In addition to the obvious potential solutions to secure Alberta's power grid, there's an entire conversation we aren't having.
It’s been more than a week since Alberta teetered on the brink of an electricity crisis, brought on in large part by the prolonged bout of record-breaking extreme cold gripping the province at the time.
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In the time since, different political factions have tried to milk the problem for their own benefit, laying the blame on absolutely everyone and everything not aligned with their own views.
You name it, you’ve got a culprit: Weather. Renewable energy. Coal phaseout. Inadequate power generation from natural gas. Insufficient energy storage. A green transition that hasn’t even started yet. And last but not least, your most despised provincial and/or federal politician, personally.
Having read and heard a number of talking heads addressing recent troubles with Alberta’s power grid, it seems reasonable to say a confluence of many things was the cause.
The kind of electricity market our government chose to institute determined how much capacity our grid has.
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Because it was nighttime, there would have been no solar power generation. Wind generation wasn’t anything to write home about.
There were unfortunately timed outages at natural gas facilities, with some plants offline.
And yes, it was very cold, meaning people were perhaps using electrical appliances like space heaters and engine block heaters in larger numbers than typical.
Everything added up to an emergency alert being blasted to our phones around 6:45 p.m. on Jan. 13, asking everyone in Alberta to limit our power usage or risk rotating blackouts that evening.
It didn’t take long for experts to share charts to show the near-immediate impact as many of us responded by reducing their reliance on such power-hungry appliances as ovens, stoves, dishwashers, washers/dryers, space heaters, block heaters and, for a small number of people, electric vehicle chargers.
Albertans patted themselves on the back for a job well done — and deservedly so.
While big-ticket items are obvious targets for conserving energy in a crisis, almost no one has talked about the little things that could add up to a significant amount of wasted electricity. The nicknames for this phenomenon sound like something out of a horror film: vampire power, vampire draw, ghost loads and the like.
But whatever you want to call it, the issue is the same. Problem or not, we’re collectively using scads of electricity when we don’t actually intend to.
Things like idling chargers and coffee makers — plugged in but not used — will continue to sip electricity, around 1 watt.
Doorbell cameras and smart speakers use a little more, typically under 10 watts.
Smart TVs, set-top boxes, gaming consoles, internet modems and wifi routers can use quite a bit more when when idle or supposedly off but plugged into an electrical socket.
Individually, none of those devices consumes crazy amounts of power but put together, it’s still quite a bit.
For argument’s sake, let’s say the approximately one million households in the Edmonton and Calgary metropolitan areas each have devices plugged in that draw 100 watts between them while idle or allegedly off.
That’s 100 megawatts of electricity in total that could easily be reduced or cut — a savings equivalent of having built ourselves one or more modest-sized power plants.
It’s not nothing, but we can’t do all of it ourselves.
We really need device manufacturers to realize electricity isn’t as abundant or inexpensive as they’d like to believe and design products that don’t suck as much power from the grid as they do currently, wasting precious and finite resources while adding to our bills to boot.
Of course, conservation will only go so far. It doesn’t take away from the fact we need to consider what we need to do to right-size our source of mains power supply, given changes in our lifestyles and growth in population.
What Alberta needs is a rational, reasonable and realistic discussion about what kind of electrical grid we need and how to protect it — not a charged debate based on political beliefs and preconceptions.
rleong@postmedia.com
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