Alberta's second grid alert in 2 days leads to rolling blackouts
The Alberta Electric System Operator (AESO) issued another grid alert on Friday, the second in the past two days, and ENMAX says it led them to shut down power to a number of Calgary communities.
As of 6:49 a.m., AESO declared the alert "due to a tight supply."
"Generation is slowly coming online, and we expect conditions to return to normal by 10 a.m.," AESO said.
During a grid alert, Albertans are asked to take energy saving measures such as turning off unnecessary lights and appliances, minimizing use of air conditioners and space heaters and using cold water to wash clothes as much of the energy used in washing machines goes to heating water.
ENMAX reported Friday morning that it had been instructed to put 'rolling blackouts' in place in several Calgary communities to help control power consumption.
As of 10 a.m., calls to ENMAX's info number has a recorded message saying the service is experiencing "a higher than normal call volume" due to the number of communities experiencing power outages.
"ENMAX crews are currently investigating to restore power and quickly and safely as possible," the message said.
'Built the system completely backwards'
Premier Danielle Smith, speaking at a school announcement in Brooks, said the issue in Alberta is that the electricity system's been built to favour renewable sources ahead of fossil fuels.
"We've built a structure that gives priority to wind and solar," she said. "When wind and solar don't materialize, it takes a couple of hours to power up our natural gas (plants).
"We've built the system completely backwards."
Smith says that system needs to be built on "reliable base load power" instead of relying on the forecasts of what wind and solar could generate each day.
Alberta used to have 90 per cent of its power generated by coal generators, Smith said, and it was easier for the system to manage.
With coal out of the picture, Smith said the province is in a balancing act.
"What we're trying to do is match our natural gas to jack up and go down on the basis of whether the sun jacks up and goes down and wind goes up and jacks down.
"It's creating these gaps, which are filled by either higher spikes in prices – and people are seeing that on their power bill – or we're ending up with this system instability."
Smith said the issues Alberta has seen with its grid alerts and brownouts underlines the fact that the province can't build a system that only consists of wind and solar.
"It just isn't possible."
Looking to other jurisdictions
Smith said her government is looking at a number of other options to solve Alberta's power crunch, including the possibility of tapping more heavily into the grids of its neighbours.
"It's not just with B.C., it's also with Saskatchewan and certainly Montana," she said.
However, there is an issue with accessing electricity generated with B.C., Smith said.
"It's not really a fair relationship. When they buy it from us, they buy it at zero power and when we buy it from them, we're competing with California, which can see prices go up to $5,000 per megawatt hour," she said.
"So we don't actually have an agreement with B.C. that would give us priority."
'Unexpected generation loss'
At 8:12 p.m. on Wednesday, the agency said an "unexpected generation loss" also led to a grid alert.
University of Calgary economics professor Blake Shaffer, who worked for a decade and a half as an energy trader, said the province needs a more flexible system, inlcuding pricing that helps shift demand to off-peak hours, so-called "peaker plants" that can provide short-term bursts of power.
He also said the system connecting Alberta's grid to other jurisdictions needs work, both to increase the amount of power that can be brought in, but also the self-imposed price cap that leaves Alberta unable to outbid American states that are sometimes bidding on that same power.
"This is an outage story," Shaffer said. "So what you have right now is you have several large power plants offline for maintenance. The Sheppard gas plant in Calgary, the currently biggest power plant in the province, is offline.
"You had several very large 'baseload power plants' suddenly go offline, over the span of 24 hours," he added, "at different times -- and that is very hard for a grid operator to manage here."
Friday afternoon, AESO said that on Thursday night, they expected to have 800 MW more power than needed, but forecasts changed overnight, and 900 MW of renewable energy didn't come through.
To compound matters, one natural gas plant "tripped" off-line unexpectedly, robbing 400 MW of power from the grid, causing blackouts to ensue.
That all came on top of the fact that the Shepard Power Plant in Calgary, which is the province's largest, was already down for scheduled maintenance.
"We had a bunch of generation that either had some planned outages and others that were just returning to service due to being off yesterday," said AESO vice-president of grid reliability, Marie-France Samaroden. "And so those take a while to ramp up."
AESO said that disruption was caused by a number of factors, but an "unexpected outage of thermal generation led to tight conditions."
A full list of conservation tips can be found on the AESO website.
The Smith government is expected to share further details on electricity agreements with neighbouring jurisdictions in the coming months.
CTVNews.ca Top Stories
Parents of infant who died in wrong-way crash on Ontario's Hwy. 401 were in same vehicle
Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit has released new details about a wrong-way collision in Whitby on Monday night that claimed the lives of four people.
Three Quebec men from same family father hundreds of children
Three men in Quebec from the same family have fathered more than 600 children.
Jurors in Trump hush money trial hear recording of pivotal call on plan to buy affair story
Jurors in the hush money trial of Donald Trump heard a recording Thursday of him discussing with his then-lawyer and personal fixer a plan to purchase the silence of a Playboy model who has said she had an affair with the former president.
B.C. mayor stripped of budget, barred from committees over Indigenous residential schools book
A British Columbia mayor has been censured by city council – stripping him of his travel and lobbying budgets and removing him from city committees – for allegedly distributing a book that questions the history of Indigenous residential schools in Canada.
Captain sentenced to 4 years for criminal negligence in fiery deaths of 34 aboard scuba boat
A federal judge on Thursday sentenced a scuba dive boat captain to four years in custody and three years supervised release for criminal negligence after 34 people died in a fire aboard the vessel.
New scam targets Canada Carbon Rebate recipients
Fake text message and email campaigns trying to get money and information out of unsuspecting Canadian taxpayers have started circulating, just months after the federal government rebranded the carbon tax rebate the Canada Carbon Rebate.
President Joe Biden calls Japan and India 'xenophobic' nations that do not welcome immigrants
President Joe Biden has called Japan and India “xenophobic” countries that do not welcome immigrants, lumping the two with adversaries China and Russia as he tried to explain their economic circumstances and contrasted the four with the U.S. on immigration.
Universities grapple with the complicated politics of campus encampments
Montreal police are facing pressure to move in and dismantle a pro-Palestinian encampment on McGill University campus on Thursday, as a growing number of universities across this country grapple with the tough decision of how to handle the protests.
Police order B.C. woman who praised Hamas not to protest for 5 months, says her group
A pro-Palestinian activist group says its international co-ordinator, who was arrested in a Vancouver hate-crime investigation, was released with an order not to attend any protests for the next five months.