What I take away from this podcast is how profoundly ignorant the federal government must be in its understanding of how electrical grids operate, and how each grid is different based on its customer needs and geography. I have a better appreciation for electrical grid operators, after listening to this podcast. Thank you.
The Metric system started out as a science project funded by the King of France. Communism descended from the people who thought beheading everyone with money or an education would improve things. It didn't work.
Excellent guest and an excellent coverage of the engineering and economics and politics of energy to the customers. Excellent weather explanation. Many warm latitudes energy promoters use cold latitudes solutions and arguments in their warm latitudes but for biased reasons.
Something worth repeating. Weather patterns that generate record high or record low temperatures are usually stationary high pressure systems that pretty much guarantee low to zero output from wind turbines at the very time that demand for electricity tends to peak. This effect is not limited to North America, you can see it in many parts of the world.
Hopefully, in your next conversation, you can delve into Terrestrial Energy and its role in the region. They were developed to provide industrial heat for the oil sands industry to extract the oil more economically. Bitumen is incredibly valuable because of the huge range of products it supplies but this assumes you can extract it in an economical fashion. If we want roads, we need bitumen.
At some point in the future the Tar sands will be shut down. What is are the Provinces plans for the future winding down, clean up and closure of the tar sands oil extraction industry in Alberta?
You're correct, and it will be a world of hurt because the cogeneration supply feeding the grid will go with it, just like a gust of wind. Remediation is handled on a per site basis. No doubt there will be challenges in holding the last ones out the door accountable for their clean up promises made, just like we suffer from on the legacy conventional assets throughout the province. A sufficiently wise population would appreciate and accept ultimate responsibility for this, though, and both plan and act accordingly. We aren't there at the moment.
Vast grid upgrades are needed if you install lots of wind power. Eg Germany is currently building a North South HVDC cable which is expected to cost €10 Billion Euro. They might ultimately need 10 such links at a cost of €100B Assuming a 7% cost of capital those cables alone will cost €7 billion per year in perpetuity forever.... And that's not the only grid upgrades they will need Large central Generation plants had the huge benefit of installing them near demand or at least near existing transmission infrastructure. Distribited distant wind farms have vast grid upgrade costs in some locations something the LCOE doesnt really address
Bang on, and it's the end consumer who ends up bearing the burden, which is really the important thing to monitor and optimize for. Instead of appeasing the demanding, profit capturing narcissists on the front end who sit behind the grid connection and do not feel the pain they create.
Great interview. In the next few months, it would be great to review the power generation charts that show exactly who supplied what. Wind and solar have, issues. during winter months but a graphs showing temperature, demand and production (who showed up) would be very interesting.
For those who would like to know who was doing what generation-wise during the AB grid emergency, here's the numbers. AESO was in EEA3 as of 15:30 13 Jan 2024 (Grid emergency, rolling blackouts expected). Internal load was 11,391 MW for hour ending 16:00. At 15:30 this is the generation broken out by fuel type. Natural Gas 9,023 MW/11,832 MW Capacity Coal 814 MW/820 MW Capacity Hydro 371 MW/894 MW Capacity Solar 330 MW/1650 MW Capacity Wind 110 MW/4481 MW Capacity
So what that tells us is that the intermittent suppliers should pay for backup capacity or the lost return on investment that the reliable providers suffer from the parasitic narcissist intermittent suppliers!
@@chrisjohns38 That would be nice, but at the moment consumers pay for the backup service. Worst case, as happened in South Australia, subsidized renewables destroy the electricity market for reliable generators who can no longer make enough money to survive, then the system goes black because the reliable generators are off-line during a crisis. Wind and solar are cheap in term of $/MWh of production, but very expensive in terms of $/MWh load served. The difference in cost is backup generation and transmission costs, both usually paid by consumers.
Wind and solar are a fool's errand. You don't replace fossil fuels with wind and solar, but we should definitely be replacing wind and solar with nuclear.
