A wind power forecast overestimated the amount of wind power to be generated Friday morning by 800 megawatts, Samaroden said.
When the Keephills 2 natural gas plant west of Edmonton tripped offline two hours later, AESO asked power distribution companies, including Edmonton’s Epcor and Calgary’s Enmax, to begin rotating outages to their customers, she said.
So the wind turbines still work, there is just not enough of them, but the petro-chemical powered plant, which Alberta continues to tell us is the only real way to supply a grid, failed.
Oh, Jesus, this is from January.
Yeah, we got issued an emergency alert to drop unnecessary power usage in Edmonton and there was a cool graph that epcor I believe posted later showing how edmontons power usage dropped a shit tonne as people got the alert.
I think only a couple specific areas had brown outs, we definitely didn’t get them in my area.
No, this is from Friday. The bit mentioning the January brownouts was making a comparison to those of yesterday.
Odd, I’m in Edmonton and never got the emergency broadcast all day and night yesterday.
Never heard anything about brown outs, maybe my specific area didn’t get included in the rollouts?
Alberta still primarily uses gas for heating so unlike our southern friends, brown outs impact us a lot less.
I was in one of the areas that was hit by the rotating brown outs.
Sure would have been nice to get an EAS alert warning to reduce consumption first. There weren’t any.
Andrew Leach, an energy and environmental economist and professor at the University of Alberta, said the current market is skewing production, because companies don’t want to generate more power when supply is high and prices are low.
I’m curious how this jives with the rest of the article. Weren’t there a bunch of unplanned outages going on at that time?
Interesting how often they try and bring up solar and wind forecasts, dispite both being a small portion of Alberta’s generation capacity, for the second large outage that’s been caused by their ‘reliable’ natural gas plants that make up three quarters of Alberta’s current generation failing. I feel like they should probably be taking some lessons from the provinces that not only manage to keep the lights on, but strangely do it with far, far less gas.
And no, it’s not just a lack of hydro.
