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Comment by kalupa | Hacker News Reader

Now it's mostly natural gas, instead! With a good chunk of wind, but the current government seems to dislike "renewables"

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Well, it's hard to get someone to hate their source of income.

As far as I understand it, the whole country is dependent on the tar sands, but the east still hates it.

Is really not. I don't think there are any numbers justifying narrative, and numbers presented in this thread prove it. The dependency is really just Albertan advertising.

Canada's economy is built on primary resource extraction and production in general but would have done fine without the tar sands. Most of the oil money leaves the country; the money that stays mainly fuels self-serving private agendas, pressuring other parts of the economy and stuffing politics. This could have been averted had a solution like Norway's state oil fund been adopted but would have been too socialist a measure for the empire to tolerate.

Is this not the analogous fund?

https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/heritage-fund-reaches-all-time-h...

Their current source of income. Alberta has more sun and more wind than any place else in Canada so renewables could be quite profitable to them in the future, but what government cares about anything further out than the next election? Alberta also used to be the only place in Canada where you could just build a solar power plant and hook it up to the grid with minimal red tape so had a massive advantage in terms of number of solar jobs.

Also Alberta is next door to BC which has vast sources of hydro-electric power so it could easily trade solar & wind power to BC when the sun is shining and/or the wind is blowing in exchange for hydro power when it isn't.

I agree. The times they are a-changing, but we have a particularly regressive government at the moment that is actively blocking renewable production. The unfortunate bit about having the most sun is that during winter we still don't get much of it. It seems to me we need as much storage as we do production.

Alberta isn't very cloudy in the wintertime, the reduced insolation is mostly due to lower angles and shorter days. AFAICT, winter sunshine is more than a third of summer sunshine in Alberta. In Europe the number is often 10%.

It's cheaper to size production for winter sunshine than to build a lot of storage. AKA it's cheaper to put down 3X as many panels than to build seasonal storage.

Alberta doesn't lack for hills, which is what's needed to build pumped storage which is what's cheapest for seasonal storage.

> It's cheaper to size production for winter sunshine than to build a lot of storage.

Which means enormous amounts of surplus power in the summer (even with PV angled to optimize winter production.) So storage doesn't have to go far to be worthwhile, and in particular with nearly free input energy it doesn't have to be very efficient.

It doesn't have to be very efficient, but it is has to be cheap. Batteries aren't cheap but they discharge every night so their cost is spread out over ~365 days and their cost becomes feasible.

Pumped storage is ~10% the cost of batteries, but if used as seasonal storage so they only discharge once per year that makes them ~36X as expensive. Especially in Alberta where they're competing against Natural Gas which is also approximately free (it's often flared off as a waste gas from oil wells rather than captured and sold because the value is less than the cost of capture).

For seasonal storage, it would be either an e-fuel (like hydrogen) or bulk storage of thermal energy (basically, artificial geothermal). The latter could produce very hot rock at rather shallow depth, yet still have thermal time constants of many years.

Both of those are more expensive than pumped storage.

This depends on the time scale. For days or weeks? Pumped hydro is better. But for seasonal storage? The size of the reservoir becomes prohibitive.

A water reservoir is a heck of a lot cheaper to make large compared to a hydrogen tank.

Hydrogen on this scale would be stored underground, preferably in solution mined salt caverns. This is a well established technology, although it's more used for storing natural gas. These caverns are very inexpensive to build, which is why they are used.

Alberta, as it turns out, is underlaid by kilometers of sedimentary rock that includes salt formations.

Still sounds more expensive than a holding pond.

If one compares the heat of combustion of hydrogen stored at 100 bar and 20 C, to the energy of water elevated by 100 meters, the former exceeds the latter (per unit volume) by a factor of 1000. So that "holding pond" is going to be much, MUCH larger than the solution-mined cavern for storage systems of equal capacity (and remember one needs two reservoirs.)

I like this idea, but I disagree with this:

> It's cheaper to size production for winter sunshine than to build a lot of storage.

This still doesn't work - storage is mandatory. Winter peak loads, which are often the most power that the grid will require all year, are before and after the sun.

There’s a huge difference between load shifting a couple of hours and seasonal storage

That's why I didn't specify it needed to be seasonal, but it does need to be stored, as a lot of that load isn't shifting. At 7pm on a -35 day there is zero solar generation, but every furnace in the province is on and people are doing their evening cooking and cleaning.

You're right, you said "as much storage as production". That's actually a very tiny amount of storage. Generally a "24hr" solar plant for California usage patterns has about 4-6Wh of storage and about 1W of discharge per watt of solar plant. Alberta will likely need ~2X that for daily load shifting during the winter. Seasonal storage would require a couple of orders of magnitude more.

