. Rooftops and solar canopies (parking lots with solar panels over them) for example. Solar canopies can even go above outdoor public transit lines.

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..

It's a lot more expensive to put panels on roofs than to put them on a meadow somewhere.

So settle on something in the middle -- cover parking lots.

>> more or less one party have been in power there for over 50 years.

you know we had a majority left-leaning (NDP) government < 10 years ago, right?

The province splits pretty predictably between Calgary, Edmonton and Rural.

The bigger problem with the comment is that said party threw in the towel in 2020. How they managed to enact something last year from the dead is a head scratcher.

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