Ironic for Alberta to be leading in solar projects
This province is now the country's fastest-growing market for the sun's energy
How's this for irony: Despite what the rest of the country may think about Alberta, this province is now the fastest-growing market for solar energy in Canada.
What makes it even more ironic is it's Alberta's deregulated electricity market — so detested by the Alberta NDP — that's behind Alberta increasingly soaking up the sun to make electricity.
That popping sound you hear is not the crackle of electricity but the fragile ideologies of woke, anti-free market, green socialists exploding.
Robert Hornung, president and CEO of the Canadian Renewable Energy Association, said the declining cost and improved efficiency of solar is helping to increase its uptake. “But it also really highlights the unique structure of the Alberta market within the Canadian context and how that provides Alberta with a pretty unique competitive advantage at this time to secure this type of investment,” Hornung said during a recent telephone interview.
Hornung said that if a corporation in Saskatchewan, for instance, wants to buy solar power and reduce its costs or boost its ESG (environmental, social and governance) score, the only organization it can buy power from is Saskpower.
“In the Alberta context, because it's a deregulated market, there are all sorts of people that someone can approach to sell them that power, and that makes it very competitive as well and really opens up opportunities for innovative bilateral contracting between these companies and renewable energy providers.
“In many parts of the world, particularly in the U.S., where these kinds of markets are more common, that corporate procurement of renewables is a major driver right now of investment in this technology,” said Hornung.
Currently, Alberta has more than 6,500 on-site solar installations for a total of 90 MW of capacity, as well as seven operating utility-scale solar farms, totalling 174 MW of capacity.
But it's what's in the works now that is really electrifying for Alberta's renewable energy scene.
“Alberta is now the fastest-growing market for solar energy in Canada,” said Hornung.
Canada's largest solar farm started operating just last week in Claresholm, producing 132 MW of electricity. The project is owned by Capstone Energy and Obton A/S — one of Europe's largest investors in solar.
That project, however, will be dwarfed by the 465 MW Travers Solar Project by Greengate Power Corp. of Calgary, to be located eight kilometres southwest of the Village of Lomond in Vulcan County, and is expected to be fully operational by the fourth quarter of 2022.
To put these numbers in context, a 100 MW solar plant generates enough electricity to power 36,000 homes.
And on Monday, Amazon — the world's largest corporate buyer of renewable energy — announced that it will buy electricity from Greengate.
Alberta also ranks third in installed wind energy capacity in Canada with 1,815 MW, behind Ontario (5,436 MW) and Quebec (3,896 MW), and “is now the fastest-growing wind energy market in Canada with several hundred megawatts of projects currently under construction or getting ready to start construction,” said Hornung.
He said the federal government's budget released on Monday, which provides $40,000 zero-interest loans, might see even more Canadian families take the leap into having rooftop solar on their homes.
What's more, the federal Conservative Party has also finally put a price on carbon with its new low carbon savings account that will allow consumers to collect the fees they spend on carbon in an account that can then be spent on approved green technologies such as solar panels.
Will these new incentives make a difference in the number of Canadians seeking solar panels for their homes? “Absolutely,” said Hornung. “They will help to accelerate deployment of these technologies, technologies that we have a lot of evidence that there's growing public interest in wanting to explore them and make the economics work. I think that's very, very positive.”
Hornung said a rooftop system that has the capacity to produce enough electricity over the course of a year to match a typical home's annual electricity demand would likely cost between $15,000 to $20,000 to install, but that's all dependent on numerous factors including the shape of the roof and whether the roof slants toward the south. Also, batteries have improved so much, homes and businesses can store the power to be used later in the evening, when the sun is no longer shining, or sell it back into the grid when the cost of electricity is higher.
Obviously, one of the reasons Albertans are keen to take up solar is Alberta's grid is carbon intensive.
In a province such as Quebec, for instance, where 98 per cent of the power comes from hydroelectricity, the impact of producing solar on your rooftop will be less than it would be in Alberta.
“There's a number of ways that those sort of distributed energy resources, which is what we call things like rooftop solar, can provide benefits,” said Hornung.
“One incentive is reducing greenhouse gas emissions ... and another is to avoid the need to invest in new generation and transmission infrastructure. So, if you're actually producing a significant amount of power, for example on people's roofs or on the roofs of businesses or shopping malls, you need less power to be coming from a big generating station, whether it's renewable or fossil fuel or whatever.
“You also need less investment in transmission lines to carry that power so you can generate savings across the system in that way, and that will be very important in a world where we're talking about things like net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.”
Alberta's UCP provincial government remains opposed to a carbon tax for homeowners and individuals.
“We continue to be opposed to carbon taxes because we think they just punish people for living normal lives, for filling up their gas tank and for heating their homes, we don't think that's an effective environmental policy,” Premier Jason Kenney said Tuesday.
“Our focus is on technological changes ... on the massive upscaling of technology like carbon capture utilization and storage, and we're happy to see some commitment in (Monday's) federal budget to expand critical CCUS technology,” he said.
Ultimately, Alberta's free market is making the growth in solar doable, and there's a sunny bit of irony to that.