Alberta puts cap on wind projects… Big deal
In a move that the anti-wind crowd is sure to celebrate, Alberta’s electricity system operator has indefinitely capped the amount of wind development in the oil-rich province to 900 megawatts, or about 8 per cent of grid capacity, citing a lack of adequate transmission infrastructure and a fear that too much instability will be introduced to the system beyond that amount.
What the anti-wind folks don’t seem to appreciate is that the pro-wind folks understand the intregation difficulties associated with adding wind to an electricity system. Just because, at a certain point in time, a system can only handle so much wind doesn’t mean wind technology is garbage or a scam or uneconomic or whatever else they like to call it. The fact is, it can be handled up to a certain threshold — we’ll take what we can get. After that, yes, the entire structure of the grid has to be adjusted to accept more wind, and new technologies such as utility-scale storage must be experimented with to “firm up” wind power. This is why the Ontario Power Authority has hired GE Energy to study this issue, so that we have an action plan in place as Ontario gets closer to this threshold — and believe me, it’s got a long way to go.
So is this cap in Alberta bad news for the wind industry? No, not really. It may be a tad conservative, but it’s not at all surprising. And I wouldn’t read too much into the word “indefinite.” Every jurisdiction has a right to slow down development of something so that it can be more thoroughly studied, and no one has ever lost their job by taking a slow, cautious and balanced approached. That’s all Alberta appears to be doing.
It’s also important to keep in mind that wind power is only part of the energy puzzle, alongside biomass, hydropower, co-gen, combined cycle natural gas, solar and energy-efficiency (i.e. negawatts). No fool believes we’ll be powering the entire world with wind energy. As far as I’m concerned, hitting a 10-per-cent threshold is mighty impressive.
Tyler Hamilton is editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights magazine and a business columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the clean technology and green energy market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper.
