So I read through the 2023 AESO Reliability Requirements Roadmap and it just continues to shock me how unprepared every grid operator seems to be for the future. Their own future scenarios they use to project what's needed are already out of date and we're 6 months into 2023. With intermittent generation growth as it is, why does everyone continue to assume exponential growth suddenly stops? The "Renewables and Storage Rush" scenario in the report accounts for an additional 2 GW of solar capacity by 2031. There's been more than that announced in the first half of this year. The plan correctly (to a complete layperson) identifies the risks, but just faceplants on the magnitude of the risk and the speed it will come.
It's just going to lead to more pain in the future if there isn't a reasonable plan now. Power generation has traditionally been a slow and steady large project industry and it seems no one can see what's coming now. It takes 4-8 years from announcement to generation for a coal or gas plant. Wind and solar
can be months. In Nat Bullard's big slide deck on energy trends I posted earlier, he notes that cost overruns and time overruns happen in over 50% of larger cap generation projects. Wind and solar are only about 1%. This means it happens just so, so, so much faster. The world took 22 years to install the first terawatt of solar capacity. It'll only take about 5 or 6 years to triple that. Alberta is fairly unique in the world because it has little resources in winter beyond fossil fuels, yet has excellent summer generation resources, so storage is a much more important priority than many other places.
I'm not sure exactly what the answer is for Alberta, but to me AESO isn't prepared for what the deregulated grid is facing
