37 Replies to “We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans”

  1. Here! We’ll charge you $15 bucks to look at Vancouver from our most beautious wind energy generator!
    It doesn’t do much but stand there and look like a used toothpick but, hey, at $15 a view, what’s to sneer at?
    It’s got to make money somehow.
    Annual passholders to Grouse Mtn get a 20% discount!
    https://www.grousemountain.com/eye-of-the-wind

  3. This should be shown do every wind proponent who talks about there output, but not vrs capacity, in this case, under .2%.
    Like I’ve said, put the cities on wind power only and the problem will be sorted out quickly.

  4. Frank, that 25 MW (sometimes zero) cost about $5 billion. Wind produces about 1% or less of Alberta’s power needs about 18% of the time.
    Here is a link to my last presentation on Alberta’s climate plan given at the Nov 2016 AGM of the Alberta Assoc of MDs and Counties (AAMDC)
    Pulling the Plug: Challenges in Alberta’s Future Electricity Supply
    https://www.dropbox.com/s/s97od3izkydpqmh/AAMDC%20Pulling%20the%20Plug%20V3%20Nov%2021%20compressed%202016.pptx?dl=0

  5. In the present Ont, where politicians crow about x % of power soon to be supplied by politically correct “renewables”, the figures for last evening 6:00 PM are as follows:
    Total Supply MW – 20,065
    Nuclear Supply – 11,420
    Wind Supply MW – 129 .6 %
    Today wind has picked up a bit to about 3%. but several industrial plants show absolutely 0 generation.
    So if the Green dream to rid Ont of Nuclear was to happen, just how would cities like Toronto manage to heat their buildings? Don’t ask, for Green fanatics faith is the same as reality, Wind will supply the needed power.
    Today it is about -23 C.

  6. This is the time nuclear power shuts down for an “emergency inspection” during this “cold vortex” – much scarier word than “cold front.”
    That should shock Ontario voters of the importance of nuclear power.
    This should be front page news across Canada.

  7. When we went down to the Oregon coast this past summer, we took our usual I-84 route along the Columbia. From Umatilla to Portland is a must-see drive, as the Columbia Gorge is spectacular. The last time we went that way, there were a handful of wind turbines atop the Washington side at Goldendale/Maryhill. Now, there are hundreds of them on the Oregon side, west of Boardman, Oregon.
    Now, over the past few decades, the Bureau of Reclamation that operates the hydro dams along the Columbia, spent a considerable amount to upgrade all the dams so as to reduce the need to release water down the spillways. Water down the spillways is water that does not generate power, nor does it generate revenue, despite it going to the same place- the Pacific. The BRec sells the power to utilities.
    What struck me was the volume of water being spilled at the John Day, The Dalles, and the Bonneville dams. My little gearhead brain suggested to me that about the same amount of water was being diverted through spillways as what would be used to generate the same amount of power as was being supplied by the whirlygigs. I did some homework when we got back to home, and my suspicion was verified.
    Here’s the problem. The taxpayer’s get a triple-whammy on this. First off, the money spent on the dam upgrades has been negated, even if only somewhat. Money was spent to eliminate the need for spill-off, and now they’re spilling off water (and revenue). Secondly, the dams cost the same to operate regardless of the amount of power being sold. But, the wind generators get a guaranteed buy-in to the grid. If their blades are spinning, the grid must take their power. This can force the dams to open their spillways. Thirdly, the same federal government that derives billions of dollars in revenue from the sale of electricity generated along the Columbia (it operates as a non-profit, but retains a substantial portion of earnings for maintenance and upgrades to generating infrastructure, and some goes into BRec operational coffers) also subsidizes the Oregon wind farms. So, not only do the wind farms reduce federal revenue in-flow, they exacerbate outflow.
    One of those Alberta wind farms- Halkirk- is situated within sight of the chimney stacks of the Battle River coal generating station, which has been targeted for shutdown. The Battle River plant supplies not only reliable electricity, but millions of dollars per year in income tax revenue and a not insubstantial royalty from the coal it mines and burns into the provincial treasury. This revenue will be lost, and not replaced, yet the province clearly has no plans to reduce spending by an equivalent amount.
    But wind power’s great, right?

