Quote:
Originally Posted by Torture
I know Smith isn't saying anything in good faith but frankly, 105,000 acres of solar or half of Calgary to provide enough power for the whole province seems pretty darn achievable to me. Travers alone is about 3% of that. Anybody know how many acres of solar we have today?
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I think that's purely in panels, there's more space required overall because panels can't be tightly packed together in all directions. Solar plants in the American SW are around 500-600 MW over 3000-4000 acres in size. With Alberta solar capacity factor of <20%, you would need about 50 GW of solar to generate the 85 TWh that Alberta consumes in a year. Or about 300K acres, which isn't too bad on paper.
But space is not the strongest argument against solar, its real problem is its daily/seasonal generational profile at Alberta latitudes. That 50 GW of solar will produce most of it during the summer mid-day, when Alberta demand is 10-11 GW so most of it can't be used and no infrastructure to store 100+ GWh of electricty.
And for wind, it will frequently be weak for days at at time, a fatal problems given Alberta's winter. Those are the strong arguments against significantly more solar and wind capacity in Alberta, but it's harder to explain in a news sound bite.