Albertans Left Blown' In The Wind

You Don't Need A Weatherman To Know Which Way the Wind Blows. Not in Alberta home of the free market. No rent controls here says our Premier. No changes in Building Codes till 2010. No need to revise our pork barrel health boards.

But Steady Eddie will keep a cap on wind energy.

Wind power advocates are unhappy with the Alberta government for suggesting that the current cap on wind energy in the province might be raised, rather than eliminated completely.

And not let Albertans develop their own home based energy to reduce their energy bills and produce locally based micro green energy whose excess can be put into the provinces utility grid. So much for his much lauded free market politics.

The Stelmach government foresees nearly doubling the amount of wind-power generation allowed in Alberta, even as the province remains the only jurisdiction in Canada to cap the production of wind energy.

Alberta's Electric System Operator introduced last year a limit of 900 megawatts of wind-energy generation, saying it was uncertain about whether wind conditions and patterns could be properly forecast -- something needed to produce a reliable stream of power.

The decision enraged wind-energy producers, which have thousands of megawatts in the queue. The rules made Alberta the only jurisdiction in Canada to impose such a cap.

"Replacing it with a higher cap is not a preferred option," said Robert Hornung, president of the Canadian Wind Energy Association. "A cap sends a signal that a door is closed, and for investors in the industry, that sends a negative signal."

NDP environment critic David Eggen, who's long been lobbying the government to axe the cap, said more wind power will help slash greenhouse gas emissions spewed by coal-fired electricity plants.

The Tory government's priority for building transmission lines has gone to the carbon-based energy suppliers, he argued, which has further hindered wind-energy generation.

"If these guys (the government) are free marketers, get out of the way and let the renewable energy groups into the market," Eggen said. "There are so many delaying tactics to prevent renewable energy from getting a foothold in this province."

Of course there never was a free market in utilities in Alberta. They are either private monopolies like ATCO Frontenac, or TransAlta, or they are publicly owned like EPCOR and Enmax.

The former being influential supporters of the Tory government and their boards are retirement homes for former PC cabinet ministers.

Deregulation was done for their bottom line not for expansion of alternative utility services such as wind energy or home based green energy production.


Wind energy companies are all private small entrepreneurs.

Cowley Ridge in southwestern Alberta is the site of Canada's first commercial wind farm. The turbines generate enough electricity to power 7,000 homes. When it was launched in 1998, 3,000 households were signed up. Now, it has more than doubled with each home paying an extra $7.50 on average for using wind power.

While big utility monopolies like TransAlta are a dumping ground for ex Tory cabinet ministers their coal and gas powered hydro monopolies must be protected by their pals like Eddie.

The provincial government wants to insure those who control the grid, do not face competition from independent johnny come lately's promoting green energy nor from home based micro energy production.



H/T to Pierre Trudeau Is My Home Boy


SEE:

Power Failure

Heat Not Light

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18/7

Steam power is the basis of the industrial revolution and the birth of Capitalism in America. Some of the steam lines in New York City date back to then. And steam is inherently explosive.

Huge Steam Pipe Blast Kills One in NYC

Emergency personnel look over a truck that lies in a hole in the street after a steam explosion in midtown Manhattan, New York, Wednesday, July 18, 2007. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

A transformer exploded in midtown Manhattan on Wednesday, creating a roar and a huge plume of smoke and sending pedestrians fleeing from the area in scenes reminiscent of the September 11 attacks.

Police at the scene said 15 to 20 people had been taken to the hospital. CNN said three of the injured had been admitted to the New York Presbyterian Hospital emergency room.

In Washington, a U.S. Department of Homeland Security official said there was no apparent link to terrorism.

"Right now it is a localized incident," said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "At this point, we see no nexus to terrorism."

Officials said a ruptured steam pipe appeared to have caused the transformer to blow.

The explosion erupted during the evening rush hour in one of the busiest sections of New York City, near the transportation hub of Grand Central station.

A loud constant roar rang out through the streets.

Photograph by J.D. Griggs on February 3, 1988

Steam explosions (also called littoral explosions, because they occur at the shoreline, or littoral zone) result when lava meets the sea. In the photograph above, the explosion sprays fragments of lava into the air. The smaller pieces are carried by currents and deposited in bays to form black sand beaches.

SEE:

Nuclear NIMBY

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Power Failure

Americans are facing an increase in electricity rates thanks to deregulation.