In the words of ERCOT after Uri, "performing as expected"....... and you have no idea how many people took that to mean they were actually working!!! Good talk!
Some experts are incredibly ignorant outside their areas of expertise. Your medical expertise has caused you to talk to many experts, I applaud you. We need grid design experts. We need grid construction experts, people who wil put their company's financial neck on the line to build extra capacity in city streets and backbone transmission. Including transformers and switch yards and home and building connections. I have worked on several large city building projects and the grid supply costs and more importantly the time frame for the supply's construction, dictated the projects approval and commencement.
That would be a huge program with immense returns! Like heating homes nearby to capture waste heat again... or fish farms. Seem to remember stories of "lunkers" anywhere there was cooling ponds near a coal fired plant or two, in those very same areas mentioned when spent 23 years roaming Alberta❤. That Flag says it all at when you are at hwy 842 x hwy 1 intersecrion say, on Canada Day 2 hours after sunrise. Just look slightly South of West, and you'll see the 3D version of the Alberta Flag. You can add in a bit of Hwy 40 views around Grande Cache. The whole freakin place is beautiful. Something for everyone to benefit from. And in abundance like you said.
As an economist working on Alberta electricity for 30 years, you might want to ask how much we pay for reliability in an energy only market. When you realize that relates to the peak price paid in the market, ask yourself how not adjusting that price since 1999 has affected system reliability. Oil men have ruined our electricity system due to a lack of understanding of electricity markets.
I know energy is a serious matter and the grid must not be ignored. Nuclear plants are cheap to construct compared to the grid construction costs. Filling the existing national grid is only 20% of the new electricity demand with no fossil fuels.
Agreed, and we need to remove nuclear power generation - using volatile fission tech - from private companies competing in the cut-throat energy market. Conflict of interest: Profit versus safety.
@@anthonymorris5084 Efficient is not the same as effective, clean or cheap, or healthy or safe. And, of course, companies are not all efficient either. They always do have to make profit, because they have shareholders to please, and they all do have to compete in a cut-throat energy market: Not all power sources are equal,, either so it makes sense to treat each on its own merits. In the case of nuclear, this is at its heart a uniquely volatile, explosive and difficult-to-control technology with uniquely dangerous waste, whose power to poison can only be reduced by time or processes that also have radioactive waste streams, and have already suffered numerous disasters in many countries already. Even in normal operation, nuclear power plants emit man-made hot particles are artificially enriched and more powerful than any found in nature, and fission produces, directly or indirectly - via radioactive decay - some 2000 radioactive substances not found in nature. Many of these are extremely carcinogenic and to our bodies, they are indistinguishable from nutrients - radioactive iodine is concentrated in the thyroid, caesium is an analogue for potassium and concentrated in our hearts and other muscles, radioactive strontium is like calcium and concentrates in our bones, and so on. The waste, therefore, has a whole medley of threats that do not exist in nature. Even in normal operation, some of these substances are generated and must be collected and stored, but some cannot be collected and are released into the open environment: noble gases and so on. The consequences of an accident at a nuclear power plant are therefore far reaching and long lasting than, say, an accident at a wind or solar farm, or even a huge hydro dam. The question then, is: who should be operating nuclear power plants, and how sensible is it to license out weapons technology to private companies competing in a cut-throat energy market, when alternatives are available, and false economies can produce disaster zones of hundreds of square miles or more. The conflict of interest between public safety and private profit is palpable, and there is every argument for 1) partitioning off weapons production from grid power generation altogether or 2) allowing not-for-profit generation only. There you go.
I think maybe a better solution is to have a significant amount of "excess" power and use it some some productive but not essential process that can be turned off when that power is needed. Something like hydrogen generation (works like a battery since hydrogen can be turned back into electricity), or desalinating water to have more fresh water for people or farms. But when there is a dip in wind or solar or even gas generation, we can shut down desalination and use that now "available" power to fill the gap.
