January 12th
A crazy day in gas markets and an electricity system alert in Alberta, and oil production reaches 4 million barrels of oil per day.
It’s been a day of chaos in energy markets in Western Canada. The effect of a vicious cold snap has ravaged gas and electricity markets.
In gas markets, supply issues caused by freeze-ups along with the really high heating loads due to the current cold snap appear to have been behind curtailment on the Nova system. Below, you can see the list of bulletins issued, mostly for the Foothills system, through the day today.
This is already leading to spiking prices in BC, and there are signs things could get worse tomorrow.
As I write this, we’re also in a Grid Alert (!!!) on the Alberta electricity system, and things look to get pretty tight between now and 11pm.
The Alberta Electric System Operator (AESO) is, as shown below, expecting very thin margins of error for the next few hours, so let’s hope for no more plant outages.
With the H.R. Milner (300MW) and Sundance 6 (401 MW) natural gas plants offline, and almost no wind and no solar generation this evening, the AESO are asking for conservation and, you’d have to think, hoping it gets a bit windier.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to be in the cards for the next few days, as it’s expected to remain calm as temperatures remain low. Luckily, we should see lower peak demands on the weekend, so hopefully tonight will be the tightest the market gets. The wind seems to be tracking the AESO forecast, which at least means this was not an unexpected event.
Winter troughs present a big challenge for renewable generation in Alberta: when our demand is at it’s highest (we set an all-time record yesterday), both wind and solar generation tend to be at their lowest. And, yes, there’s already a tweet from the Premier.
I’m sure we’ll be hearing even more about this from the Premier in the coming days. Perhaps the Premier will find some solace in the fact that new data released this week shows that, for the first time, average oil production in Alberta averaged more than 4 million barrels per day in November.
As I told my students last week, it’s a great time to study energy because there is always something exciting going on.
I thought the reason renewables were bad was because gas generation couldn’t be ramped up quickly to deal with these situations. Guess not.
I'm still not certain of what the surprise was. Sundance 6 has been offline for a while. The day before they were comfortable there was 400 MW (maybe a couple of hours 200-400), but the loss of one 300 MW gas plant sent the market soaring - and that Milner unit actually returned to service a few hours into the alert.