Alberta’s close brush with blackouts stiffens Moe’s resolve

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

“We will not risk plunging our homes, schools, hospitals, special care homes and our businesses into the cold and darkness because of the ideological whims of others.”

Alberta’s close brush with possible rolling blackouts stiffens Moe’s resolve to keep the lights on.

Moe reiterates: “We will not attempt the impossible when it comes to power production”

The past weekend proved to be a close-run thing for the Alberta electrical grid, and Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe is making statements resolving he won’t allow that to happen here.

Specifically, after having nearly completely divested itself of coal-fired power production, Alberta’s dramatic buildout of wind and solar proved impossible to keep the lights on in that province when the chips were down and temperatures hit -35 C, or worse.

“In Saskatchewan, we will not attempt the impossible when it comes to power production in our province,” Moe said in a post on X and other social media the evening of Monday, Jan. 15.

“We will not risk plunging our homes, schools, hospitals, special care homes and our businesses into the cold and darkness because of the ideological whims of others.

“To support the ongoing power demands across western Canada, Boundary Dam 4 has been restarted to ensure families can continue to keep the heat on. Net zero by 2035 is not only impossible, it’s irresponsible as it would leave Saskatchewan and Western Canadian families freezing and in the dark.”

It was in response to the extraordinary events that occurred in Alberta over the weekend, in which Saskatchewan played a key part. And it was also a tacit acknowledgement that as much as SaskPower’s been trying to wean itself off coal, it just can’t do it yet. We still need it to keep the lights on.

The Alberta Electric System Operator (AESO) declared four “grid alerts,” over four days in a row, starting the afternoon of Friday, Jan. 12. Desperately cold temperatures drove up demand for power, just as the same temperatures reduced wind power generation to nothing at times, and close to nothing for most of the weekend. And since the mass of cold air stretched from the Yukon to Texas, every grid operator in between was in the same boat – high demand but short supply. The Southwest Power Pool, which incorporates parts of 14 states from south of Saskatchewan to the Texas Panhandle, as well as Texas grid operator ERCOT, all put out various forms of alerts suggesting their clients reduce electrical consumption.

Staring into the abyss

The first three of Alberta’s grid alerts ran from mid-afternoon until late evening, but the fourth occurred for an hour on Monday morning, as the workweek began.

The second of those grid alerts turned out to be the most significant. On Saturday, Jan. 13, Alberta came within a half-hour of rotating blackouts, an Alberta Electric System Operator spokesperson told CBC News on Jan. 15, confirmed by Alberta Affordability and Utilities Minister Nathan Neudorf the same day.

Indeed, the province stood at the brink of the abyss Saturday night, as rotating blackouts would have impacted different areas of the province for 20 to 30 minutes at a time, as temperatures ranged from -30 to -45 C, depending on where you were in the province. As the province’s grid-scale batteries neared depletion, and there was nothing left to call upon, the AESO and provincial government put out an emergency alert to all cellphones and TV screens, asking Albertans to shut off and unplug everything they could, from electric vehicle chargers to ovens to bathroom fans.

SaskPower ups its game

Alberta had run out of reserves, and with British Columbia unable to provide much more in the way of additional power, and Montana unable provide much at all, Saskatchewan’s Crown utility SaskPower responded, by sending 153 megawatts westward.

And that, in itself, was extraordinary, because limits were pushed to provide Alberta with as much as possible on the intertie between the two provinces.

SaskPower spokesperson Joel Cherry told Pipeline Online by email, “One hundred fifty-three megawatts is the interconnection’s maximum capacity, but it has been derated to 90 megawatts for the past several months because of ongoing work at a interconnection station at the border. AESO and SaskPower Grid Control have agreed to temporarily increase the transmission capacity to make the extra 63 MW available to Alberta when they declare energy alerts.

Contingency reserve had run out

Generally speaking, power needs to be consumed at the instant its produced. There is very little in the way of grid-scale storage in the Canadian electrical grid, although Alberta has built 10 grid-scale batteries totaling 190 megawatts capacity. All of that capacity would come into play Saturday evening.

Grid operators must maintain a small amount of excess capacity at all times, known as a “dispatched contingency reserve” (DCR) The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) standard is to maintain at least 4 per cent DCR. That’s because if the DCR runs out, all sorts of bad things happen, with voltage drops and frequency variance which then can lead to cascading brownouts, including additional power generating units tripping off and whole areas going without power.