Ah. To clarify, when I said "as much storage as production", I meant focus, not quantity.

I'd note that actual -35 days are pretty rare. Per Environment Canada Climate Normal Data from 1991 to 2020, Edmonton averages only 2.5 days per year with a minimum temperature below -30.

While you're correct, they do happen and need to be accounted for, and temperatures in the -30s in general aren't rare, but we're also experiencing more extreme weather as of late. Edmonton set a few records for cold the last few years, and those moments, when the grid is at the most strain, is also when the power is needed the most to keep people safe.

> Alberta doesn't lack for hills, which is what's needed to build pumped storage which is what's cheapest for seasonal storage.

From what I understand, BC has a lot of hydro dams. I wonder if there is a way to use them for pumped storage.

They do use them as storage, but more passively - When others sources of production are high BC slows their consumption, allowing them to build up greater reserves in their dams.

> The times they are a-changing, but we have a particularly regressive government at the moment that is actively blocking renewable production.

I guess Canadian politics are not unlike US politics in the area of energy production. You'd think that most of the jobs in non-renewable energy could just transition over to jobs in renewable energy and everyone's happy. But sadly, like everything, the energy source itself has been politicized. The left favors renewables regardless of the pros and cons and the right favors non-renewables regardless of the pros and cons, so it looks like yet another ideological battle rather than a battle over concrete things like jobs and the environment.

I think there's simply not enough jobs in renewables - once a solar farm is operational maintenance is a fraction of production, unlike the oil sands or rigs which require constant human intervention.

Winter is not an issue for solar because solar panel efficiency is better when the panel is cooler. A panel blazing away in Florida is actually losing quite a bit of efficiency because of how hot the panel is; much farther north even with less light, the panels can produce more.

But it is an issue when Calgary only sees 8 hours of daylight in the deepest depths of winter.

Yep. The Alberta government has their head stuck in the sand (pun intended) around renewables as they existentially threaten their current economy. They have repeatedly shown that they’d rather double down than try and diversify.

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/canadas-alberta-set-b...

To boost your point - that is literally what the Alberta government has been doing. They instituted a seven-month renewable's pause to "evaluate" them (evaluating renewables in 2023????), which introduced a lot of investor uncertainty[1]. When the pause was over they introduced rules around preventing wind turbines and solar from being developed in areas to prevent obstruction in "viewscapes"[2].

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-renewables-pa... [2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-viewscapes-bu...

Which is worse in terms of greenhouse emissions but it's something I guess.

Instead of "natural gas", we should just switch to saying methane, which is what that generally is.

No? Methane produces less than half the CO2 per kwh than coal.

Which is still bad, but not worse or as bad.

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11

Methane burned for electricity is better than coal no doubt. But methane that escapes into the atmosphere is way worse than CO2 in the nearish term. And not every extraction company is super thrilled about proper containment.

A very small percent is not contained though, and even most vented is flared.

I am under the impression that methane levels in the atmosphere have spiked significantly in the last decade or two, and the origin is not really understood. Extraction could be one source, but if it's from another source, that could be more bad news as it would mean that some tipping point has possibly been triggered. I'm far from an expert on this though.

Most of the consciously vented is flared. However, the infrastructure leaks like mad and there have been no incentives incentive for the companies to fix it, it's a cheap invisible gas after all with almost all reporting being self reporting.

Released methane is 27-30 times worse than released CO2 per unit mass measured over the next 100 years of warming [1]. Burning methane releases 1 CO2 molecule per CH4 molecule (CH4 + 2O2 -> CO2 + 2H2O), or 2.743 it's mass in CO2 [2].

To make up the difference in CO2 you'd have to be losing ~5% of the methane to the atmosphere along the way from extraction to burning.

Do you have reason to believe anywhere near that much is lost?

"Worse than coal" has set a very low bar for how not-bad methane needs to be.

[1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warmin...

[2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=molecular+weight+of+CO2...

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.1c06458

That study puts it at 9.4% of gross production. Many other sources exist which put 5% at a very realistic number. Fossil gas is dirt cheap, invisible, and leaks are large self-reported, so the companies have 0 reasons to properly test for or stop leaks.

>No? Methane produces less than half the CO2 per kwh than coal.

The important metric is CO2e, not CO2. Critically, CO2e includes measurements of methane emissions.

The problem with methane is that the methane leaks are self-reported, by an industry who have every incentive to under-report and who have a history of massively underreporting. Methane isn't clearly better than coal, and might well be worse.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair

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