I agree in principle, which is why I advocate for putting the excess generation into thermal storage via molten salt. That heat can then be utilized later for whichever purpose makes sense for the local opportunities - any source (thermal or electric) can contribute to that "pot". It's not practical to plan on putting the excess peaks towards industrial processes like hydrogen generation or oilsands production because it is hard on the equipment and hard on the economics. We would need to have some combo of very cheap hardware that could be replaced quickly, capital repayment rules that accommodate sporadic productivity, or customers willing and able to pay higher prices to cover the other two factors.
@@myfirstseven8316 Any kind of storage or use that can be on demand is the point. Obviously 100% efficient storage would solve the vast majority of the wind/solar power instability problems, but barring that having enough "reliable" power generation maintained and online to cover the emergency level requirements, and when there is excess power don't shut down generation, rather use the power for something productive. There are automated systems that can do water desalinization and hydrogen production that don't suffer from an orderly shutdown/startup, but they were just examples I picked out of a hat, ANY energy hungry process that can be stopped and started automatically and that has a useful benefit would work for the task, even if the power use is "wasteful".
@@chrisjohns38 Much more than that. My solar system in the best summer months only produces about 1/4 of its rated capacity, and in the worst winter months it is only about 1/32 of rated capacity. It has been 10 days now with zero electricity produced by my snow/ice covered panels.
@@danadurnfordkevinblanchdebunkmy point is that solar is great and all, but not effective at supplying 24/7/365 the way most people would like it. So 100% reliable power back is desired by most people in the west.
@@chrisjohns38 Storage isn't really a viable option today. We would need more natural gas peaker plants if we are forced to deal with more ruinables, yet the Greenies want to do away with them...
@@danadurnfordkevinblanchdebunk You may need double-sided vertical solar panelts. Google it. International grids and grid storage are the bottleneck - though nuclear cannot help with that in any case - it is baseload only.
Excellent presentation, would be great if climate alarmist people would sit down and listen to the can do,s and can not do,s regarding energy , as it's the key to prosperity here in canada and around the world.
Great example of how government interference in economic activity simply makes the citizens less safe, less wealthy and less free. Government should stick to directly protecting life, liberty and property - a full separation of economics and state.
You're correct, it is turbulence in polar vortex that pushes the jetstream around. That allows a huge mass of arctic air to move southward when the vortex normally keeps it more or less contained. Here's a decent image that describes the phenomenon. www.climate.gov/sites/default/files/styles/full_width_620_alternate_image/public/PolarVortex_Feb2021_620.jpg?itok=hvBI3FXy
Yes polar vortex usually contained in arctic by jet stream. As climate changes and weakens jet stream it gets more wavy and loopy allowing polar air to flow down into more temperate zones. Expect these to become more frequent as we continue to screw up the climate on planet.
Utility scale batteries and renewable energy work well together to stabilize grid flexibility at a small fraction of the cost of nuclear-powered . They can also be built relatively quickly.
Dude!!! I'll sign on to a plan where softening the oil gets easier by waste heat from the nuke. As in: run your cooling lines uninsulated under a funnel based ore body😮. Then, when your cooling lines need additional cooling, (the free kind at least😮)... ya just pull it up with a straw! Love the "narcissist" reference. I love puzzles. And parallels. BRAVO! Well said.
I know a guy who knows a guy who ran steam powered saws with bark he cut from sawing lumber. What was amazing for his time (lol), what capturing some of that steam to make electricity! Why? Because he could sell twice as much wood running 2 shifts! With heated microspheres. Anyone with a John Deere 350 knows the value 9f capturing heat lol. Stick 2 flat panels where air comes out the rad during summer, and force it through your cowl station and controls. Right where your feet are. If ya like fresh air, there is always a way around cold. Well, if you already have something you already need hot, and lots( regerative loops)of it.
I am wondering about moving your excess electrical energy South, on a very high voltage grid helping defray the cost of wind to the provence. These powerlines will of course run both ways with America shipping power to Alberta during a polar vortex situation.