With demand hovering around 11,800 megawatts, four per cent would have been around 472 megawatts DRC. Instead, for the better part of an hour, the DCR was 20 megawatts, or 0.1 per cent, a razor thin margin. The extra 63 megawatts SaskPower sent in part meant the difference between rotating blackouts or not.

In a very real way, it was payback for Alberta’s weeks-long help for SaskPower during the outage of the Poplar River Power Station at Coronach, Saskatchewan. For weeks on end, Alberta supplied Saskatchewan with around 150 megawatts for parts of the day to keep the lights on in this province.

BC played critical role, too

On any given day, imports and exports of power between Alberta and British Columbia will often run up to 600 megawatts going either direction. But with BC also in the deep freeze, it didn’t have much to give at various points during the weekend, including parts of the crucial Saturday evening. Indeed, around the time the grid alert was first sounded on Saturday, Alberta was still exporting 38 megawatts to British Columbia, according to X bot account @ReliableAB, which posts hourly data from the AESO on the status of the Alberta grid.

For a few hours, BC Hydro was able to ramp up its exports to Alberta during the crucial time. At 5:39, they were exporting 251 megawatts to Alberta, nearly 100 megawatts more than Saskatchewan. For the next few hours they sent around 200 megawatts, but it was not enough, and the AESO sent out its alert.

Additionally, during the third grid alert on Sunday, British Columbia ramping up its power exports at a critical time saved the day, as the Alberta Dispatched Contingency Reserve had briefly hit zero. BC bumped its exports up to 496 megawatts while Saskatchewan contributed 153 and Montana nine. Those increased megawatts from British Columbia appeared to make all the difference on that day.

The cat came back, and so did Unit 4

While all of this was going on, SaskPower spent the weekend getting its coal fired power station Boundary Dam Unit 4 back into play. It’s been on cold standby for months. Officially, by federal regulations it was supposed to retire Dec. 31, 2021, but SaskPower has been forced to bring it back into service multiple times to fill a need, such as when Poplar River went offline last June. It was 139 megawatts that could have been used, but SaskPower has shown reluctance to bring it back into the game, as it were.

And that’s what Moe alluded to in his social media post, saying, “We will not risk plunging our homes, schools, hospitals, special care homes and our businesses into the cold and darkness because of the ideological whims of others.”

This was an oblique reference to the push by the federal government to shut down coal and natural gas-fired power generation by 2035, according to the proposed Clean Electricity Regulations, using similar words that Moe has expressed before. The federal preference is for more renewables, in particular wind and solar.

Several years ago, the federal government and Saskatchewan reached an equivalency agreement, recognizing the Boundary Dam Unit 3 Carbon Capture and Storage Project and therefore allowing a few more years operation out of other coal units. But to get that agreement, SaskPower had to agree to adding a further 3,000 megawatts of wind and solar by 2035, according to SaskPower president and CEO Rupen Pandya in an interview Sept. 25, 2023.

Pandya said, “When we signed the equivalency agreement with the federal government in 2014 to allow us to keep using coal to the end of 2030, part of that agreement required us to build out renewables in the province, so that we could operate coal assets, coal generators, past their end of life. And that’s what we’ve been able to do. And we continue to do. So, part of the build out of renewables that’s required as part of the equivalency agreement, that 3,000 megawatts that we need to put in place by 2035. I think 2,000 by 2030. A good tranche of that will be in that south central part of Saskatchewan around the Coronach. So we currently have in the market an RFP for 700 megawatts of wind and solar in the Coronach region, so it’ll will actually go into power, if all goes well with RFPs, in 2027.”

On a typical fall day, SaskPower’s total power demand hovers around 3,000 megawatts. On a cold winter day, it’s closer to 3,500 megawatts. But that’s before widespread adoption of electric vehicles, which the federal government is also trying to force upon Canadians.

Saskatchewan held up to the cold

SaskPower’s Joel Cherry told Pipeline Online on Jan. 15, “Saskatchewan’s system has held up during the extreme cold. We had no major issues.”

However, “Poplar River Power Station was operating at reduced capacity earlier in the weekend because of issues with coal supply. As of yesterday (Sunday) we are back to normal operations there.”