Illinois residents have seen a jump in electricity rates recently. NewsHour correspondent Elizabeth Brackett looks at the debate over deregulation and freezing rates in Illnois.

Which of course Albertans have faced since 2001.

A number of industry watchers, including Alberta Energy Minister Mel Knight, have been forecasting higher electricity costs for Albertans even before the Ed Stelmach government announced a new $15-per-tonne tax on carbon dioxide emissions.

And that's come on top of a $4.5-billion bill Alberta consumers are being asked to pay for desperately needed new transmission infrastructure.

Hydro Quebec rated Edmonton's residential electricity rate the fifth highest out of 11 cities in 10 provinces in 2006.

Here is the irony deregulation was supposed to create competition and thus fund infrastructure expansion. Instead it has cost consumers more, reduced competition creating power oligopolies and no new transmission infrastructure has been created.

Service, well we have increasing brown outs and black outs now thanks to deregulation. Something we now share with California.

EPCOR has begun rolling blackouts, cutting power to certain areas on alternating days to help conserve energy. It's not a terrible idea, but it makes day to day living a pain. There's no official schedule anywhere, so you just kind of have to guess when power in your area is going out.

However city owned EPCOR has increased its profits thanks to deregulation.

But these profits have not benefited consumers or tax payers, they have been shoveled into an income trust created by EPCOR. This is the real meaning of deregulation;

Epcor recently acquired TransCanada Power Limited Partnership, which now operates as Epcor Power L.P. The merger included the integration of 11 new power generation facilities located in Ontario, New York, British Columbia and Colorado. The new publicly-traded subsidiary is the largest publicly-traded company based in Edmonton.

EPCOR Power L.P. (the Partnership) is a limited partnership organized under the laws of the Province of Ontario, which owns and operates a portfolio of power generation assets in Canada and the United States.

The Partnership's mission is to be Canada's premier income fund, providing a growing, stable cash distribution to unitholders. This will be accomplished by being growth-oriented while providing unitholders with reliable long-term cash flows. Superior operating and commercial management practices will be applied to a quality portfolio of energy assets.

	Stock Quote: EP.UN
		$26.12

See:

What's That Smell?

Blowing in the Wind

Citizen Klein

The Wild West Buyout

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Nuclear P3 Meltdown

Ah the joy of Private Public partnerships. The irony here is that the Bruce Plant is also owned by public pensions funds, private interests and the Power Workers Union. Originally mothballed by the Harris government, it was sold to a consortium of public private interests to pay for the expensive repairs Bruce needed to get it back online.

Robin Jeffrey’s determination created the opportunity that spawned Bruce Power and has led to a revitalization of nuclear power in Canada. The Bruce Power transaction received a Gold Award from the Canadian Council for Public Private Partnerships for “Excellence and Innovation in Infrastructure” and received the Financial Times Global Energy Award for “Successful Investment Decision of the Year” of 2001.

Local support wasn't a given for Hawthorne when he first came to the Bruce station, in 2000, as part of a team of experts imported by British Energy, a U.K. utility that leased the plant from the Ontario government that year. The 1970s-era station — which consists of eight Canadian-made Candu nuclear reactors — had languished and faltered under public-sector management. The provincial government had decided to see if private managers could do a better job running a major part of the nuclear fleet that supplies almost half of Ontario's electricity. To lure experienced nuclear managers to the province, Ontario's Conservative finance minister at the time, Jim Flaherty, offered British Energy a 17-year lease on terms critics considered too sweet for an asset the public borrowed billions to build.

Financial concerns involving its operations outside of Canada led British Energy PLC to withdraw from Bruce Power in 2003. As a result, the Cameco Corporation increased its share of Bruce Power to 31.6%, while new partners TransCanada PipeLines and BPC Generation Infrastructure Trust (a trust owned by the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System [OMERS]) each acquired a 31.6% share. The facility’s two primary unions retained their original 5.2% share.

With the McGuinty government promise to eliminate coal fired plants, Bruce coming back online at 'any cost' was a priority. And the cost was of course to the taxpayers of Ontario.

Ontarians would have saved $1.5 billion on their hydro bills over the next 25 years had the government negotiated a smarter deal to refurbish the Bruce Power nuclear station, the provincial auditor general says.

Electricity generated by refurbished reactors at a privately operated nuclear station will cost hydro consumers in Ontario 44 per cent more than the going market rate as a result of the government's failure to drive the best deal possible, the province's auditor says.

