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.
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.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“It is truly a combination of many things that occurred that got us into the rotating outage situation,” Marie-France Samaroden, vice-president, grid reliability operations at AESO, said at a news conference Friday afternoon.
It’s a problem Alberta hasn’t experienced in more than a decade, when a July 2013 heat wave led to rolling brownouts to conserve power.
AESO also issued a grid alert on Wednesday evening this week due to unexpected outages at power plants and high demand, Samaroden said.
Blake Shaffer, an associate professor of economics at the University of Calgary specializing in electricity, called the brownouts a “far more serious situation” than the power demand crisis Alberta experienced in January.
A combination of record cold, surging power demand and some gas plants offline led Alberta to issue an emergency alert Jan. 12, pleading with the public to turn off appliances and lights to relieve an overtaxed grid.
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.
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