Independent analysts pointed to sudden shutdowns at several coal and gas plants and called for more flexible grid planning, while Premier Danielle Smith immediately blamed renewables, after about 60,000 households in Alberta temporarily lost power in rolling blackouts across much of the province Friday.
The Alberta Electricity System Operator (AESO) issued a grid alert at 6:49 AM local time after a wind power forecast overestimated production by 800 megawatts, then the 395-MW Keephills 2 gas plant west of Edmonton unexpectedly tripped offline, CBC reports. The brownouts lasted 14 minutes in Calgary, 30 minutes in Edmonton, an unspecified length of time across various rural communities, and reduced demand by about 250 MW.
The brownouts came less than 48 hours after AESO issued a separate grid alert due to “unexpected outages at power plants and high demand,” CBC adds, citing a spokesperson for the grid operator.
The multiple alerts were “a reminder that Alberta must improve the flexibility of its grid, so it can store more energy for emergencies and quickly import energy from other provinces,” the Calgary-based Pembina Institute wrote on LinkedIn Friday.
Electricity system specialist Blake Shaffer, an associate professor of economics at the University of Calgary, told CBC the situation last week was “far more serious” than the mid-January emergency alert on the Alberta grid, brought on after two gas plants went offline during a winter cold snap. This time, multiple power plants were simultaneously out of service, and solar and wind couldn’t make up the difference—a situation that Shaffer noted would be difficult for any grid operator to manage.
“People like to assign blame on power system woes to their least favourite generation technology,” he said. “And the reality is, all generation technologies have reliability challenges.”
With the AESO reporting that grid alerts are occurring more frequently, Shaffer suggested practical steps the province could take to add flexibility to the system, including better interties with adjacent provinces and U.S. states, smart metering, flexible demand, incentives for consumers to use off-peak power, and construction of “peaker” plants to handle the load when the system is at maximum.
Pembina took a similar tack last January in an analysis of the January grid emergency.
University of Alberta energy and environmental economist Andrew Leach said the Alberta power system has been too slow to adapt, resulting in a skewed market where producers don’t want to generate more power when supply is high and prices are low.
“It’s no longer good enough to say, ‘Sorry, there were policies that were put in place seven or eight years ago that we didn’t agree with,’” Leach told CBC. “If you are going to stand up today and say, ‘Everyone knew this was coming,’ then the logical question is, why didn’t you act?”
Smith took the opportunity to pin the blame on renewables, telling an unrelated news conference Friday that the market should encourage gas plants to stay in operation. “This is at the heart of everything that we’ve been saying for the last year, that the system is broken,” she said. “It needs to be repaired. We need to be focused on base load power and reliable and affordable energy.”
Except that gas and coal plants have been at the centre of Alberta’s recent grid reliability problems, and a study by Clean Energy Canada early last year concluded that solar and wind with storage were already less expensive than new gas plants in both Alberta and Ontario.
While Alberta debated the causes of and takeaways from another grid alert, power utilities from Texas to Maine were preparing to treat Monday’s solar eclipse as a learning experience—even though they stood to lose between half and more than 90% of their solar-generated electricity.
“Grid operators have been preparing for the solar eclipse for months and say they are fully equipped to compensate for the loss of sun power,” Politico reported Friday. “But the predictable celestial occurrence is offering power providers a test run for unpredictable sun-blocking events, such as winter storms and wildfire smoke so thick it blankets the sky.”
“In the future, you might see something that has the same effect as an eclipse, but you may only know about it a day ahead of time,” said Barry Mather, chief engineer at the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