Very good video. However, it is highly inaccurate to talk all the time about "the energy grid". As far as I understood you were always only talking of the electricity grid. It is a bit confusing, for experts like you 2 to talk about "the energy system". This is misleading, because one does not know if you're still talking about electricity or energy in general. Try to make this difference clear please, but keep up the great work! The remark on the energetic return on energetic investment on oil sands is very very important though. Look up Nate Hagens (again). Keep up the good work, and make it even better! By the way, and unfortunately for nuclear, EREOI for nuclear is apparently similar to wind (around 11). It's solar that is very poor, depending on source varying between 2 and 5.
I try very had to be clear on the distinctions between the two, I apologize for the confusion. Speaking about energy is very difficult because of things just like this. Thank you for the feedback, and for listening.
@@myfirstseven8316 Thanks for thé reaction. I never know if I'm not overreacting, in any case I don't want to be hard, yet I probably come over as such. If so, my (late) apologies. Good night and good luck!
Chris, please I want a video with Jim Krellenstein on how to get disposed of spent nuclear fuel. Not by deep geo storage. How to Separate which parts to reuse and which parts to store for how long. What will you do with long halflife isotopes of Am, Cu or Np... asking just because of science wars with german greens in YT comments. Thanks.
Thé exceptionnel shortage issue with gas power plants or pump storage reminds me of a smalle scandal with that Guy that bought all thé old Léopard tanks in Belgium for scrap value, tegen sold Theo recently for much more back to the Belgian for much more to supply Ukraine. He sold them for 100k I believe, but he has also stored them for something like 10-20 years.... Very good discussion, thank you!
Nuclear power. Up front costs. Let's look at what that water intensive choice does to our pristine rivers and lakes too. Radio- active waste. Non renewable power. High, high environmental impact.
That's what people mean about it being expensive, overnight outlay. Huge concern for a single person or a net present value maximizing entity with unknown life span. Entities with predictable and fixed obligations over long time horizons are well matched to be able to finance such outlays up front, and reap the very long tailed benefits. Not hard. Most conventional nuclear requires co-location with water for cooling and decay heat rejection, but this is something most Gen IV vendors are looking to work around because most of their clients will be remote sites not necessarily near large bodies of water like major population centres tend to be. Radioactive waste is actually mostly useful fuel, we need to use it. If you don't like it around, discourage mining new fuel so industry is incentivized to implement the tech that can do it, which is well understood. I encourage you to revisit the literature, nuclear is one of the lowest impact technologies we use by almost every measure. I was surprised to learn this when I started out as well.
Agree with all the insights here. The public objective needs to be abundant, clean, affordable, safe energy. The issue is the public, private sector and technology mix needed to achieve the objective. The mix will vary community to community and place to place. I think there are some fundamentals. Renewables by their nature offer economy and spatial diversity but suffer in terms of reliability. Nuclear offers reliability and energy intensity but cost is an issue. Overall a diversity of energy sources has value in itself for reliability and stabilising prices. The issue then is determining the mix needed in various situations.
I believe that because wind and solar are free, a lot of people are fooled into overlooking the huge cost of producing, and placing these items is in reality .
I don't think a human right is to have 100% power, 100% of the time for everything. People should be able to deal with the lights going off for 1 min every few months. There are some things which they should be able to powered 100% of the time but they should be paying for this... If not the government should assist with this cost. Don't want to over engineer everything.
