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Energy

One (Megawatt) is the loneliest number, but hundreds of batteries are absurd

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12 minute read

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Brian Zinchuk

That comes out to $104,000,000,000, in batteries, alone, to cover those 18 hours on Feb. 8. To make it easier on you, $104 billion. If you use Smith’s numbers, it’s $80.6 billion. Even if I’m out by a factor of two, it’s an obscene amount of money.

SaskPower Minister Dustin Duncan recently told me I watch electricity markets like some people watch fantasy football. I would agree with him, if I knew anything about fantasy football.

I had some time to kill around noon on Feb. 8, and I checked out the minute-by-minute updates from the Alberta Electric System Operator. What I saw for wind power production was jaw-dropping to say the least. Alberta has built 45 wind farms with hundreds of wind turbines totalling an installed capacity of 4,481 megawatts.

My usual threshold for writing a story about this is output falling to less than one per cent – 45 megawatts. Its output at 11:07 a.m., Alberta time, in megawatts?

“1”

Ten minutes later:

“1”

30 minutes later:

“1”

How long can this last? Is there a fault with the website? There doesn’t seem to be.

12:07 p.m.

“1”

Strains of “One is the loneliest number” flow through my head.

I’ve seen it hit one before briefly. Even zero for a minute or two. But this keeps going. And going. I keep taking screenshots. How long will this last?

1:07 p.m.

“1”

1:29 p.m.

“1”

Finally, there’s a big change at 2:38. The output has doubled.

“2.”

That’s 2.5 hours at one. How long will two last?

3:45 p.m.

“2”

4:10 p.m. – output quadruples – to a whopping eight megawatts.

It ever-so-slowly crept up from there. Ten hours after I started keeping track, total wind output had risen to 39 megawatts – still not even one per cent of rated output. Ten hours.

It turns out that wind fell below one per cent around 5 a.m., and stayed under that for 18 hours.

Building lots of turbines doesn’t work

The argument has long been if it’s not blowing here, it’s blowing somewhere. Build enough turbines, spread them all over, and you should always have at least some wind power. But Alberta’s wind turbines are spread over an area larger than the Benelux countries, and they still had essentially zero wind for 18 hours. Shouldn’t 45 wind farms be enough geographic distribution?

The other argument is to build lots and lots of batteries. Use surplus renewable power to charge them, and then when the wind isn’t blowing (or sun isn’t shining), draw power from the batteries.

Alberta has already built 10 grid-scale batteries. Nine of those are the eReserve fleet, each 20 megawatt Tesla systems. I haven’t been able to find the price of those, but SaskPower is building a 20 megawatt Tesla system on the east side of Regina, and its price is $26 million.

From over a year’s frequent observation, it’s apparent that the eReserve batteries only put out a maximum of 20 megawatts for about an hour before they’re depleted. They can run longer at lower outputs, but I haven’t seen anything to show they could get two or five hours out of the battery at full power. And SaskPower’s press release explains its 20 megawatt Tesla system has about 20 megawatts-hours of power. This corresponds very closely to remarks made by Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, along with the price of about $1 million per megawatt hour for grid-scale battery capacity.

She said in late October, “I want to talk about batteries for a minute, because I know that everybody thinks that this economy is going to be operated on wind and solar and battery power — and it cannot. There is no industrialized economy in the world operating that way, because they need baseload. And, I’ll tell you what I know about batteries, because I talked to somebody thinking of investing in it on a 200-megawatt plant. One million dollars to be able to get each megawatt stored: that’s 200 million dollars for his plant alone, and he would get one hour of storage. So if you want me to have 12 thousand megawatts of storage, that’s 12 billion dollars for one hour of storage, 24 billion dollars for two hours of storage, 36 billion dollars for three hours of storage, and there are long stretches in winter, where we can go weeks without wind or solar. That is the reason why we need legitimate, real solutions that rely on baseload power rather than fantasy thinking.”

So let’s do some math to see if the premier is on the money.

