Opportunities and Obstacles for nuclear in Alberta

The prospects for new nuclear reactors has been a hot topic this summer, particularly following Ontario’s announcements exploring new builds of large reactors and additional consideration of smaller (modular) reactors (SMRs). Ontario had been exploring SMR’s with other provinces, initially with New Brunswick and Saskatchewan, and more recently Alberta joined the group. Alberta’s electricity mix last week became a second hot topic. The current Canadian government is also a topic as it threatens to force, "a net-zero electricity system by 2035."

This seems an appropriate time for me to revisit Alberta’s electricity system in search of a route to nuclear power in that province.

Alberta’s electricity system underwent radical changes since I wrote on a former government’s activities in 2017’s Alberta.Bound. In this post I’ll concentrate on data from the Alberta Electricity System Operator (AESO) in this post, mostly from their Annual Market Statistics data visualization which currently contains data from 2015 thru to June 2023. The AESO's data indicates rapidly declining potential for nuclear in the AESO’s market in recent years.

Alberta’s coal generators saw the wish for them to disappear grow for over a decade. In 2012 I wrote on the rapid opposition to federal regulations that would see emissions from new coal-power plants limited to something impossible with any operational technology, and a maximum lifespan of 50-years mandated, then, through emissions regulation, the goalpost essentially moved to 40 years within Alberta, and then a 2030 death data was mandated, and other generation sources incented. Alberta's Climate Leadership Plan (CLP) of 2017 noted the, "drive toward the development of 30 per cent of electricity generation capacity from renewable sources connected to the grid by 2030." [emphasis added] While the CLP itself spoke of efforts to remove, "policy barriers of the conversion of coal units to natural gas," many of the people that set policy had already created an understanding that ,"Two-thirds of the coal-generating capacity (4200 MW) will be replaced by renewable energy, and one-third (2100 MW) by natural gas."

Summarizing the changes in generation capacity since 2016 by grouping fossil fueled generators together (gas, coal, dual fuel), “green” together (wind, solar and storage), displaying co-generation alone and lumping everything else in under “other” (including hydro), the decline in generating capacity of firm generators fueled by coal and/or gas is apparent, as is the, related, meteoric rise of “green” ones.

on the risk of power shortages in Ontario this summer

A regulatory body with a mission “to assure the effective and efficient reduction of risks to the reliability and security of the grid,” delivered its “Summer Reliability Assessment” for North American jurisdictions last month. The brief news release for the document:

warns that two-thirds of North America is at risk of energy shortfalls this summer during periods of extreme demand. While there are no high-risk areas in this year’s assessment, the number of areas identified as being at elevated risk has increased. The assessment finds that, while resources are adequate for normal summer peak demand, if summer temperatures spike, seven areas — the U.S. West, SPP and MISO, ERCOT, SERC Central, New England and Ontario — may face supply shortages during higher demand levels.

Toronto Centre MPP, the NDP’s Peter Tabuns, used that document to launch an attack on the government’s management of the electricity system in the Ontario legislature on June 1st:

“…the body that oversees electricity grids in North America reported that Ontario risks power outages this summer. In fact, Ontario is the only province in Canada that is rated with elevated risk that it can’t meet peak demand. After five years, this government’s policies of cutting funding for efficiency and conservation, of demolishing wind farms and cancelling other renewable projects have led to this.”

This has gotten the rabble roused - if the media is any indication. The Toronto Star and CTV news both reported on topic. CTV’s reporting included comments from an expert, who advised, “There really is not any cause to be alarmed”, but also commentary from the opposite sort - politicians Tabuns and the leader of Ontario’s Green party.

Since this topic doesn’t seem to be going away I’ll explain some of the structure and content of reporting on reliability, and address the substance, or lack thereof, in the criticism of the government as reducing reliability through canceling plans for additional ‘green’ energy.

Saving TransAlta: a demonstration of Canada's Clumsy Carbon Pricing

Canada’s Prime Minister announced aspects of a carbon pricing policy again last week. This time there were some details on how much more people in four provinces would pay for fossil fuels, the estimated revenues from those charges, and what is to be done with those revenues. Subsequently there’s much commentary on the content of announcement, and I’ll offer some more, but my attention was returned to a topic I prepared to write on quite some time ago: the impact of government actions in Alberta on a company owning much of the coal-fired generation in its province. I’ll use that company to demonstrate why I refer to the allegedly national policy as Canada’s Clumsy Carbon Pricing (CCCP).

