January 27th

One chart only, please.

Today’s charts are posted at https://aleach.ca/charts.

We’ve got great students stories with the whole team in the mix this week. Erica’s writing on the pressure on banks to reduce financed emissions, Marc’s got a piece on how global spending on fossil fuel alternatives exceeded spending on fossil fuel production, Yousaff has a piece on solar in Africa, and Kayla’s got a story on Imperial’s renewable diesel plant in Alberta.

I also added a couple of products to the weekly charts, including coverage of the Brent to Urals differential.

But, for this week, one piece of data stopped me in my tracks. As I was pulling together this week’s charts, I noticed the increasing daily solar power peaks and, looking at the 24th of January, I wondered if maybe…just maybe…we had crossed a major milestone in Alberta.

In fact, we had.

Yes, you’re seeing that correctly.

At a little before 2pm on January 24th, Alberta’s industrial solar power facilities fed more electricity onto the grid than the province’s coal units for the first time. And, for much of the next hour, Alberta used more solar power than coal power. Wow.

Informed observers will point out that Capital Power’s Genesse 3 facility is still dual-fuel. And, others will point out that these figures don’t include residential and commercial solar power. To my mind, neither takes away from how much this graph captures the changes we’ve seen in Alberta over the last few years.

January 24th was a historic day in Alberta.

And, before I leave you, a shout-out to my Econ 366 students who spent the week fighting with (learning?) R-Markdown, and they are well on their way to creating cool products like the weekly charts update. But, it was a tough week for many and they worked really hard. I want them (and you) to know that I’m proud of them.

And that’s all I have for you this week.