Their current source of income. Alberta has more sun and more wind than any place else in Canada so renewables could be quite profitable to them in the future, but what government cares about anything further out than the next election? Alberta also used to be the only place in Canada where you could just build a solar power plant and hook it up to the grid with minimal red tape so had a massive advantage in terms of number of solar jobs.
Also Alberta is next door to BC which has vast sources of hydro-electric power so it could easily trade solar & wind power to BC when the sun is shining and/or the wind is blowing in exchange for hydro power when it isn't.
I agree. The times they are a-changing, but we have a particularly regressive government at the moment that is actively blocking renewable production. The unfortunate bit about having the most sun is that during winter we still don't get much of it. It seems to me we need as much storage as we do production.
Alberta isn't very cloudy in the wintertime, the reduced insolation is mostly due to lower angles and shorter days. AFAICT, winter sunshine is more than a third of summer sunshine in Alberta. In Europe the number is often 10%.
It's cheaper to size production for winter sunshine than to build a lot of storage. AKA it's cheaper to put down 3X as many panels than to build seasonal storage.
Alberta doesn't lack for hills, which is what's needed to build pumped storage which is what's cheapest for seasonal storage.
> It's cheaper to size production for winter sunshine than to build a lot of storage.
Which means enormous amounts of surplus power in the summer (even with PV angled to optimize winter production.) So storage doesn't have to go far to be worthwhile, and in particular with nearly free input energy it doesn't have to be very efficient.
It doesn't have to be very efficient, but it is has to be cheap. Batteries aren't cheap but they discharge every night so their cost is spread out over ~365 days and their cost becomes feasible.
Pumped storage is ~10% the cost of batteries, but if used as seasonal storage so they only discharge once per year that makes them ~36X as expensive. Especially in Alberta where they're competing against Natural Gas which is also approximately free (it's often flared off as a waste gas from oil wells rather than captured and sold because the value is less than the cost of capture).
> It's cheaper to size production for winter sunshine than to build a lot of storage.
This still doesn't work - storage is mandatory. Winter peak loads, which are often the most power that the grid will require all year, are before and after the sun.
They do use them as storage, but more passively - When others sources of production are high BC slows their consumption, allowing them to build up greater reserves in their dams.
> The times they are a-changing, but we have a particularly regressive government at the moment that is actively blocking renewable production.
I guess Canadian politics are not unlike US politics in the area of energy production. You'd think that most of the jobs in non-renewable energy could just transition over to jobs in renewable energy and everyone's happy. But sadly, like everything, the energy source itself has been politicized. The left favors renewables regardless of the pros and cons and the right favors non-renewables regardless of the pros and cons, so it looks like yet another ideological battle rather than a battle over concrete things like jobs and the environment.
I think there's simply not enough jobs in renewables - once a solar farm is operational maintenance is a fraction of production, unlike the oil sands or rigs which require constant human intervention.
Winter is not an issue for solar because solar panel efficiency is better when the panel is cooler. A panel blazing away in Florida is actually losing quite a bit of efficiency because of how hot the panel is; much farther north even with less light, the panels can produce more.
Is really not. I don't think there are any numbers justifying narrative, and numbers presented in this thread prove it. The dependency is really just Albertan advertising.
Canada's economy is built on primary resource extraction and production in general but would have done fine without the tar sands. Most of the oil money leaves the country; the money that stays mainly fuels self-serving private agendas, pressuring other parts of the economy and stuffing politics. This could have been averted had a solution like Norway's state oil fund been adopted but would have been too socialist a measure for the empire to tolerate.
Yep. The Alberta government has their head stuck in the sand (pun intended) around renewables as they existentially threaten their current economy. They have repeatedly shown that they’d rather double down than try and diversify.
To boost your point - that is literally what the Alberta government has been doing. They instituted a seven-month renewable's pause to "evaluate" them (evaluating renewables in 2023????), which introduced a lot of investor uncertainty[1]. When the pause was over they introduced rules around preventing wind turbines and solar from being developed in areas to prevent obstruction in "viewscapes"[2].
Methane burned for electricity is better than coal no doubt. But methane that escapes into the atmosphere is way worse than CO2 in the nearish term. And not every extraction company is super thrilled about proper containment.
Released methane is 27-30 times worse than released CO2 per unit mass measured over the next 100 years of warming [1]. Burning methane releases 1 CO2 molecule per CH4 molecule (CH4 + 2O2 -> CO2 + 2H2O), or 2.743 it's mass in CO2 [2].
To make up the difference in CO2 you'd have to be losing ~5% of the methane to the atmosphere along the way from extraction to burning.
Do you have reason to believe anywhere near that much is lost?
"Worse than coal" has set a very low bar for how not-bad methane needs to be.
That study puts it at 9.4% of gross production. Many other sources exist which put 5% at a very realistic number. Fossil gas is dirt cheap, invisible, and leaks are large self-reported, so the companies have 0 reasons to properly test for or stop leaks.
I am under the impression that methane levels in the atmosphere have spiked significantly in the last decade or two, and the origin is not really understood. Extraction could be one source, but if it's from another source, that could be more bad news as it would mean that some tipping point has possibly been triggered. I'm far from an expert on this though.
Most of the consciously vented is flared. However, the infrastructure leaks like mad and there have been no incentives incentive for the companies to fix it, it's a cheap invisible gas after all with almost all reporting being self reporting.
>No? Methane produces less than half the CO2 per kwh than coal.
The important metric is CO2e, not CO2. Critically, CO2e includes measurements of methane emissions.
The problem with methane is that the methane leaks are self-reported, by an industry who have every incentive to under-report and who have a history of massively underreporting. Methane isn't clearly better than coal, and might well be worse.