Recently, Shan Bhattacharya of the Alberta Electric System Operator (the provincial electricity grid operator) has written, “our mandate is to connect any and all generation that is approved by the Alberta Utilities Commission, regardless of the type or location of the generation.”
He forgot to add, regardless of the cost. In other words, our money is no object. The government and AESO force consumers to pay to connect generators to the grid no matter how far away they are from consumers or how little energy they might produce. When you add the cost of wires and land devaluation, the cost of some of that far-away energy is enormous. Bhattacharya says that in order to ensure a reliable transmission system, the AESO must build a robust, unconstrained transmission grid. As a vice-president for transmission, he surely knows that this statement is absolutely wrong. An unconstrained system is absolutely not needed to keep the lights on. There is not enough money on Earth to build a road system that is never constrained, it just means we sometimes fight traffic to get to work.
Similarly, there is not enough money on the planet to build enough hospitals with zero wait times, as nice as that would be. The University of Calgary did a study called Transmission Policy in Alberta and Bill 50 (look for it on the web at policyschool.ucalgary.ca). It showed that we could save about $2 billion by building generators near Calgary to supply Calgary consumers when the transmission line from Edmonton is full rather than use AESO’s plan to build those two new so-called critical lines). But hey, it’s only our money, not AESO’s.
Bhattacharya says that consumers in certain parts of the province will continue to be held captive if we don’t spend billions on transmission. If you ask me, a lot more people are worried about being held captive by huge transmission cost increases than by those nasty electricity providers. If one of those providers tries to hold consumers captive, it can be fined millions of dollars a day by the market policeman, the Market Surveillance Administrator. Pity there’s no policeman anymore to monitor transmission spending.
Bhattacharya says AESO takes a prudent, practical approach to forecasting growth. Have you seen their forecasts? How many times have industry experts told them that they’re over-building the Heartland project? Not only that, but if their approach is such a great idea, why don’t they take their plans to the Alberta Utilities Commission for a full public review? It’s a shame that the engineers and economists at AESO won’t explain to Albertans that there is more than one way to keep the lights on, like building gas-fired generators closer to load, that could avoid billions of dollars and hundreds of miles of wires criss-crossing our farms and ranches, and even our cities.
It’s a shame that they seem to refuse to consider the cost of the mandate Bhattacharya describes. Instead, they adhere to the mantra of unconstrained transmission regardless of how many billions it will cost consumers. How many more billions do the costs of their plans have to rise before they are taken to task (The Heartland Project has roughly doubled from its original estimate within the past year alone)? And the idea that some politician rather than the experts at the Alberta Utilities Commission is better equipped to make decisions on billion-dollar transmission projects?
Well, that’s the subject of another, much longer letter and a trip to the ballot box.
Sharon Tarapaski, St. Albert