If you wanted enough batteries to output the equivalent of the 4,481 megawatts of wind for one hour (minus the 1 megawatt it was producing), that’s 4480 megawatts / 20 megawatts per battery = 224 batteries like those in the eReserve fleet. But remember, they can only output their full power for about an hour. So the next hour, you need another 224, and so on. For 18 hours, you need 4032 batteries. Let’s be generous and subtract the miniscule wind production over that time, and round it to 4,000 batteries, at $26 million a pop. (Does Tesla offer bulk discounts?)

That comes out to $104,000,000,000, in batteries, alone, to cover those 18 hours on Feb. 8. To make it easier on you, $104 billion. If you use Smith’s numbers, it’s $80.6 billion. Even if I’m out by a factor of two, it’s an obscene amount of money.

But wait, there’s more!

You would also need massive amounts of transmission infrastructure to power and tie in those batteries. I’m not even going to count the dollars for that.

But you also need the surplus power to charge all those batteries. The Alberta grid, like most grids, runs with a four per cent contingency, as regulated by NERC. Surplus power is often sold to neighbours. And there’s been times, like mid-January, where that was violated, resulting in a series of grid alerts.

At times when there’s lots of wind and solar on the grid, there’s up to around 900 megawatts being sold to B.C and other neighbours. But for 18 hours (not days, but hours), you need 4,000 batteries * 20 megawatt-hours per battery =  80,000 megawatt hours. Assuming 100 per cent efficiency in charging (which is against the laws of physics, but work with me here), if you had a consistent 900 megawatts of surplus power, it would take 89 hours to charge them (if they could charge that fast, which is unlikely).

That’s surplus power you are not selling to an external client, meaning you’re not taking in any extra revenue, and they might not be getting the power they need. And having 900 megawatts is the exception here. It’s much more like 300 megawatts surplus. So your perfect 89 hours to charge becomes 267 hours (11.1 days), all to backfill 18 hours of essentially no wind power.

This all assumes at you’ve had sufficient surplus power to charge your batteries, that days or weeks of low wind and/or solar don’t deplete your reserves, and the length of time they are needed does not exceed your battery capacity.

Nor does it figure in how many years life are you going to get out of those batteries in the first place? How many charge cycles before you have to recapitalize the whole fleet?

For the dollars we’re talking here, you’re easily better off to four (or more) Westinghouse AP-1000 reactors, with 1,100 megawatts capacity each. Their uptime should be somewhere around 90 per cent.

Or maybe coal could be renewed – built with the most modern technology like high efficiency, low emissions (HELE), with integrated carbon capture from Day 1. How many HELE coal-fired power plants, with carbon capture and storage, could you build for either $80 billion or $104 billion? Certainly more than 4,481 megawatts worth.

Building either nuclear or HELE coal gives you solid, consistent baseload power, without the worry of the entire fleet going down, like wind did in Alberta on Feb. 8, as well as Feb. 45, 6, and 7.

Indeed, according to X bot account @ReliableAB, which does hourly tracking of the Alberta grid, from Feb. 5 to 11:15 a.m., Feb. 9, Alberta wind output averaged 3.45 per cent of capacity. So now instead of 18 hours, we’re talking 108 hours needing 96+ per cent to be backfilled. I don’t have enough brain power to figure it out.

You can argue we only need to backfill X amount of wind, maybe 25 per cent, since you can’t count on wind to ever produce 100 per cent of its nameplate across the fleet. But Alberta has thousands more megawatts of wind on tap to be built as soon as the province lifts is pause on approvals. If they build all of it, maybe the numbers I provide will indeed be that 25 per cent. Who knows? The point is all of this is ludicrous.

Just build reliable, baseload power, with peaking capacity. And end this foolishness.

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]

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2025 Federal Election

Canada Continues to Miss LNG Opportunities: Why the World Needs Our LNG – and We’re Not Ready

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From EnergyNow.Ca

By Katarzyna (Kasha) Piquette, Founder and CEO, Canadian Energy Ventures

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Europe’s energy system was thrown into chaos. Much of the 150 billion cubic meters of Russian gas that once flowed through pipelines had to be replaced—fast. Europe turned to every alternative it could find: restarting coal and nuclear plants, accelerating wind and solar approvals, and most notably, launching a historic buildout of LNG import capacity.