  8. .
    Nothing better than using millennia-old technology in a modern electrified world. How can anyone believe this stuff has a hope in hell of enduring. Same for the idiotic and ugly solar panels. This is the stuff of fantasy … the safe-space of the left.
    .

  10. Great presentation CAS. You did a good job of it.
    The power generation war is a war by the left for power, to get full control of our lives and money for their backers. It has nothing to do with environment except as a sell to the gullible. Besides, Fat Al, the fruit fly guy and a few other big names have gotten wealthy off this mann made fraud.

  11. And then there is Brooks Solar that started last week. $30 million on 78 acres. 50,000 snow-collecting panels.
    http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/brooks-solar-newell-elemental-energy-1.4458277
    Rated at a hallucinogenic 30 MW at full capacity, but currently listed by AESO at 15 MW. (http://ets.aeso.ca/ets_web/ip/Market/Reports/CSDReportServlet)
    At high noon today output was zero. Wow!
    The City of Medicine Hat spent over $10 million (up to $13m perhaps) to build a solar thermal plant in conjunction with its gas thermal. The city put in some money but most came from Albertans. Here is what the city recently wrote: “.. we have discovered that during the winter months there is less available energy from the sun because of the angle of the sun and how the Earth tilts making it less optimal for solar heating”
    They spent over ten million dollars and “discovered” the sun does not work well in winter. Coulda bought a grade 8 geography/science textbook to tell them that.
    CAS

  12. Liberals/leftists are completely out of touch with reality. It is like Andrew Scheer says in an interview with John Ivison (published in the Post today). Liberals do not care about the effects of their policies. They only care about the “story” they can tell at the front end (e.g. Cue the violins: “We care about the environment.”) Then, when things don’t work out, they ignore the problems rather than attempting to fix them. Really, Canada needs a serious government and they do not have one. We will pay a price for our own naivety a few years down the line. Everyone gets screwed.

  13. No it doesn’t. Planned outages for inspections are only done during spring and fall. So stop just making things up.

  14. Another thing liberal greenies do not seem able to understand; covering miles and miles of green fields with black solar panels may provide a lot of electricity, but those black panels are acting like furnaces,
    every one knows ( well… maybe greenies don’t know ) anything black left in the sun becomes much more hotter than things of lighter color such as green grass or light colored dirt or sand.
    the day half of the planet’s fields are covered with black solar panels, will that not cause some serious warming of the planet?
    I mean real warming, not like the fake one we have been sold by snake oil salesmen like AL Gore.
    Right now I am a global warming ” denier” but the day billions of black solar panels are installed and become billions of furnaces…I might start to believe in ” man made” global warming ( although liberal-made would be more exact in this case )

  15. Other inconvenient truths Ont Liberals wish to ignore. When electricity is really needed, like today, wind turbines are still, when power is supplied from other sources, they quickly spool up creating excess supply. Professional Engineers and the AG had this to say:
    “A study the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers released last month estimated that in 2016 alone, Ontario lost between $384 million and $675 million on clean energy exports due to an oversupply.
    The auditor general has also complained about the issue:
    “Between 2009 and 2014, Ontario exported 95.1 million megawatt hours (MWh) of power to other jurisdictions, including New York and Michigan. The province lost as much as $3.1 billion by exporting that power”
    So Ont overpays wind companies to generate unneeded power and then gives it to US customers at a loss. Quite the business model, little wonder Ont is close to bankrupt.

  16. So, doing the math on that Brooks solar plant…average wholesale price for electricity at $22.00/MWh, times 30 MW, times 365 days, times 8 hours per day (annual average +/-?), gives you a gross revenue of under 2 million per year.
    Assuming no interest costs, and no operating costs, it takes 15 years just to recoup the cost of building the generating facility. Reduce the output to a more realistic 15-20 MW, or take out some revenue as operating profit, and you simply delay the time before you’ve paid back your initial investment. Repairs and maintenance also do the same. Those panels aren’t going to clean themselves of airborne dust, debris, and bird crap. Is 8 hours per day of full capacity a reasonable average, over the course of a year? Is the long term wholesale price of $22/MWh a realistic number?
    No matter how you work this deal, it’s out of whack. There’s no profit there. By the time you recoup your installation cost, the panels will have degraded by probably 40% or more. If the only profit component is a depreciating asset, that makes even less sense, and I don’t think the tax folks will let you run that way. I don’t think you can invest $30M, run it at a zero profit margin for 25-30 years, and then only show the remaining value of the asset as your sole profit at the end. Besides, what kind of nut bar would fork over $30m so that he could have it paid back over 25-30 years (maybe), and the only upside is that at the end he has his original investment back, and half a quarter section of highway frontage in Brooks, Alberta. That dog don’t hunt.

