Nathan Neudorf Archives - Loonie Politics

Alberta’s power system watchdog, the Market Surveillance Administrator (MSA), analyzed two near-disastrous electricity shortages faced by Albertans in January and April of this year.

The January emergency alert event happened during a cold snap and resulted in calls for everyone in the province to sharply reduce power usage to avoid blackouts.

The April event, which was related to a whole series of power generation glitches, did result in some rolling blackouts.

In its report released this week the MSA made seven recommendations to avoid future failures. But the report doesn’t address the big issue —Alberta’s complex private power system is a mess, ill-suited to providing stable power in a fast-growing economy and increasingly diverse power-generation environment.

The MSA report suggests tweaks addressing some obvious flaws without addressing the underlying structural dysfunction. But even those tweaks suggest that Alberta has been lucky to avoid a catastrophic power failure.

The MSA suggests power generators make their commitments to supply the electrical grid a day ahead rather than an hour ahead of delivering the power. Forecasting needs to be improved on how much power solar and wind generation will supply, it recommends.

Companies should have to justify their power plant downtime in more detail, says the MSA and those reasons should be routinely audited. And companies should be required to keep a generator online if a supply shortage is imminent.

The province has enacted some changes already that appear in the report, including the Supply Cushion Regulation that requires natural gas plants to stay online in times of high demand. The MSA report shows that the requirement would have prevented the April blackouts if it had been in place at the time.

The day, rather than hour, ahead electricity sale system will be implemented, according to the government.

In March Nathan Neudorf, Minister of Affordability and Utilities, admitted there are problems requiring urgent attention.

“Our government is committed to Alberta’s unique and investor-driven energy-only market. However, the market’s rules were designed 25 years ago, and some are no longer optimal for the system today,” he said in a press release as the government announced more restructuring of the system.

“Unique and investor-driven” certainly does describe Alberta’s system.

With no overall public utility, Albertans are hostage to a sprawling network of private-sector power generators and retailers. Electricity prices are among the highest in the country. Bills are nearly indecipherable in their complexity.

Recent changes allow Albertans to switch companies and billing plans more easily, but that means the average customer has to keep a sharp eye on the electricity market month to month.

Regulations and rules (because despite calling itself de-regulated, the system has plenty of regulations) are, as Neudorf admitted, out-of-date.

Most of the regulations were designed to deal with massive coal-generation facilities. But with the development of more nimble natural gas units and a welter of green-generation options, the ecology of power in the province has changed.

When the red alert came in January, Premier Danielle Smith tried to lay a major part of the blame on the inability of wind power to make up the power deficit. The MSA report mentions forecasting issues regarding wind, but the root cause was pretty clearly a deficit in natural gas power generation due to various plant shutdowns and outages.

There is also the looming issue of electrical grid decarbonization, not anticipated by the province’s current regime and being fought tooth and nail by Smith.

Smith argues that the province can’t possibly meet Ottawa’s requirement to decarbonize]by 2035. She actively hobbled the renewable energy sector with a six-month moratorium on new projects.

Alberta’s power system is overly complicated, out of date, too dependent on private players and too inflexible to respond to today’s climate emergency. Layering on more rules and tweaking regulations won’t fix a structure which doesn’t serve the public interest.

Are the differences between Alberta and Ottawa on carbon emission policy unreconcilable?

If you surf the tops of the news headlines it looks as though the province is retreating further and further from coming to grips with its climate crisis responsibilities.

Piqued by recent comments from federal environment minister Steven Guibeault, Premier Danielle Smith fired off an incendiary statement on social media over the weekend railing that federal emission reduction targets and the goal to reach a carbon-neutral electrical grid by 2035 are unconstitutional, investment-killing atrocities.

Alberta claims to be working toward that carbon-neutral grid by 2050. Instead of trying to curb oil and gas production with ambitious emission controls, Ottawa should be promoting “clean” Canadian LNG in Asia, says Smith.

Her bottom line: “Alberta will not recognize any federally imposed emission-reduction targets for our energy and electricity sectors under any circumstances unless such targets are first consented to by the Government of Alberta.”

Perhaps more than any issue, Smith frames energy policy, and by extension environment policy, as an Alberta sovereignty issue.

On Wednesday, Alberta Minister of Affordability and Utilities Nathan Neudorf backed Smith’s rhetoric up further with a statement that acknowledges that demands for reliable, sustainable energy are higher than ever but that it’s just too expensive for Albertans to reach the federal 2035 carbon-neutral grid target.

The cost of sharply reducing carbon emissions and in any way reducing oil and gas production is now consistently tied to the cost to the economy. Any flip advantage of a more sustainable industry is sliding out of the narrative.

Alberta’s Environment Minister Rebecca Schulz was a tad conciliatory after she met with Guibeault on Wednesday.

“The indication we got from the minister was that there’s still time for negotiation and discussions,” she told reporters.

But she trotted out the fire-breathing party line in her formal statement.

“I informed Minister Guilbeault that our government remains resolutely opposed to any federal cap on oil and gas emissions or electricity regulations that are not expressly consented to by Alberta and that do not align with Alberta’s emissions reduction and energy development plan.”

Smith’s mandate letter to Schulz in her new job as environment minister met with lots of criticism earlier this month in terms of what it didn’t contain, including specific actions on carbon emissions.

Schulz told a Canadian Press reporter that the climate strategy is coming as the government gathers enough information.

“In many ways, we are working at emissions reduction right now. Some aspects of our net-zero aspiration by 2050 are relying, maybe in some cases, on technology that doesn’t yet exist.”

These trends in Alberta government public messaging are shaping the climate change discussion in the province. The dreaded “CO2 is not a pollutant” meme is popping up consistently in social media comments on government statements.

So how deep does this divide between Ottawa and Edmonton go? Despite the overheated rhetoric and diversionary tactics at the strictly political level, there is still a fair bit of emission tackling and sustainable innovation happening at a bureaucratic and industry level.

Even Smith has mentioned the federal-provincial working group trying to find common ground and a way forward.

Guibeault spent a couple of days this week roaming Calgary, chatting with the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Council of Alberta. His media interviews didn’t suggest much movement off the electricity 2035 target but a supposed 42 percent emissions reduction in the energy industry by 2030 seems a bit fuzzier.

“What we said in the Emissions Reduction Plan was that the 42 percent was not a target but it was a pathway. So we will see with the oil and gas cap — will it be exactly that, will it be something different? That’s one of the many things that remain to be defined,” Guibeault said in an interview.

For the average Canadian, tours and chats, innovation grants, promised regulations, targets and policies and endless jurisdictional battles don’t amount to much beyond posturing and blather.

Floods, heat waves and forest fires speak much more loudly about the concrete actions expected from all leaders. There’s not much point protecting Alberta’s sovereign rights and oil patch bottom line if the province is in flames and the crops are dead in the field.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.

Tag: Nathan Neudorf

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