Today, LNG terminals are built around the world. The ‘business case’ is solid. The ships are sailing. The demand is real. But where is Canada?

As of March 28, 2025, natural gas prices tell a story of extreme imbalance. While Europe and Asia are paying around $13 per million BTU, prices at Alberta’s AECO hub remain below $2.20 CAD per gigajoule—a fraction of global market levels. This is more than a pricing mismatch. It’s a signal that Canada, a country rich in natural gas and global goodwill, is failing to connect the dots between energy security abroad and economic opportunity at home.

Since 2022, Europe has added over 80 billion cubic meters of LNG import capacity, with another 80 billion planned by 2030. This infrastructure didn’t appear overnight. It came from urgency, unity, and massive investment. And while Europe was preparing to receive, Canada has yet to build at scale to supply.

We have the resource. We have the relationships. What we lack is the infrastructure.

Estimates suggest that $55 to $75 billion in investment is needed to scale Canadian LNG capacity to match our potential as a global supplier. That includes pipelines, liquefaction terminals, and export facilities on both coasts. These aren’t just economic assets—they’re tools of diplomacy, climate alignment, and Indigenous partnership. A portion of this investment can and should be met through public-private partnerships, leveraging government policy and capital alongside private sector innovation and capacity.

Meanwhile, Germany continues to grapple with the complexities of energy dependence. In January 2025, German authorities seized the Panama-flagged tanker Eventin, suspected of being part of Russia’s “shadow fleet” used to circumvent oil sanctions. The vessel, carrying approximately 100,000 tons of Russian crude oil valued at €40 million, was found adrift off the Baltic Sea island of Rügen and subsequently detained. This incident underscores the ongoing challenges Europe faces in enforcing energy sanctions and highlights the pressing need for reliable, alternative energy sources like Canadian LNG.

What is often left out of the broader energy conversation is the staggering environmental cost of the war itself. According to the Initiative on GHG Accounting of War, the war in Ukraine has produced over 230 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent (MtCO₂e) since 2022—a volume comparable to the combined annual emissions of Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. These emissions come from military operations, destruction of infrastructure, fires, and the energy used to rebuild and support displaced populations. Yet these emissions are largely absent from official climate accounting, exposing a major blind spot in how we track and mitigate global emissions.

This is not just about dollars and molecules. This is about vision. Canada has an opportunity to offer democratic, transparent, and lower-emission energy to a world in flux. Canadian LNG can displace coal in Asia, reduce reliance on authoritarian suppliers in Europe, and provide real returns to our provinces and Indigenous communities. There is also growing potential for strategic energy cooperation between Canada, Poland, and Ukraine—linking Canadian LNG supply with European infrastructure and Ukrainian resilience, creating a transatlantic corridor for secure and democratic energy flows.

Moreover, LNG presents Canada with a concrete path to diversify its trade relationships, reducing overdependence on the U.S. market by opening new, high-value markets in Europe and Asia. This kind of energy diplomacy would not only strengthen Canada’s strategic position globally but also generate fiscal capacity to invest in national priorities—including increased defense spending to meet our NATO commitments.

Let’s be clear: LNG is not the endgame. Significant resources are being dedicated to building out nuclear capacity—particularly through Small Modular Reactors (SMRs)—alongside the rapid expansion of renewables and energy storage. But in the near term, LNG remains a vital bridge, especially when it’s sourced from a country committed to environmental responsibility, human rights, and the rule of law.

We are standing at the edge of a global shift. If we don’t step up, others will step in. The infrastructure gap is closing—but not in our favor.

Canada holds the key. The world is knocking. It’s time we opened the door.