  17. The left doesn’t care about the costs or inefficiencies.
    Its all about saving Mother Gaia, no matter what or who gets hurt.
    Logic is not in this equation, its about blind faith, a religion/psychosis of the left.

  18. When a corporate rent seeker is negotiating with a bureaucrat whose marching orders from his technologically-infantile political boss is to “get a deal” to sign up “renewable” energy providers, it isn’t the rent seeker that is willing to agree to any terms no mater how unfavourable to their purported interests.
    Most politicians aren’t qualified to run for Dog Catcher let alone make feel-good decisions affecting the economy by ignoring economics and electrical engineering. Perhaps we should have to “elect” brain surgeons based on their feelings as it isn’t too much of a stretch.

  19. A non lunatic, non rent seeker, driven society would have demanded the
    development of practical massive super battery power storage systems
    first and left the easy stuff about the methods to be used to charge them
    to competitive market forces. Of course that would have been too dull and
    lacks the showboating PR that the lefty enviros crave so much.

  22. Bill Greenwood. Thanks for the math. But it’s worse than we thought. First, the plant is only 15 MW as posted by AESO. (My error in reporting it at 30MW—my apologies. There were too many “30s” in the story.☺)
    15 MW = 131000 MWh per year at 100% output, but output will be http://eralberta.ca/projects/details/brooks-solar-1-facility/
    BTW, the new wind contracts were let at $37/MWh. Average pool price is YTD is $22.08 as you noted.
    So they make close to 3% in their investment BEFORE operational costs, depreciation and municipal taxes. Depreciation alone at 30 years life is $1 million/yr if you don’t count the $15 million grant. Depreciation at $15 million (after grant) still eats up the gross income. Municipal taxes might be $100k++. Operations? Two full-time staff, admin, trucks, benefits etc., perhaps $200K conservatively, but probably more like $300 to $400K. Annual costs could range from $700K to $900K against income of maybe $440K. If the owners ponied up the full $30 million … well, add another $500K in costs. (None of this considers tax breaks, creative accounting, admin costs hidden under other companies etc.)
    The same investment in a combine cycle natural gas plant (although they are usually much larger) would buy you about 120,000 MWh of electricity annually (at 90% output) — about five times much power for the same money.
    But also consider that the gas plant is reliable and dispatchable, meaning you get power when you need power. There is NO reliability in solar and output is willynilly.
    People would die on days like this if they had to rely on wind and solar. Sheer insanity.

  23. Opps….something was lost in posting (a “less than” symbol truncates info)
    15 MW = 131000 MWh per year at 100% output, but output will be less than 20%, more likely 15%. Which brings the output to perhaps 20,000 MWh at $22 (as you cited) and that is a gross income of ~$440,000/year on a $30 million investment. But Albertans paid the owners $15 million through ERA. OUR TAX MONEY!

  24. GIANT windmills are a NASTY BLIGHT on the natural landscape. What a total CON-job on Western Civilization. I sometimes believe that Global Warming and all the Alternative, Green, Renewable, etc. Energy is nothing more than WEALTH-GUILT. Yes, it is all perpetrated by Leftists as a guise to their ultimate agenda which is the destruction of Capitalist Economic Systems … but it is ENABLED by WEALTH-GUILT. COMFORT-GUILT. LIFESTYLE-GUILT. Inotherwords … LIBERAL-GUILT. We have been “shamed” into believing that we Westerners are “taking” all the resources … such that all the POOR (non-Western) cultures are being deprived by US. Therefore, we must dismantle ALL that has given us such a GREAT standard of living. Bunch of MO-ronic liberals guilt-shaming us into 3rd world status. Sick. Sick in the head.

