No strong winds that blow baseload: why Alberta will stay fossil-fueled for the foreseeable future.
Alberta is typical among jurisdictions that are mostly fossil fired but try to respond to that uncomfortable fact by shoehorning renewable energy into their grids and then trumpeting that fact. This only leads to higher probability of frequency events (see the standard-deviation bands in the “Alberta Generation and Uncertainty plot” in Data visualization), which is not what you want when you’re trying to convince more people to electrify.
All jurisdictions have a baseload power demand, which is simply the minimum grid-wide demand over a time period. Alberta’s baseload through the 2025 holiday season was 10,251 MW.
I must emphasize what that means, because many people seem to breeze past it as they tout their favourite form of power generation. Alberta’s 10,251 MW baseload demand means there was not a single second during the 2025 holidays that Alberta’s electrical demand fell below 10,251 MW. Nor was there a single second in the same time period that Alberta’s supply—supply is total net generation minus the net of imports and exports—fell below 10,251 MW. That’s the critical other side of the power equation: supply must always equal demand. Always.
Well, there are components of supply that do not correlate with demand. Wind is one, solar is another. Yet demand is always met by supply. That means sources of supply other than wind and solar performed the critical task of ensuring overall supply met demand every second of every day. Wind and solar actually impeded the performance of that task. The supply that met demand had to work harder because of wind and solar. That added cost to the grid, which of course Albertans will cover when they pay their electrical bills.
It’s easy to see which classes of generation most meet baseload demand. Those are the ones with the flat output curves over time, and small standard deviations. In Alberta, these are the gas-fired cogeneration units.
Alberta demand over the same period, as mentioned, never fell below 10,251 MW. The 24-hour rolling standard deviation of demand was 455 MW on average. That of wind plus solar, whose combined output never exceeded 4,200 MW, was almost always above 1,000 MW. Wind+Solar’s high std is a measure of the work that other sources and sinks of Alberta power had to do to ensure supply exactly met demand. It is also a measure of the uncertainty, hour to hour, the the Alberta grid operator faced as it managed supply to meet demand.
There is not one single electric power user in the province of Alberta that can use wind and solar power to accomplish what they need. Many may claim they do, but it is very easy to demonstrate that they do not. There are honest users of wind and solar, some of them understandably former users, that learned first hand that neither wind nor solar nor both combined provide power that suits their own demand profile.
Alberta is not unique in this respect. No user of baseload power anywhere meets its electrical demand using wind or solar or both. All use sources of supply that show the output characteristics of the fossil fired generation on Alberta’s grid, the nuclear and hydro generation on Ontario’s, or the mostly-hydro on Quebec’s.
Alberta has very limited hydro potential, as you can see. What hydro is available for power generation in the province, Alberta is already using. So if Alberta wants to truly decarbonize its grid, its only option is nuclear. However, for political and ideological reasons, Alberta is unwilling to implement nuclear. So its grid will remain mostly fossil powered.
Are you a user of baseload electric power? Or a user of baseload heat power? Are you looking to reduce Scope 1, Scope 2, or Scope 3 emissions from your use of baseload power? Are you unsure of how to accomplish this, or whether to even try? I can help spare you some headaches as you work through your decisions. Feel free to reach out.
The utility, the gas station, and the gas company: the same company
Municipalities use tremendous amounts of energy, from three broad types of organizations.
- Electric utilities provide the electrical energy that runs all things electrical.
- Gas stations (which are the retail-facing part of the oil industry) dispense liquid energy in the form of gasoline and diesel.
- Gas companies—not to be confused with gas stations—deliver gaseous energy, i.e., natural gas, to provide heat for homes and businesses.
In the electrified future, the electric utility, which today provides less than a third of the energy municipalities use through the year, will provide most of it. This has profound implications for municipal finance and administration; most electric utilities are owned by their host municipalities.
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