Sources:

  • Natural Gas Prices by Region (March 28, 2025): Reuters
  • European LNG Import Capacity Additions: European Commission
  • German Seizure of Russian Shadow Fleet Tanker: Reuters
  • War Emissions Estimate (230 MtCO₂e): Planetary Security Initiative
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Energy

Trump Takes More Action To Get Government Out Of LNG’s Way

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By David Blackmon

The Trump administration moved this week to eliminate another Biden-era artificial roadblock to energy infrastructure development which is both unneeded and counterproductive to U.S. energy security.

In April 2023, Biden’s Department of Energy, under the hyper-politicized leadership of Secretary Jennifer Granholm, implemented a new policy requiring LNG projects to begin exports within seven years of receiving federal approval. Granholm somewhat hilariously claimed the policy was aimed at ensuring timely development and aligning with climate goals by preventing indefinite delays in energy projects that could impact emissions targets.

This claim was rendered incredibly specious just 8 months later, when Granholm aligned with then-President Joe Biden’s “pause” in permitting for new LNG projects due to absurd fears such exports might actually create higher emissions than coal-fired power plants. The draft study that served as the basis for the pause was thoroughly debunked within a few months, yet Granholm and the White House steadfastly maintained their ruse for a full year until Donald Trump took office on Jan. 20 and reversed Biden’s order.

Certainly, any company involved in the development of a major LNG export project wants to proceed to first cargoes as expeditiously as possible. After all, the sooner a project starts generating revenues, the more rapid the payout becomes, and the higher the returns on investments. That’s the whole goal of entering this high-growth industry. Just as obviously, unforeseen delays in the development process can lead to big cost overruns that are the bane of any major infrastructure project.

On the other hand, these are highly complex, capital-intensive projects that are subject to all sorts of delay factors. As developers experienced in recent years, disruptions in supply chains caused by factors related to the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in major delays and cost overruns in projects in every facet of the economy.

Developers in the LNG industry have argued that this arbitrary timeline was too restrictive, citing these and other factors that can extend beyond seven years. Trump, responding to these concerns and his campaign promises to bolster American energy dominance, moved swiftly to eliminate this requirement. On Tuesday, Reuters reported that the U.S. was set to rescind this policy, freeing LNG projects from the rigid timeline and potentially accelerating their completion.

This policy reversal could signal a broader approach to infrastructure under Trump. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, enacted in 2021, allocated $1.2 trillion to rebuild roads, bridges, broadband and other critical systems, with funds intended to be awarded over five years, though some projects naturally extend beyond that due to construction timelines. The seven-year LNG deadline was a specific energy-related constraint, but Trump’s administration has shown a willingness to pause or redirect Biden-era infrastructure funding more generally. For instance, Trump’s Jan.20 executive order, “Unleashing American Energy,” directed agencies to halt disbursements under the IIJA and IRA pending a 90-day review, raising questions about whether similar time-bound restrictions across infrastructure sectors might also be loosened or eliminated.

Critics argue that scrapping deadlines risks stalling projects indefinitely, undermining the urgency Biden sought to instill in modernizing U.S. infrastructure. Supporters argue that developers already have every profit-motivated incentive to proceed as rapidly as possible and see the elimination of this restriction as a pragmatic adjustment, allowing flexibility for states and private entities to navigate permitting, labor shortages and supply chain issues—challenges that have persisted into 2025.

For example, the $294 billion in unawarded IIJA funds, including $87.2 billion in competitive grants, now fall under Trump’s purview, and his more energy-focused administration could prioritize projects aligned with his energy and economic goals over Biden’s climate and DEI-focused initiatives.

Ultimately, Trump’s decision to end the seven-year LNG deadline exemplifies his intent to reshape infrastructure policy by prioritizing speed, flexibility and industry needs. Whether this extends formally to all U.S. infrastructure projects remains unclear, but seems likely given the Trump White House’s stated objectives and priorities.

This move also clearly aligns with the overall Trump philosophy of getting the government out of the way, allowing the markets to work and freeing the business community to restore American Energy Dominance in the most expeditious way possible.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

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