The government’s website contains a section on “Ontario and pollution pricing” [sic] that describes the two main aspects of CCCP:

The federal carbon-pollution [sic] pricing system will be implemented in Ontario, under the federal Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act with the following features:

• For larger industrial facilities, an output-based pricing system for emissions-intensive trade-exposed industries will start applying in January 2019....
• A charge applied to fossil fuels, generally paid by registered distributors (fuel producers and distributors), as set out in the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act, Part 1, will start applying in April 2019…

Because the 2019 pricing for provinces not deemed to have met federal pricing requirements is only now being finalized it will not be effective January 1st, but April 1st, while the Output Based Allocations (OBAs) that are still not finalized are still to be effective four months prior to that - on January 1st.

Clumsy - at best.

Base load and baseload generation

The term baseload gets thrown around frequently but seldom is associated with a base, or minimum, load. It occurs to me the level of knowledge in discussions on electricity supply could benefit from reviewing the level of total electricity that would be met by a mythical generator running throughout at a the year at the minimum system demand. The results are not surprising,but the current level of discourse indicates the results are not intuitive.

I’ve revisited hourly load data I’ve collected over the past year for two provinces and British Columbia (bce … or BC). Each data set measures “load”, or demand, differently, but the particulars are not important for this simple review. For each province’s data set, I’ve queried the minimum annual load along with the average. Upon reflection it’s obvious that the minimum load divided by the average load produced the percentage of annual supply that could come from the steady production of the minimum load.

Differences between years are minimal, but the difference between Alberta and the other 2 provinces is significant. Alberta’s flat load profile means 80% of annual generation could usually be met by consistent supply at the base load level. “Alberta Internal Load”, or AIL, is the statistic used, and it includes behind-the-fence generation which is large due to extensive cogeneration, particularly from oil sands operations. Large industrial loads tend to be far more consistent than, particularly, residential demands. In Ontario and BC the reported loads, which omit behind-the-fence generation, indicate over 2/3rd of supply requirements would be met by output at the base load level.

For reasons I’ll return to in discussing implication of this base load supply level review, I ran some figures estimating how much usable supply would come from increasing the base supply level to 10% above the annual base load level, and with base supply 20% above base load.

Alberta. Bound.

The government of Alberta has a plan to "reduce carbon emissions."
Their plan restricts the ability of the province to efficiently minimize greenhouse gas emissions.

The three aspects of the Alberta's "Climate Leadership Plan" most relevant to the electricity sector are:

• implementing a new carbon price on greenhouse gas emissions
• ending pollution from coal-generated electricity by 2030
• developing more renewable energy

I've seen my province - Ontario - cited as an impediment to growing renewable energy in Alberta. This is understandable from a cost perspective, but if reducing emissions were the primary goal Ontario's example would be encouraging, as its emissions from generating electricity are a fraction of Alberta's.

I realize most Albertans are not awaiting opinions from Ontario, but I'll trust my analysis will be of interest to some in Alberta, and some elsewhere. Alberta is simply the sample case I'll use to argue specifically banning coal-fired electricity is unnecessary, and quotas for renewable sources to provide a fixed percentage of supply a little worse than that. This is not to argue for coal or little supply from renewables. Functionally, what I'll point to as better policy is likely to result in similar outcomes. I intend to demonstrate rules are being gamed to predetermine an unambitious outcome at the expense of achieving greater things.

A brief review of Albert's electricity system will be helpful prior to discussing the growth of renewables and elimination of coal. 

Figures are collected from AESO annual market statistic files (year 2013-2016) 

Available figures for Alberta's electricity generation include the percentage of electricity produced by generation technology. Unfortunately some categories change in 2010, but whether 2016 is compared to 2010 (the earliest year of the current categories) or 2004, coal has lost the greatest market share, and it has lost it to wind (probably the greatest change since 2004, natural gas (Combined Cycle gas turbines had the biggest 2010-2016 growth) and "Cogen" (for co-generation). Coal does continue to have 60% market share by this measure, so adding renewables until they have a 30% share seems doable - but it's more difficult depending on the definition of the market.