[bryanlarsen]

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.

[SketchySeaBeast]

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.

[bryanlarsen]

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.

[pfdietz]

> 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.

[bryanlarsen]

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).

[pfdietz]

For seasonal storage, it would be either an e-fuel (like hydrogen) or bulk storage of thermal energy (basically, artificial geothermal). The latter could produce very hot rock at rather shallow depth, yet still have thermal time constants of many years.

[bryanlarsen]

Both of those are more expensive than pumped storage.

[SketchySeaBeast]

I like this idea, but I disagree with this:

> 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.

[adrianN]

There’s a huge difference between load shifting a couple of hours and seasonal storage

[SketchySeaBeast]

That's why I didn't specify it needed to be seasonal, but it does need to be stored, as a lot of that load isn't shifting. At 7pm on a -35 day there is zero solar generation, but every furnace in the province is on and people are doing their evening cooking and cleaning.

[bryanlarsen]

You're right, you said "as much storage as production". That's actually a very tiny amount of storage. Generally a "24hr" solar plant for California usage patterns has about 4-6Wh of storage and about 1W of discharge per watt of solar plant. Alberta will likely need ~2X that for daily load shifting during the winter. Seasonal storage would require a couple of orders of magnitude more.

[Marsymars]

I'd note that actual -35 days are pretty rare. Per Environment Canada Climate Normal Data from 1991 to 2020, Edmonton averages only 2.5 days per year with a minimum temperature below -30.

[jfim]

> Alberta doesn't lack for hills, which is what's needed to build pumped storage which is what's cheapest for seasonal storage.

From what I understand, BC has a lot of hydro dams. I wonder if there is a way to use them for pumped storage.

[SketchySeaBeast]

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.

[ryandrake]

> 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.

[SketchySeaBeast]

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.

[KennyBlanken]

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.

[SketchySeaBeast]

But it is an issue when Calgary only sees 8 hours of daylight in the deepest depths of winter.