Nuclear really should have just repalced existing coal and gas plants. There would have been little need to upgrade the grid Now the world is going to need vast grid upgrades. Not just interconnections to other counties but also internal grid upgrases and storage assets like batteires and pumped hydro The UK is going to build ~20 links to other European nations. And also some ~20 large significant internal grid upgrades eg like two massive expensive HVDC lines from Scotland to England Not only do these links and storage cost money and upkeep but they are also net consumers of Electricity Unfortunately its too late now for much of Europe as our early embrace of wind means that by 2030 we will have a wind heavy grid and wont need any additional generation poat ~2030 The wind will be relatively cheap. The transmission distrituion and storage will be relatively expensive Unfortunately we are going to make a similar mistake with the change over to fossil free building heat. We probably should do nuclear heat grids for heating. Instead we are going to do 50 million heat pumps. Thise might be affordable almost. But again its going to need expensive transmission distribution and storage assets none of which would be needed for nuclear heat Oh well. The downside of democracy is the vocal protestors get their way. Hopefully we wont kill the gold laying goose of relatively free trade so as to be able to afford a relatively expensove grid
Alberta passed on their best opportunity to get in early on nuclear in 2008 or so when Bruce Power was interested. I think the only reason why Alberta has a snowball's hope in hell now is because OPG is involved and I suspect the limitations of a crown corp will rear it's head at some point. On the subject of internal grid upgrades, without even getting into storage assets neighbouring BC Hydro's looking at 36 billion.
@@wheel-man5319 you are correct . Why would you build pumped hydro with a 50% (+/-) round trip efficiency - even if you had a prime location available. Let the renewables compete in an unsubsidized environment and see how long they last and let the ideologues commit to their renewables-only power supplier and see if they like the power bills when mother nature shows her true colors.
Would love to hear more about carbon capture in Alberta as he mentioned. Always seemed viable to me inside an exhaust stack and been wondering why we don't see more of it
There is no climate emergency,no need to carbon capture,trees and plants will die with less co2,.004 parts per million makes damn all difference to the climate,and we are also having record cold temperatures,a fact that the biased media hardly ever mentions,and cold weather has killed more people than hot weather,climate variability will always be with us,but we are also building more expensive stuff on beaches,rivers,in the bush,so when a cyclone,floods due to heavy rain ,droughts and bush fires occur,the damage can be huge,and in that regard,nothing will change,climate is unpredictable,and the media love catastrophes,and scientists like Greta Thunberg,Al Gore,John kerry are just scaremongering the population with their idiotic hypocrisy,as is the davos mob,a bunch of unelected ,genocidal oligarchs that want more for themselves,and less for we the people,well the hell with that!@
It’s extremely expensive and doesn’t start providing an actual reduction in net emissions for a while. I hear brewing beer presents a net zero carbon case though!
"We're really bad at.." shifting the direction of social momentum, so a detailed revision of the educational curriculum to reset the personal experience of the relative-timing Actuality in which we're embedded is even more urgent than ever. That report on the extremely wasteful low grade fossil fuels and not-actually-alternative WSB is the kind of horror story that Dark Money interests are extremely clever at obfuscating. MMT Provisioning strategies are effectively detailing what, how and why the government debt is mostly political fakery in denial of the responsibilities to prepare reliable energy sources underpinning expected health and welfare programs and strategies. Organized mafia-like Crime is what we're getting.
Nakota Nation Named "speaks in paragraphs" sits down with Chippawa Medicine Man "forgets where he was going with that" to digress on many things. Perhaps I was just over served, but I started with nothing and still have most of it left. Will try again in the AM. I hear smarter in the daylight.
So, where is AB's "backup" for daily fluctuation of demand? Can't call on the steam co-generation plants. Can't call on the gas fired steam (converted coal) plants. Can't call on any open cycle gas turbines. No pumped hydro. Insufficient neighboring grid connections. Time ~39m, you've got gas generators gaming the system (as it is an energy only market) just like ENRON did. No one told them to build a power plant in AB (or any of the NorAm energy markets) and they built them to make money thinking they had a better product than existed previously. No one guaranteed them x-hours per year. So let me get this straight, it is only "sporadic" energy generators aka wind/solar that are gaming the system, but the same generators you lamented about gaming the system waiting for prices to increase, are not to blame at all?! Shut the front door. And let's get real, real fast... you literally had the same situation happen in AB that happened previously in Texas with Uri, that had nothing to do with wind/solar failing and was compounded by failures in the market design, failures of the fossil operators and just because there was little wind or solar, all the blame rests on them? Also, like ERCOT, you've got little external transmission capacity by choice, not by what is best for the grid & its operation. And as a little "island" grid you have no capacity to install nuclear as n1 or n2 contingencies of a reactor trip happening exceeds 10% of system cap. Again shut the front door. Woah, wait a second... "what could the $200 B have done in Texas? Every study points at the "Energy Only" market design as bearing the largest factor... not wind or solar. What is Alberta again? A [explicative] Energy Only market!!! But please tell us again how this is an issue of wind & solar.
