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Comment by bluefirebrand | Hacker News Reader

Alberta is nothing but empty space and sunshine. It is a prime location for Solar

It will continue to be an energy juggernaut

Alberta's solar energy might make BC rich. The price of electricity while the sun is shining is very low. The combination of Alberta solar during the daytime and BC hydro at night is valuable, but it's the hydro that'll get the vast bulk of the dollars.

And Alberta is quite far from big electricity markets. It's far cheaper to put overbuild solar in places with poor sunshine than it is to build a HVDC line.

Plus Alberta will have to compete with Arizona and neighboring states, which have even more sunshine than Alberta does.

Alberta/Canada exports oil which earns it forex. Which allows it to buy stuff from other countries. Exporting solar electricity to earn forex will earn next to nothing.

During the summertime maybe? It's pretty far north to generate much from solar in the wintertime isn't it?

I'm not a solar expert, but even during winter we get tons of sun, just fewer hours per day

Northern Alberta would probably not do very good, but southern Alberta would be fine I'm sure

It's not hard to look this up. It's not just fewer hours per day, latitude matters a lot. If you look at yearly totals[1] Alberta looks better than BC but not better than any other neighbors to the South or East. All its neighbors also have plenty of space. Plus, total energy consumption (electricity plus gas) is probably highest in winter when solar input is lowest. I think it's hard to argue Alberta will become an exporter of solar-derived power.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_irradiance#/media/File:W...

In Calgary I rule-of-thumb 10x less solar energy in December than in June.

Not really, the level of production in the winter would be very low, and no batteries can fix that.

They have cheap gas though, and that could be used in the winter.

> the level of production in the winter would be very low, and no batteries can fix that

But overbuilding can. It's already a fairly common idea.

You’d need to overbuild by a ridiculous amount. I don’t think it’s currently close to viable.

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