That means the reduced capacity occurred the same day Alberta was stretched nearly to the breaking point.

Asked if we lost a major unit, while Alberta was at the same time in crisis, what did we have for backup? Was there additional capacity available from Manitoba and/or Southwest Power Pool?” Cherry replied, “SaskPower has maintained adequate reserves to allow for the continued stability of the system even if we lost a large unit. We have also been importing from Manitoba and the SPP when available.

Collapse of wind

Major factors in Alberta’s power woes were the utter collapse of wind and solar power generation. Even at its best, solar power production during the day was around a third of maximum capacity.

Wind turbines started shutting down Thursday night as temperatures plummeted below -30 C, the temperature where cold brittle behaviour of materials risks catastrophic failure of the turbines. The three evening grid alerts all came on as the sun went down and the roughly 500 megawatts (of 1,650 megawatts capacity) faded with the setting sun. On Friday, Alberta’s wind generation fell to 6 megawatts at one point. It was minimal on Saturday. On Sunday morning, multiple times wind hit zero – not one megawatt from the 4,481 megawatts of wind generation capacity.

SaskPower’s Where Your Power Comes From webpage noted on Friday, Jan. 14, Saskatchewan’s 617 megawatts of grid-scale wind produced a 24-hour average of 21 megawatts. On Saturday, that number was 19. On Sunday, the average was 22 megawatts. Unlike the previous week, where there were seven days where wind in Saskatchewan hit zero power output, Jan. 12-14 did not have any periods of zero.

“We had four hours of less than 10 megawatts wind output on Jan 12, despite the low average through the day on Jan. 13 we only had a half hour below 10 megawatts and on Jan 14 we had 7.8 hours below 10 megawatts,” Cherry said.

Ten megawatts is 1.6 per cent of total grid-scale wind capacity in Saskatchewan.

As for Unit 4, in April of 2023, Pipeline Online reported Cherry said at the time, “We’re going to keep BD 4 in laid up status until Great Plains Power Station comes online, or until March 31, 2024.”

The most recent plan, as of April, 2023, was to shut down, for good, Unit 4 by March 31, 2023. Whether Moe’s statement on Jan. 15 will extend that is unknown at the time of writing.

Brian Zinchuk is editor and owner of Pipeline Online, and occasional contributor to the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. He can be reached at [email protected]. For further information read the original publication here.

Up Next

Coastal GasLink completion key to unlocking Canadian natural gas for the world

Don't Miss

24 facts for 2024—Canadians should understand impact of government policies

Todayville

Todayville is a digital media and technology company. We profile unique stories and events in our community. Register and promote your community event for free.

Follow Author

Signed and sealed: Peace in the Middle East

Business / 3 hours ago

Finance Titans May Have Found Trojan Horse For ‘Climate Mandates’

Daily Caller / 3 hours ago

Utah Republican Senator Planning To Attend Big Globalist Climate Shindig Despite Trump’s Energy Policies

Alberta

Jason Kenney’s Separatist Panic Misses the Point

Published on October 11, 2025

Todayville

By Collin May

Time was a former political leader’s expected role was to enjoy retirement in relative obscurity, resisting the urge to wade into political debate. Conservatives generally stick to that tradition. Ralph Klein certainly did after his term ended. Stephen Harper has made no attempt to upstage his successors. Yet former Alberta Premier Jason Kenney can’t seem to help himself.

From the boardroom of Bennett Jones, one of Calgary’s oldest law firms, Kenney recently offered his thoughts on the unspeakable horrors that await the province should it entertain a debate (perhaps even call a referendum) on separating from Canada. While dismissing Alberta separatists as a “perennially angry minority”, Kenney nevertheless declared a vote on separation would “would divide families, divide communities, divide friends for no useful purpose.” Business partnerships, church and community groups, even marriages and families would break apart, he warned, “shredding the social fabric of the province.”

It was a remarkable burst of untethered hyperbole, but it says more about the former premier than it does about the province he once led.

