CHARBONNEAU – Alberta’s wobbly electrical grid needs govt control

UNLIKE OTHER PROVINCES, Alberta has no central power grid administration. As a result, consumers are held hostage to the whims of the marketplace. Last year, retail prices hit 32 cents per kilowatt-hour, over three times what B.C. pays.

The talk-show premier of Alberta, Premier Danielle Smith, is full of flakey ideas and is not hesitant in telling the world about them. Although sometimes, as a fluke, she gets it right.

Her latest flight-of-fancy is to support Alberta’s oil boom by cancelling renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. You see, if renewable sources aren’t pumping energy into the electrical grid, then fossil fuels can.

The cancellation appeals to Smith’s rural base who wants to stick it to Prime Minister Trudeau and his weird ideas about preventing the planet from cooking.

Smith has called renewables a “fantasy” and suggested they are unreliable and expensive.  I suppose, too, that the prospect of our planet reaching the dreaded threshold of 1.5 C this year is also fantasy.

In Smith’s la-la land, the uncomfortable truth is a delusion.  This is the person who suggested that the 75 per cent of the public who received a vaccine fell for the “charms of a tyrant,” specifically referencing Adolf Hitler.

Too busy listening to herself, she probably missed the threshold set in the Paris Agreement in 2015; a treaty in which 195 nations pledged to tackle climate change.

Her usually reliable voices told her that rural municipalities had requested the shutdown. But when it turned out that no such request was made, she feebly justified the shutdown by claiming the destruction of farmland and despoiling “pristine viewscapes.”

What a load of crap. Apparently it bothers her little that Alberta’s oil sands, an open wound on the planet, occupy a land area equal to 28 Calgarys.

However, in a moment of lucidity, Smith had a good idea. On her weekly radio show she mused about pulling electricity back under government control. About time. Alberta is a mish-mash of private utilities, about 40 in all.

“If the market is not going to produce the long-term baseload power that we need, we will establish a Crown corporation,” she said, adding she’d still like to work with Alberta’s private-sector operators “to see if we can get the market discipline” needed to contain power prices.

But even her moments of lucidity are somewhat disingenuous. Power prices will not come down because of Smith’s musings. They’re forecast to drop substantially come March, thanks to a record amount of new natural gas-fired power plants set to come online. That could bring prices in line with B.C.

Alberta’s power market is unique in Canada, in that the private sector controls capacity and is driven by revenues. Unlike B.C., there is no centrally administered planning corporation.

Crown corporations provide the stability necessary for long range planning. And the shareholders are citizens of the province.

British Columbia has benefited from a crown corporation since 1962 when Premier W. A. C. Bennett passed the BC Hydro Act.

But don’t tell Smith that her idea of a crown corporation has been in place here for decades –she’ll dismiss it a fantasy.

David Charbonneau is a retired TRU electronics instructor who hosts a blog at http://www.eyeviewkamloops.wordpress.com.