The grid is incredibly expensive $/klm, and huge length. Most grids are equal to the national GDP. Grids have been built over 100years. More electricity means more grid capacity. Nuclear is cost constrained by the grid construction costs. The grid is fragile and was never overbuilt because it is expensive. This is an important matter if nuclear electricity is going to work. 5 times more electricity if no fossil fuels in the future.
Most the West Grids were built during times of far lower population and far lower land/property prices. It will cost far far more to build the same grid today as the compensation numbers and amounts will be far higher It's also far easier to convince a farmer who doesn't have electricity to allow eletricity infrastructure over his land as he will get electricity which is valuable to him. It makes his non eletricity home more valuable to have electricity Now try to convince the same farmer to allow a line across his field which doesn't benefit him directly. He will protest and want a pound of flesh Likewise a home that was worth $2000 might have accepted $50 compensation for an overhead line nearby. Now the same home is $500,000 and they'd probably want $50,000 compensation before even considering the line that was built 100 years ago had yo maybe compensate 100 people now with population growth its maybe 1,000 people All said and done Grid upgrades are going to be very costly and remote wind farms are going to need more transmission and stage infrastructure than siting a nuke at a former coal plant
@kaya051285 Your comment is good. Latitude counts as well. In Australia, we need 5 times more electricity and so just replacing is only a 20% solution. I think every country has the same 100% problem. So let's not half talk. New generation capacity AND new grid capacity. Street poles and wires are also expensive. I have been involved in urban upgrade work. The expensive complexity of working in a city and suburbs and even distant cross country. People can not even see the wires. They just 'disappear'. Which is exactly what the politicians want when they are built. We get so used to them.
Dead wrong. An adequate battery would cost many times what a nuclear system would, as would the blackout when any smaller battery is depleted. i.e Texas 2021
@@grahambennett8151 That is true for older nuclear units only. But BWRX300, AP1000, all SMRs and Terra Power Natrium are all designed for significant cycling. And all molten salt reactors will have no cycling or restart limitations at all, because Xenon is not trapped in the fuel.. With them there will be no need for any class of peaking capacity other than possible thermal storage of reactor heat ala Natrium. Any battery storage of more than a few days would be more expensive than new nuclear.
@@robertmeredith3940 Yes, it's great that you came back, and I am aware of efforts to ramp, but as of now all small SMRs - and especially molten salt - are vapourware, and SMRs do not get us past the basic principle that ramping up and down - given the volatility of the core tech - fission - increases risk - and cost - especially since nuclear cost estimates are based on long lifetimes at 85% utilisation. Check it out - the UK's nuclear power does not ramp in practice, and that will be because it *should not*! There are other levels to this, however, because these things are not typically discussed in videos like this, and that seems to be symptomatic of nuclear fair-weather thinking, the conspiracy of optimism that has already led to numerous nuclear disasters, and near misses. On another level still, there are also two sets of weights, because the nuclear industry dismisses other forms of power because of their inherent drawbacks, without considering the mitigations and solutions. Well: ramping is a fundamental drawback of nuclear, and the consequences of a mistake, or a mechanism going wrong are unthinkable - we don't want even a third or a tenth of a nuclear disaster. We have at least six nuclear exclusion zones in the UK alone. www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/sep/21/scottish-nuclear-leak-clean-up
this is a truly great podcast with a real knowledgeable guest , well worth the listen . nuclear is an option but so is the development of next gen super clean coal plants .
