4 ms·

Well, it's hard to get someone to hate their source of income.

by SketchySeaBeast 2y ago

nightowl_games 2y ago
As far as I understand it, the whole country is dependent on the tar sands, but the east still hates it.
- SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
  Is really not. I don't think there are any numbers justifying narrative, and numbers presented in this thread prove it. The dependency is really just Albertan advertising.
- speed_spread 2y ago
  Canada's economy is built on primary resource extraction and production in general but would have done fine without the tar sands. Most of the oil money leaves the country; the money that stays mainly fuels self-serving private agendas, pressuring other parts of the economy and stuffing politics. This could have been averted had a solution like Norway's state oil fund been adopted but would have been too socialist a measure for the empire to tolerate.
  - nightowl_games 2y ago
    Is this not the analogous fund? https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/heritage-fund-reaches-all-time-high-value-of-22-1b-1.6857531 https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/heritage-fund-reaches-all-time-h...
bryanlarsen 2y ago
Their current source of income. Alberta has more sun and more wind than any place else in Canada so renewables could be quite profitable to them in the future, but what government cares about anything further out than the next election? Alberta also used to be the only place in Canada where you could just build a solar power plant and hook it up to the grid with minimal red tape so had a massive advantage in terms of number of solar jobs. Also Alberta is next door to BC which has vast sources of hydro-electric power so it could easily trade solar & wind power to BC when the sun is shining and/or the wind is blowing in exchange for hydro power when it isn't.
- SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
  I agree. The times they are a-changing, but we have a particularly regressive government at the moment that is actively blocking renewable production. The unfortunate bit about having the most sun is that during winter we still don't get much of it. It seems to me we need as much storage as we do production.
  - bryanlarsen 2y ago
    Alberta isn't very cloudy in the wintertime, the reduced insolation is mostly due to lower angles and shorter days. AFAICT, winter sunshine is more than a third of summer sunshine in Alberta. In Europe the number is often 10%. It's cheaper to size production for winter sunshine than to build a lot of storage. AKA it's cheaper to put down 3X as many panels than to build seasonal storage. Alberta doesn't lack for hills, which is what's needed to build pumped storage which is what's cheapest for seasonal storage.
    - pfdietz 2y ago
      > It's cheaper to size production for winter sunshine than to build a lot of storage. Which means enormous amounts of surplus power in the summer (even with PV angled to optimize winter production.) So storage doesn't have to go far to be worthwhile, and in particular with nearly free input energy it doesn't have to be very efficient.
      - bryanlarsen 2y ago
        It doesn't have to be very efficient, but it is has to be cheap. Batteries aren't cheap but they discharge every night so their cost is spread out over ~365 days and their cost becomes feasible. Pumped storage is ~10% the cost of batteries, but if used as seasonal storage so they only discharge once per year that makes them ~36X as expensive. Especially in Alberta where they're competing against Natural Gas which is also approximately free (it's often flared off as a waste gas from oil wells rather than captured and sold because the value is less than the cost of capture).

Well, it's hard to get someone to hate their source of income.

nightowl_games 2y ago

As far as I understand it, the whole country is dependent on the tar sands, but the east still hates it.

SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
Is really not. I don't think there are any numbers justifying narrative, and numbers presented in this thread prove it. The dependency is really just Albertan advertising.
speed_spread 2y ago
Canada's economy is built on primary resource extraction and production in general but would have done fine without the tar sands. Most of the oil money leaves the country; the money that stays mainly fuels self-serving private agendas, pressuring other parts of the economy and stuffing politics. This could have been averted had a solution like Norway's state oil fund been adopted but would have been too socialist a measure for the empire to tolerate.
- nightowl_games 2y ago
  Is this not the analogous fund? https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/heritage-fund-reaches-all-time-high-value-of-22-1b-1.6857531 https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/heritage-fund-reaches-all-time-h...

bryanlarsen 2y ago

Their current source of income. Alberta has more sun and more wind than any place else in Canada so renewables could be quite profitable to them in the future, but what government cares about anything further out than the next election? Alberta also used to be the only place in Canada where you could just build a solar power plant and hook it up to the grid with minimal red tape so had a massive advantage in terms of number of solar jobs. Also Alberta is next door to BC which has vast sources of hydro-electric power so it could easily trade solar & wind power to BC when the sun is shining and/or the wind is blowing in exchange for hydro power when it isn't.

SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
I agree. The times they are a-changing, but we have a particularly regressive government at the moment that is actively blocking renewable production. The unfortunate bit about having the most sun is that during winter we still don't get much of it. It seems to me we need as much storage as we do production.
- bryanlarsen 2y ago
  Alberta isn't very cloudy in the wintertime, the reduced insolation is mostly due to lower angles and shorter days. AFAICT, winter sunshine is more than a third of summer sunshine in Alberta. In Europe the number is often 10%. It's cheaper to size production for winter sunshine than to build a lot of storage. AKA it's cheaper to put down 3X as many panels than to build seasonal storage. Alberta doesn't lack for hills, which is what's needed to build pumped storage which is what's cheapest for seasonal storage.
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    > It's cheaper to size production for winter sunshine than to build a lot of storage. Which means enormous amounts of surplus power in the summer (even with PV angled to optimize winter production.) So storage doesn't have to go far to be worthwhile, and in particular with nearly free input energy it doesn't have to be very efficient.
    - bryanlarsen 2y ago
      It doesn't have to be very efficient, but it is has to be cheap. Batteries aren't cheap but they discharge every night so their cost is spread out over ~365 days and their cost becomes feasible. Pumped storage is ~10% the cost of batteries, but if used as seasonal storage so they only discharge once per year that makes them ~36X as expensive. Especially in Alberta where they're competing against Natural Gas which is also approximately free (it's often flared off as a waste gas from oil wells rather than captured and sold because the value is less than the cost of capture).