Achi news desk-
Tens of thousands of Alberta homes lost power Friday morning as a shortage of electricity generation prompted the province’s electrical system operator to temporarily cut use.
At least seven major power stations were generating little or no electricity early Friday afternoon, according to information on the Alberta Electric System Operator website.
“It’s really a combination of many things that happened that got us into the rotating outage situation,” said Marie-France Samaroden, vice president, grid reliability operations at AESO, at a news conference Friday afternoon.
AESO issued a grid alert at 6:49 am, meaning the province’s electricity system is under stress and needs to use emergency reserves.
A wind power forecast overestimated the amount of wind power to be produced 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, he said.
That move saved about 250 MW of power, he said.
Enmax knocked out power to about 25,000 Calgary customers for about 14 minutes, a spokesperson said in an email.
Epcor shut down power to about 20,000 customers across Edmonton for less than 30 minutes, a spokesperson said.
Fortis Alberta said about 15,000 customers in rural areas lost power, from the northeastern community of Conklin to the southern Alberta hamlet 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 brownouts to conserve power.
Alberta relies on power imports from BC, Saskatchewan and Montana, as demand outstrips production.
AESO also issued a grid warning on Wednesday evening this week due to unexpected power plant outages and high demand, Samaroden said. Renewable energy was producing enough power at the time, he said.
New plants, expected to produce a combined output of 1,800 MW, are expected to come online in the next few months.
Samaroden said AESO has some “short-term mitigations” to bring more power online if needed before those plants start running, which is expected on July 1.
“There’s always a bit of an art to this, right? It’s not science,” he said, pointing to the challenge of forecasting.
Avoid future brownouts
Blake Shaffer, an associate professor of economics at the University of Calgary who specializes in electricity, called the brownouts “a much more serious situation” than the power demand crisis Alberta experienced in January.
A combination of record cold, increased demand for power and some gas plants offline led Alberta to issue an emergency alert Jan. 12, imploring the public to turn off appliances and lights to relieve an overtaxed grid.
Friday’s challenge was the result of several plants being offline at the same time with little help from solar and wind, Shaffer said. Any rapid loss of power from large plants is difficult for an electricity system operator to manage, he said.
“People like to blame power system woes on their favorite least-generation technology,” Shaffer said. “And the reality is, every generation of technology has reliability challenges.”
Rolling brownouts help protect critical equipment from losing power, he said.
“It avoids that catastrophic sudden blackout by simply reducing load — involuntarily, mind you — but in a controlled manner,” Shaffer said.
The operator released data in January showing that the warnings were becoming more frequent.
Shaffer said there are steps the province could take to make the system more flexible, including allowing more power exchanges with neighboring provinces and territories, and building a second intertie with BC between the northern parts of the provinces.
He said Alberta could embrace smart metering and flexible demand, incentivizing customers to use more power at off-peak times. The province could also encourage the construction of “peak plants” that can produce or distribute a lot of power, quickly, at 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 fire up a natural gas plant quickly if wind and solar plants can’t produce anticipated power. He said the market should encourage gas plants to continue operating.
“This is at the core of everything we’ve been saying over the last year, which is that the system is broken,” Smith said. “It needs to be repaired. We need to focus on baseload power and reliable and affordable energy.”
The government has tasked AESO with designing a restructured energy market by this fall, with ambitions for new regulations to come into force in 2027.
Smith said one change being considered is a day-ahead market, where prices are set a day before the electricity is produced and used.
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 power when supply is high and prices are low.
He said Alberta has been too slow to adapt its electricity system to evolving environmental policies and technologies.
“It’s no longer good enough to say, ‘I’m 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, ‘Everybody knew this was coming,’ then the logical question is, why didn’t you act?”
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