Kenney’s take on the history of Alberta separatism is telling. It’s a 50-year-old “discredited concept,” he said, whose acolytes “couldn’t get elected dogcatcher in this province.” Exhibit A in his analysis was Gordon Kesler, an Alberta rodeo rider and oil company scout who believed independence was the only way to save Alberta from Ottawa’s depredations. In a 1982 byelection, Kesler got himself very much elected as an MLA under the Western Canada Concept banner. He later lost in the general election to Peter Lougheed’s Progressive Conservatives, but Lougheed did not belittle Albertans for entertaining separatist notions. Instead, he asked for a mandate to fight Ottawa more effectively — and got it.

Kenney, by contrast, ridicules separatists while simultaneously painting them as an existential menace. Worse, he likens them to followers of Vladimir Putin and (perhaps even worse?) Donald Trump. “[I]f you just follow them on social media,” he claimed, one will quickly see that they cheered on Putin’s attack on Ukraine and Trump’s threat of making Canada the 51 st state.

Kenney’s latest intervention fits a pattern. As premier from 2019 to 2022, he could not resist trying to stamp out dissent. During the pandemic, he alienated political allies by dismissing their concerns about mandatory vaccines with contempt. He saw his ouster as UCP leader as the result of a Trumpian-inspired or “MAGA” campaign. UCP party faithful, however, said their rejection of him had far more to do with his top-down leadership style and habit of “blaming other people for the errors he made.”

What’s especially striking about Kenney’s separatist obsession is that he seems to understand as little about Albertans now as he did while premier. Albertans have long debated separation without the province descending into chaos. When Kesler won his seat, people talked about separation, argued its pros and cons, but couples were not running to their divorce lawyers over the issue and business partners were not at each other’s throats.

And there are legitimate reasons for concern about Canada’s social and political structure, as well as the role provinces play in that structure. Canada’s institutions operate largely on an old colonial model that concentrates power in the original population centre of southern Ontario and Quebec. This has not, and does not, make for great national cohesion or political participation. Instead, it feeds constant fuel to separatist fires.

The current threat to Canadian identity comes as well from the ideological commitments of our federal government. Early in his time as Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau declared Canada to be a “post-national” state. This sort of moniker is consistent with the popularly-designated woke doctrine that eschews the liberal nation-state, democratic procedures and individual freedom in favour of tribalist narratives and identity politics.

The obsession with post-nation-state policies has initiated the dissolution of the Canadian nation regardless of whether Quebeckers or Albertans actually vote for separation. We are all becoming de facto separatists within a dissolving Canada, a drift that current Prime Minister Mark Carney’s ineffective “elbows up” attitude has done nothing to reverse.

Kenney’s panicked musings about Alberta separatists would have us believe the province need only continue the fight for a better deal within the Canadian federation. Kenney pursued just such a policy, and failed signally to deliver. For too many Albertans today, his advice does not reflect the political reality on the ground nor appreciate the worrying trends within Canadian institutions and among our political class.

Kenney likes to associate himself with Edmund Burke, the father of conservatism and defender of venerable institutions. But Burke was known as much in his day for his sympathies with the American revolutionaries and their creation of an experimental new republic as he was for his contempt towards the French Revolution and its Reign of Terror. Burke’s conservatism still linked real actions with true words. It would be advisable, perhaps, to keep our own political language here in Alberta within the bounds of the plausible rather than fly off into the fanciful.

The original, full-length version of this article was recently published in C2C Journal.

Collin May is a lawyer, adjunct lecturer in community health sciences with the Cumming School of Medicine at the University of Calgary, and the author of a number of articles and reviews on the psychology, social theory and philosophy of cancel culture.

Alberta

Alberta Is Where Canadians Go When They Want To Build A Better Life

Published on October 10, 2025

Todayville

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Marco Navarro-Genie

One in three Canadians chooses Alberta to start over. But to stay Canada’s top destination, it must fight Ottawa’s barriers and complacency

No province has captured the Canadian imagination quite like Alberta—and not because of oil.

One in three Canadians leaving their provinces in the past five years headed to Alberta. They were escaping stagnant wages, high housing costs and suffocating bureaucracy. They came for freedom and opportunity, and Alberta delivered. Its edge is cultural: it rewards enterprise instead of strangling it.

The question now is whether Albertans can keep that edge before Ottawa and complacency close in.

Prosperity, like liberty, vanishes the moment people stop fighting for it. If Alberta wants to remain Canada’s economic engine, it must continue to move forward, tearing down old barriers while fending off the new ones that Ottawa and other provinces are always erecting.

