Waste of my money

As you probably know, Alberta spent a significant amount of money, public money, on advertising in other provinces in a campaign called “Tell the feds”. The campaign suggests "When Ottawa's proposed electricity regulations make electricity unreliable, the things you rely on won't work when needed. Your hot water. Computer. Washer and dryer. Electric car. TV. Lights. Mobile phone. Stove. Your heat in –30 C weather.".

I’ve been monitoring the response to these claims in this ad campaign in the news, on FB and Reddit and from other provincial governments, and I have to say, they’re not buying it. Quebec, who isn’t officially targeted by the ads, but know about them anyway, are laughing their asses off. The kind of greening the federal government is proposing is pretty much already a ‘fait accompli’ in Quebec and umm, while they do get the odd blackout, it isn’t because of how the electricity is generated and everything to do with how it is distributed. Remember the ice storms of 1998? By the way, the reason Quebec isn’t a target of the ads is because Alberta themselves said that it wouldn’t be affected negatively by any further greening of the grid. That speaks volumes all by itself.

Ontario meanwhile has made significant moves to green its grid, converting coal plants to natural gas plants and they are building more nuclear capacity, including building the first series of advanced small modular reactors (SMR). So if the people of Ontario aren’t laughing their asses off, the folks running the grid definitely are.

BC is like, “What are you even talking about right now?”, especially since they are almost as green as Quebec. The maritime provinces are basically saying “Just shut up already.”

So I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that was $8 million well spent. Just remember, this is coming from the brain trust that suggested that utility grade mass battery storage isn’t feasible, using data from over 10 years ago.

Here’s a little nugget for you to chew on. Alberta’s electric utilities are allowed to (and do) leave generating capacity turned off every day as a way of manipulating the supply and demand curve to maintain high electricity prices to maintain a profit. They even admitted as much. As I write this post, I counted, live from the ets.aeso.ca website, 28 gas generating sources turned off, 4 hydro sources turned off, 6 wind generating farms offline (not from lack of wind), and there are 7 energy battery storage stations waiting to bring standby capacity online. We are even buying electricity from BC and Montana at this moment while selling some to Saskatchewan. From a total capacity point of view, we are (at this moment) only putting online HALF of our generating capacity. Half! Oh but the coal plants are going full steam.

It’s embarrassing to live in Alberta these days.