Power wasted as Alberta bakes

Closer integration long overdue for B.c.-alberta electrical grids

Earlier this month, near record-high temperatures contributed to rolling brownouts in Alberta as residents turned up their air conditioners. Six generators — four powered by coal and two by natural gas — went off-line at the same time as power demand reached a record-setting peak load of nearly 10,000 megawatts.

Meanwhile, BC Hydro was planning to spill “excess” water over its biggest dam, water that might best be viewed as electricity never to be generated. How is it that Canada’s westernmost province can be dumping potential energy while just a hop, skip and jump away to the east, the lights were going dim? The answer is simple: the B.C. and Alberta electrical grids are connected via transmission lines that are wholly inadequate to allow electricity to be transferred back and forth at the scale now needed.

Existing wires limit Alberta’s ability to import electricity from B.C. to about 570 megawatts in any hour. On July 9, the day of the rolling brownouts, BC Hydro sent more than 500 megawatts per hour of electricity to Alberta, close to the maximum but not enough to meet the additional demand. And with apologies to Ian Tyson, there were no four strong winds either: the high pressure cell that parked itself over the prairies left turbines turning sluggishly — on average only 37 megawatts of wind power fed into the Alberta grid per hour July 9.

To paraphrase the English writer and poet Walter Savage Landor, “heat sharpens the mind,” and in the shadow of that hot day, we need to turn our technical skills toward doing things differently here in the west. It’s time to explore vigorously the benefits of closer integration of the B.C.-Alberta electrical grids, the first step of which should be dramatic- ally upgrading interprovincial transmission capacity.

There are hosts of other benefits from which both provinces would profit. Greater grid integration would support significantly higher penetration of western Canadian wind power, particularly in power-hungry winter, thereby reducing Alberta’s dependence on fossil-fuel-generated electricity while reducing overall carbon-dioxide emissions. It would also improve stability of the provincial grids while allowing operating efficiencies to be realized on both sides of the border, and those efficiency gains could reduce net production costs for energy.

What’s more, Alberta’s summer electricity requirements and availability of water in B.C. to supply hydropower are both likely to change as this century marches on. Climate models predict progressively hotter and drier summers in central and southern Alberta, while central and northern B.C. is expected to get gradually wetter.

Will B.C. still have to spill water from its Peace River reservoirs some summer — decades from now — while air conditioning demand peaks in Alberta, or will the provinces work co-operatively to hang the wires that will allow electricity supply to be better matched with demand?

If the past is a guide, there is much work to do to promote a level of co-operation that will allow the obvious benefits to be realized. BC Hydro, a Crown corporation exclusive to British Columbia, and Alberta Electric System Operator (AESO) which represents more than 160 private-sector suppliers of electricity to the Alberta grid, are culturally different bodies with little history of collaborating.

Indeed, AESO recently requested that the amount of available transmission capacity between B.C. and Alberta be reduced to allow for imports and exports via the new Montana-Alberta Transmission Line. This request has been poorly received by current users of the B.C.-Alberta line as making this change is economically inefficient.

None of us in the west benefit from the existing limited collaboration. Rather than decreasing scope for interprovincial exchange of electricity, Canada’s western provinces should be advocating jointly for greater transmission capacity.

Getting that built, however, will require recognition at the highest levels that hanging more wires across the B.C.Alberta border will let B.C. make better use of its water while helping to keep Albertans cool in future summers.

Six generators went off-line as power demand reached a peak.

SUPPLIED “Excess” water, which authors Amy Sopinka and Tom Pedersen describe as potential energy never to be generated, is spilled over the W. A.C. Bennett Dam in northern British Columbia.