The cost of standing still is staggering.

Economists say provincial trade barriers (rules that prevent goods, services, and workers from moving freely) cost the Canadian economy up to $130 billion a year. For Alberta, even a 10 per cent reduction would be worth $7.3 billion a year.

When Quebec killed the Energy East pipeline that would have carried Alberta crude to eastern refineries, Alberta lost the chance to export oil worth as much as $15 billion annually.

That’s not theory. That’s lost paycheques, lost tax revenue and public services that never materialized.

Alberta has always been more willing than others to break free from the barriers that hold back growth. Liquor sales were privatized decades ago, as were property registries. The New West Partnership with Saskatchewan, Manitoba and B.C. opened labour mobility and procurement, though it has since stalled. Alberta doesn’t impose cultural tests and it doesn’t levy a provincial sales tax. Families arrive because life here is easier. They can work, start a business, raise kids or simply breathe without bureaucrats looking over their shoulder.

But cracks remain. Liquor shelves may be free, but the Alberta Gaming, Liquor and Cannabis Commission monopoly clogs the warehouse. Professional associations in law, teaching and health care are slow to recognize credentials and drown their members in red tape.

Procurement often tilts local, because, apparently, free markets stop at the city line. And like every other province, Alberta still bows to Ottawa’s anticompetition telecom rules, the dairy and poultry cartel and the banking oligopoly, systems that consistently benefit Quebec farmers and Bay Street lenders at Alberta’s expense.

And as if the old cracks weren’t enough, new barriers are appearing. One of the worst is protectionism. Canadians love mocking Donald Trump’s tariffs, yet happily embrace the same thing at home. “Buy local” sounds warm and fuzzy but props up cartels in groceries, banking, telecom and construction. The truth? We’ve imposed more barriers on ourselves than Trump ever dreamed of.

Prime Minister Mark Carney exemplified the problem when he promoted subsidies for canola farmers. It was a double insult. First, it showed Ottawa would rather hand out cash than negotiate hard. Second, it reminded farmers that the “help” isn’t free. They pay for it through their own taxes, scooped from Saskatchewan and Alberta, laundered through federal bureaucracy, then mailed back with a ribbon.

Carney also vowed that interprovincial barriers would vanish by July 1, 2025. That deadline came and went. His shiny new “process” for expediting infrastructure looks like more of the same: more Ottawa mediation that risks slowing everything down.

But it isn’t only economics standing in the way. Ideology is becoming a barrier of its own. Diversity, equity and inclusion has morphed into a system for entrenching gatekeepers. It compels people to think and act in ways they didn’t choose. It drains productivity, creates make-work compliance jobs and sorts people into categories. Worst of all, it punishes anyone who doesn’t conform. Alberta resists this infection better than most, but its universities and federally dependent agencies are already hooked.

Then comes debanking. In 2022, Ottawa showed how quickly it could freeze accounts, and banks complied without hesitation. Since then, regulators have only expanded their reach under the banner of anti–money laundering and climate policy. The message is blunt: if Ottawa decides your sector is undesirable, access to financial services can vanish. For Alberta, with its energy industry branded a planetary threat, this is no hypothetical.

A free economy is meaningless if citizens can be financially exiled from it by decree. Alberta must shield its people by turning ATB, its provincially owned bank, into a fortress institution and enshrining access to financial services as a civil right.

So what does moving forward mean? It means doubling down on being the most desirable province to live and work. That requires bold reforms. Cut regulators down to size. Protect banking access in law. Decentralize big-city governments to make them more accountable and give residents real choices. Reform health care to expand choice and slash wait times. Deregulate housing and trucking to lower costs. Confront public-sector unions that act as ideological monopolies.

Canada loves to brag about free trade, but governs like a feudal kingdom. Alberta has already shown that a freer path is possible. The task now is to resist cartels, fight the banks, tear down old walls and stop new ones from rising.

Alberta has always been a frontier of builders, risk-takers and prosperity seekers, and to thrive it must keep moving. If Alberta leads, it will stay prosperous and desirable. If it falters, doors will close.

The choice is clear: Alberta can either be strangled by regulations or break free and keep its frontier spirit alive.

Marco Navarro-Genie is vice-president of research at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and co-author, with Barry Cooper, of Canada’s COVID: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic (2023).