Achi news desk-
Tens of thousands of Alberta households lost power Friday morning as a lack of power generation caused the province’s power system operator to temporarily cut off use.
At least seven large power plants produced little to no power early Friday afternoon, according to information on the Alberta Electric System Operator website.
“It’s really a combination of a lot of things that happened that put us in a rolling outage situation,” Marie-France Smeroden, vice president, network reliability operations at AESO, said at a news conference Friday afternoon.
AESO issued a grid alert at 6:49 a.m., meaning the district’s electrical system was under stress and needed to use emergency reserves.
The wind energy forecast overestimated the amount of wind power that would be generated Friday morning by 800 megawatts, Samroden said.
When the Keephills 2 natural gas plant west of Edmonton failed two hours later, AESO asked power distribution companies, including Edmonton’s Epcor and Calgary’s Enmax, to begin rotating outages for their customers, she said.
That move saved about 250 megawatts of power, she said.
Enmax shut off power to about 25,000 Calgary customers for about 14 minutes, a spokesperson said in an email.
Epcor knocked out power to about 20,000 customers across Edmonton for less than 30 minutes, a spokesman said.
Fortis Alberta said about 15,000 customers in rural areas lost power, from the northeastern community of Conklin to the southern Alberta village of Skiff.
It’s a problem Alberta hasn’t experienced in more than a decade, when a heat wave in July 2013 led to rolling down heat to save electricity.
Alberta relies on electricity imports from BC, Saskatchewan and Montana as demand outstrips production.
AESO also issued a grid alert on Wednesday evening this week due to unexpected power plant outages and high demand, Samroden said. Renewable energy generated a lot of electricity during that time, she said.
New plants, which are expected to produce a combined output of 1,800 MW, are expected to come online in the coming months.
Samroden said the AESO has some “short-term reductions” to bring more power online if needed before those plants start operating, which is expected on July 1.
“There’s always a bit of art to it, right? It’s not science,” she said, pointing to the challenge of prediction.
Avoiding future disruptions
Blake Shaffer, an associate professor of economics at the University of Calgary who specializes in electricity, called the brownouts “a much worse situation” than the power demand crisis Alberta experienced in January.
A combination of record cold, soaring electricity demand and several gas plants offline led Alberta to issue an emergency alert on Jan. 12, imploring the public to turn off appliances and lights to ease a heavy grid.
Friday’s challenge was the result of many plants going offline at the same time with little help from solar and wind power, Shaffer said. Any rapid loss of power from large plants is difficult for an electric system operator to manage, he said.
“People like to blame power system woes on their least favorite generation technology,” Shaffer said. “And the reality is that all generation technologies have reliability challenges.”
Brown rolling helps protect essential equipment from losing power, he said.
“It prevents this catastrophic outage just by reducing load — involuntarily, mind you — but in a controlled way,” Shafer said.
The operator released data in January showing that alerts are becoming more frequent.
Shaffer said there are steps the province can take to make the system more resilient, including allowing more power exchanges with neighboring provinces and states, and building a second connection with BC between the northern parts of the provinces.
He said Alberta could embrace smart metering and flexible demand, encouraging customers to use more power during off-peak times. The district can also encourage the construction of “peak plants” that can generate or distribute a lot of power, quickly, on short notice.
Speaking at an unrelated news conference Friday, Premier Danielle Smith pointed fingers at the design of Alberta’s electricity system, saying it’s too difficult to get a natural gas plant up and running quickly if wind and solar plants can’t produce predictable electricity. She said the market should encourage the gas plants to continue operating.
“It’s at the heart of everything we’ve been saying for the past year, that the system is broken,” Smith said. “It needs to be fixed. We need to be focused on basic load power and reliable and affordable energy.”
The government has tasked AESO with designing a revamped electricity market by this autumn, with aspirations for new regulations to come into effect in 2027.
Smith said one of the changes being looked at is a day-ahead market, where prices are set the day before electricity is generated and consumed.
Andrew Leach, an energy and environmental economist and professor at the University of Alberta, said the current market skews production because companies don’t want to produce more electricity when supplies are high and prices are low.
He said Alberta is too slow to adapt its electricity system to evolving environmental policies and technologies.
“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 said.
“If you’re going to stand up today and say, ‘Everyone knew this was coming,’ then the logical question is, why didn’t you act?”
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