Thread by @ScottLuft

The very low capacity value/credit of Alberta's industrial wind turbine potential is well known to those who follow such things.
Far fewer follow such things than pump up excitement about vRES.

https://twitter.com/andrew_leach/status/1092469228525899782

looks like it's a high demand day in Alberta.

Maybe the highest:

https://twitter.com/bcshaffer/status/1092421510638129152

The core mission of the Pembina centre of the piously insane (a prep school for inept Ministry of Environment et cetera chief-of-staffs) requires them to immediately promote wires to connect to someplace that might be windy:

https://twitter.com/S_HastingsSimon/status/1092462320519794700

"Alberta's wind has the worst capacity value of any region in the [Pan-Canadian Wind Integration Study]"
-and my work indicated it's capacity value was even lower than that

coldair.luftonline.net/2017/11/albert…

I'll note that the Alberta system operator, @AESO, does not report negative net generation by facility: "0" means at most nothing, but Alberta's wind turbines are probably a net draw on its grid this morning.

@threadreaderapp please unroll.

icymi,
Alberta's system operator data has shown its wind resources AWOL today.

currently 2 MW
AIL (load) 11,368 MW
Record AIL? (was 11,473 MW as of 2017/12/28)

the occasion deserved a power BI view (will update every 3 hours): app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjo…

just checked AESO figures; demand is still fairly high, and wind is still sucking -uhhhhh - itself.

Wind still tucked in avoiding Alberta's cold this morning.

eyeballing AESO Feb 4 reporting Alberta's 1445 MW of industrial (I'm being too kind) wind turbine capacity produced 11MWh of output.
all day.
I'll ignore 880+ turbines were a load on the grid of up to 40 MW, and assume net output was 11 (cuz' kind).

capacity factor .03%

going back one more day to find where wind dropped below 50 MW at hour 20 - and it hasn't risen above that meager 3% c.f. 42 hours later.

I hear grifters say things like, "with 2 hrs storage wind is competitive but we could even do 6" as if that's meaningful.

it isn't.

different day,
same doldrum.

I see no evidence Calgary has idled its Ctrains during the now 55+ hours without any substantial net wind generation.

should probably stop claiming it's 100% renewable powered - unless they've found a quick way to make oil and gas from wood and sun

Alberta internal demand breaks above 11,000 MW today, while ephemeral wind power remains insubstantial - for the 60th consecutive hour.

lesson: wind should never be compared to firm generators, but only to the cost of the fuel it may displace at those generators.

and after ~70 hours the 1,445 wind fleet pushes past the 50MW output mark.

Maybe Calgary's C-train will be able to transport people again soon :-;

different perspective from a Linkedin AB wind lull post:

"The cost to provide enough storage for one cold winter day in Alberta would be C$69 billion.
...
Next to storage, the cost of wind almost becomes a rounding error."

linkedin.com/pulse/winds-wi…

funny - on the 1st day wind generation pushes above 30% of its capacity, AB's used to it not being around and mostly it's exported!