Auditor-General Jim McCarter said in a report released yesterday he recognizes that the province was not in a strong bargaining position when it cut the 2005 deal with Bruce Power, the privately owned consortium that operates the nuclear station on Lake Huron.

As a result, his report suggests, the government made too many financial concessions at the expense of electricity consumers.

The government will pay Bruce Power 7.1 cents a kilowatt hour for electricity produced from reactors the company plans to refurbish. This is significantly higher than the average market price of 4.9 cents consumers have paid over the past five years and experts' projections of future prices, the report says.

See:

nuclear power

Environment

Hydro

Energy Probe

CANDU

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What's That Smell?

A new task force funded by the Canadian government and the province of Alberta will study ways to capture and store greenhouse gases emitted by the province's massive oil sands projects, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said on Thursday. The task force will be headed by Steven Snyder, chief executive of TransAlta Corp., a Calgary-based power company that operates coal-fired plants in Alberta and elsewhere.

TransAlta the historical retirement home for ex Cabinet Ministers from the Alberta Government. Like Jim Dinning.

What's that smell? Nepotism? Nope just good old Alberta politics.

After all Steve Snyder knows how important the environment is, and how crucial CO2 sequestration is cause he told folks in Seattle about it five years ago!!! Just waiting for the government to tell them to do it. And to fund it.

Environmental issues today are greater than they've been in probably the history of the industry, and particularly in the Canadian context, with Kyoto at the forefront, but regardless of the CO2 issue, knocks, socks, water issues, in this industry are out there and bigger than ever. This is -- you know, the whole Kyoto argument has become a proxy for the environment, so it's raised environmental issues on everyone's mind. So whether, you know, the U.S., whether they sign Kyoto or not, I don't think it's the point. The point is, people are more conscious of the environment than they were, you know, asking for more action, and our industry's at the forefront of that. I mean, raising capital today, we all know that is more difficult than it was three years ago, so for a capital intensive business, that's pretty -- a pretty tough equation to be in. TransAlta Corporation Investors’ Days Presentation Seattle Seattle, Washington November 25, 2002

So If Steve and the boys at TransAlta were 'at the forefront five years ago how come we are only seeing them act now on CO2 sequestration and other environmental solutions. Just waiting with their hands out. Ottawa spends $155.9M to make Alberta oil industry more green

TransAlta is Alberta's first P3.

With ties to the provincial and federal governments and the Conservative party historically. During the Socred era and later with PC's a position on the Board was practically guaranteed if you were a well connected Calgary Cabinet Minister.

The forerunner of TransAlta Utilities, Calgary Power Company, was founded by banker W. Max Aitken in 1903. Aitken, who later became Lord Beaverbrook, reorganized a number of utilities as a subsidiary of his Royal Securities Company. He was joined in this venture by his friend and mentor R. B. Bennett, who served as Canadian Prime Minister from 1930 until 1935. Some business leaders felt that Aitken and Bennett were an unlikely team, since Bennett was known as an upstanding young man, while Aitken had earned a reputation as something of a renegade. Nonetheless, the pair joined several other prominent Canadian businessmen on Calgary Power's initial board of directors. Among these board members were: A. E. Cross, one of the founders of the Calgary Exhibition and Stampede; Herbert S. Holt, a Montrealer who was later knighted; and C. B. Smith, president of Calgary Power's forerunner, Calgary Power and Transmission Company Limited. Aitken soon became Calgary Power's first president.

In 1947, two years after the war ended, Calgary Power moved its head office from Montreal--then the nation's largest city and prime business center--to Calgary, reorganized, and incorporated as Calgary Power Ltd. At that time, Calgary Power supplied the province of Alberta with 99 percent of its hydroelectric power. Also in 1947, Calgary Power built its Barrier Hydro Plant and used it to test the use of a newly developed remote-control operation system. The automation efforts worked well enough that Calgary Power soon converted all of its plants to the Barrier Plant system. A control center that could operate the company's entire system was built in Seebe in 1951. The company continued its string of innovations by testing 'mobile radio' communications in its line patrol trucks.

Although electricity had begun to spread to rural areas in the 1940s, only 5 percent of farmers in the province had electricity of any kind. The majority of farmers were hesitant to adapt until it became obvious that electric service could increase farm production as well as provide modern conveniences. The main problem for utilities in supplying farms was a financial one: at the time, it was estimated that it would cost $200 million--or twice the provincial debt--to expand service and supply all of the farms with electricity. This dilemma led to an unprecedented cooperative effort between Calgary Power, farmers, and the provincial government.

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