Danielle Smith’s attacks on wind and solar cold comfort for Albertans

It’s one of the oldest political maxims in the book: Never let a good crisis go to waste. Rarely has that spirit of political opportunism been more obvious than in the UCP government’s handling of last weekend’s near-crisis in the Alberta electricity market, when the province flirted with rolling blackouts in the face of record-cold temperatures. For a government desperate to shovel as much dirt as possible onto wind and solar energy, it created an irresistible invitation to prove its point.

On Friday evening, Danielle Smith tweeted that “the Alberta Electric System Operator (AESO) has issued a grid alert for Alberta. Right now, the wind is generating almost no power. When renewables are unreliable, as they are now, natural gas plants must increase capacity to keep Albertans warm and safe.” This was actually an improvement on the initial version of this message, which suggested that renewables were only producing enough electricity to power 10 homes when the underlying math suggested it was actually 10,000. Either way, her desire to politicize a potentially lethal emergency was abundantly clear.

Never mind, for the moment, that this had nothing to do with wind and solar. It was a 300-megawatt natural gas plant going offline and another that was down for maintenance that had more to do with the shortfall than wind and solar, which aren’t (and shouldn’t be) treated as baseload sources of energy. As the AESO noted, it was actually wind and solar that bailed the grid out on Monday.

The real culprit here is Alberta’s deregulated electricity market, and the failure to replace it with one that rewards things like capacity. The NDP started to do that (with the backing of the province’s independent AESO) but the UCP cancelled it almost immediately after forming government in 2019. Then-energy minister Sonya Savage suggested the NDP was “fear-mongering about blackouts and price spikes” in criticizing that decision, but they have since been proven completely right. Last year, Albertans paid by far the highest electricity prices in Canada, and last weekend was just the latest near-blackout scare.

This sort of chaos is not normal. Over in British Columbia, record-cold temperatures also resulted in record-high demand for electricity. And yet, there was no warning about potential brownouts, no calls from the government for people to reduce their consumption and no emergency alert texts blasting on phones across the province. As BC Hydro noted, they were even able to send some electricity across the border to help out their Alberta neighbours. Unlike Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe, who used the opportunity to virtue signal on behalf of his province’s fleet of fossil-fuelled generators, B.C.’s David Eby didn’t even take a victory lap for it.

Alas, his maturity was in stark contrast to some of the reactions in Alberta, where all the province’s noisiest idiots were out in force declaring the blackouts the work of “dangerous Marxists” or “the green agenda” and that “Scott Moe’s coal plants saved the lives of thousands of vulnerable Albertans.”

None of that is even remotely true, of course, as experts like the University of Calgary’s Blake Shaffer and the University of Alberta’s Andrew Leach valiantly kept trying to point out. As Shaffer said, “The constant slagging of ‘wind isn’t blowing/sun isn’t shining’ gets tiring. They’re not dispatchable capacity resources. This is not news. We need flexible options coupled with the cheap raw energy renewables provide for an efficient, reliable system.”

This signal will almost certainly be lost in all the noise created by the UCP and its proxies. Smith will double down on her own anti-renewables argument that allows her to cast the blame in both Rachel Notley and Justin Trudeau’s direction. Her government will renew its campaign against the federal government’s Clean Electricity Regulations. And the broader culture war being waged against climate solutions like electric vehicles will continue apace.

What we need is a nuanced and expert-driven conversation about how best to maximize the economic value of Alberta’s renewable resources and the stability of its electricity grid. It should push for the construction of a bigger intertie between B.C. and Alberta’s grid, something the federal government can and should encourage. It should embrace demand-side technologies like smart meters and other measures that proactively reward consumer flexibility. And yes, it should welcome more wind and solar power in places where it’s economically viable.

What we’re probably going to get is a populist-driven campaign against technologies the rest of the world is continuing to adopt and deploy at record pace. The UCP will continue to wage war against Ottawa’s climate policies, effectively cutting off Alberta’s nose to spite Justin Trudeau’s face. Given their dire standings in the polls, the increasingly desperate federal Liberals will almost certainly welcome the fight.

None of this is good for Alberta’s future. None of it augurs well for an informed debate about its electricity system or the sources of energy that will power it. But then, politics in Alberta has never really been about what’s best for the future.