  26. “I keep reading the “left”, are you people telling me that Patdick Brown is a libtard????”
    Evidence points that way.
    Conservatives who claim to be liberal lite are probably not conservative in any identifiable way.
    I listen to our “Canadian Conservatives” but all I hear is slower,dopier NDP Libtards.
    None say “Stop the stealing”.
    None admit “Government Cannot”.
    And none seem to comprehend Base Load Electrical supply.
    All I sense are a motley bunch of parasites drooling over the proceeds from taxes we have not imagined yet.
    So short answer;Yes.

  28. The Ont figures I posted above and many similar damning estimates have been known for 7 or 8 years at least. And they come form impeccable objective sources, public accounts, Ont Prof Engineers, Auditor General, etc. Even media occasionally quote such figures, they don’t headline them and flog them for days, but they do publish them.
    During the last provincial election Tim Hudak could have hammered Wynne relentlessly with the costs of Green Energy Act and the Wind fiasco. Instead he barely mentioned the subject; the present leader is similarly subdued on this subject.
    I can only conclude PCs are still terrified of being labeled Climate Deniers or something similar by Toronto media, and that Green Wind power is still held to be sacred by many urban believers (as long as the towers are miles away in rural counties).

  30. According to the left probably not enough as they maintain that there are 6 billion too many people on earth. Letting them freeze to death is just a slower method than Stalin and Mao used.

  31. A friend in Ontario (I’m embarrassed to even say that) sent me a picture (sadly not video) this summer from a beach full of people in +35C where dozens of wind turbines on the horizon all stood dead still.
    Wind power is like the French military: it’s always there when you didn’t need it.

  32. Also pay attention to some of the other numbers in this report. Like the total DCR number at the bottom right in the table at the top of this posting. DCR is Dispatched (and Accepted) Contingency Reserve – total reserve generating capacity.
    Notice that the DCR for the coal generators is down to zero – no more reserve capacity here. If one of the biggest coal generating plants such as Keephills #3 (KH3) which is right at this moment (Dec 29 @ 19:57) putting out 463 Mw goes down for any reason, we would need to dispatch nearly all that reserve and be in dangerous territory if any other disruption occurred. At this same time we are now drawing 391 Mw from BC and sending about 136 Mw to Montana.
    And as for natural gas, that is always available and dispatchable, right? Just read something that scares the beegeezus out of me.
    Cold disrupts natural gas supply in Mackenzie County

    Cold weather disrupted the natural gas supply Friday in Mackenzie County, leading to outages south of La Crête.
    The Alberta Management Agency sent out an alert at 5:41 p.m. saying areas south of La Crête had begun to experience natural gas supply outages, which were expected to last until temperatures warm up.
    In the meantime, natural gas supply trucks are being brought in to try to maintain the gas line pressure, the alert stated. . .

    Natural gas supply disrupted by cold weather???
    Natural gas supplied by truck???

  33. OK NME000, tell us how this all fits together in a neat conspiracy as to how Patrick Brown is clearly identifyable as one of the undercover guys on the grassy knoll in Dallas that day when the shots were fired at you-know-who and went on to pose for those fake photos of American guys standing on the moon. Of course all this was done to prove KKKrisianity is a false religion concocted by the jews in Iran.PemexCarret
    (As if they could stand on the moon without floating off into space)

  34. @Joey Alex Epstein has done some work gathering data of climate related death over the last 80 years. His source is EM-DAT (http://www.emdat.be) and he compiled a graph and posted it on his page in support for his book “The Moral Case For Fossil Fuels”. (http://www.moralcaseforfossilfuels.com/data) Graph 5.1 is the relevant graph and recalling stats from his speech he outlined that in the 30’s had years where over 3.7 million died from climate related events and for 2015 the last year before he published his book there had been fewer than 30 thousand climate related death.

  35. Hate to see what Alberta will look like a year under similar circumstances, and record use as we saw last night. Brown out? Our power mysteriously drew down about that time last night (5-6) and now I think I know why. Ayla Simmons has a column in the Journal today about cheap power but I can’t bring myself to read it – a mouthpiece for the Left.

  36. CAS- Oy Vey! I was pretty sure from my own figures that there was no profit there. You take it from a mild beat down to the killing of Bonnie and Clyde.

  37. Pay attention to the government union-funded ads during the next election about how the UCP’s planned budget cuts will jeopardize the province’s education and health care systems.
    Then remember all the billions spent on RE schemes that, when needed the most, produced a big fat nothing.

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