Chase Energy Canada Limited

Alberta has hired four experts to reassess the need for two new multibillion-dollar transmission lines, and to recommend changes to a highly controversial new electricity law. The panel, given a $600,000 budget, will propose changes to Bill 50, which gave cabinet the power to circumvent normal approval processes for costly new transmission lines. The panel will also reconsider the need for the Eastern and Western Alberta Transmission Lines, two high-volt-age transmission lines slated to run between Edmonton and Calgary. The province has been working on upgrading its system for nearly a decade, but the most recent plan ground to a halt in the summer of 2007 when the defunct Energy and Utilities Board hired private investigators to spy on landowners who were opposed to the line. Morton said the panel will also review “whether the process for skipping needs determination is appropriate. The committee will be headed Brian Heidecker and includes electricity and transmission experts Roy Billinton, Joseph Doucet and Henry Yip. They will report back to government by Feb. 10.

A report from Commission for Environmental Cooperation, an organization tasked with overseeing environmental practices in Canada, the United States and Mexico says electricity-generating plants that run on fossil fuels in North America account for 33 per cent of greenhouse-gas emissions originating on this continent, and six per cent globally. By comparison, the Canadian government estimates the country’s oilsands-mining operations account for just 0.1 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, or 6.5 per cent of Canada’s. The electricity plants at issue are run mostly on coal in Canada and the U.S., and oil and gas in Mexico.

Canada’s wind industry has had a record year.  According to the latest data from the Canadian Wind Energy Association (CanWEA), 1,400 megawatts of wind capacity was installed in 2011, more than doubling 2010′s output. With over 5,400 megawatts of wind energy at its disposal, enough to power 1.5 million homes, the country now holds the ninth largest wind generating capacity in the world.  This year’s record number of installations cumulatively represent almost $3.5 billion in investment as well as 13,500 jobs. Even with this staggering growth, the industry will not be able to meet the provinces’ increasing demand for wind energy. Quebec and Nova Scotia have issued new policy this year, and Saskatchewan is working on a revised target.

Kentucky Power Co. is asking the Public Service Commission to approve its plans to spend about $940 million at its Big Sandy Power Plant in eastern Kentucky. The company says the request also seeks to recover costs after the system is operational sometime in 2016. If it’s approved, a Kentucky Power residential customer using 1,000 kilowatt hours per month would pay $31 more monthly, an increase of about 31 percent. The project would build a scrubber system on the plant’s 800-megawatt electricity generation unit near Louisa. The company says the scrubber system is needed to meet federal Environmental Protection Agency regulations

Battle River#4 went offline at 20:00 Friday and back online at 19:04 Saturday; Sundance#6 offline at 09:49 Saturday and came back online Sunday.

From the major generators to the industrial consumers who burn 64 per cent of the power in the province, market participants are watching a tide of public outrage threaten to overwhelm Alberta’s open electricity market. And while residential consumers represent only 13.5 per cent of the provincial electricity load, they are meaningful, noted the newly appointed head of Alberta’s consumer advocacy agency. “The politicians are concerned because the voters are concerned,” Robert Spragins said at a recent conference in Calgary. Currently, there are approximately 170 market participants on the wholesale side as a result of deregulation.  The province now runs the risk of high prices and public outcry propelling newly minted Premier Alison Redford toward dismantling both wholesale and retail markets, warned industry insiders. “I believe there is a threat of a consumer backlash, there is a serious political risk of high electricity prices,” said Sheldon Fulton. A veteran of both Alberta and Ontario’s competitive markets, Fulton heads the Industrial Power Consumers Association of Alberta and is emphatically not in favour of going back to a regulated system. What Fulton wants to see is Alberta’s market operate on a physical contract basis, moving volumes of power, rather than a financial contract focused on price. This year generators have made 50 per cent of their profits in just five per cent of the year because of spiking prices, he noted. That means from January to mid-November, half of their revenues were accrued during just 315 hours, the equivalent of 12 days. (Calgary Herald)

TransAlta late Wednesday said its coal-fired Genesee 3 plant, operated by Capital Power north of Edmonton, would be off-line until Jan. 1, two weeks longer than anticipated. The outage raises a question about how reliable TransAlta’s newest generation plant, the 450MW Keephills 3 will be. Concerns are abound because there are no material incremental capacity coming in until Enmax Corp.’s 800MW Shepard comes on in 2015-2016. TransAlta spokesman Glen Whelan confirmed turbines for both Keephills 3 and the downed Genesee 3 plants were the same make, but clarified the outage originated with the backup battery supply rather than turbine issues (Calgary Herald).

Energy Minister Ted Morton said Wednesday’s he’s “not happy” about electricity prices hitting a record high in Alberta, but insisted the province is still doing relatively well compared to other jurisdictions. With Alberta raising its regulated power rate by 48 per cent this week, consumers not locked into a long term contract will pay 13.5 cents per kilowatt-hour in December, the highest monthly rate since the regulated option was launched in 2002. Morton said the prices are related to some major generating units being recently out of operation – Trans Alta’s Sundance Unit 1 and Unit 2 and Genesee 3. Morton also maintained Alberta is in a strong position because it has no Crown corporation debt, which amounts to billions of dollars in other provinces. Alberta has the strongest growth in power demand across North America, averaging 3.5 per cent a year.

News that a major power plant outage will last longer than expected could increase the pain as forward prices jump in response. An electricity rule which allows power players in Alberta to hold back blocks of electricity and drive prices up might be manageable for large industrial and commercial users, but not so for residential consumers, Sheldon Fulton, with the Industrial Power Consumers Association of Alberta, said Wednesday. “One of the two has to go; we either have to change economic withholding within the Market Surveillance Administrator or we have to change the regulated rate option,” Fulton said at an Insight conference on Alberta power. Since players have been allowed to hold back power, price peaks and valleys have occurred over much shorter time spans, sometimes going from $75 per megawatt-hour to $1,000 and back in less than an hour. But unlike industry, utilities in Alberta can’t buy long-term contracts to shelter regulated rate consumers against price spikes as they are restricted to a 45-day limit. The rational behind the withholding rule was to allow generators to boost prices in what had been a $40 to $50 per megawatt-hour market, prices considered too low to justify building a new power plant. The unintended consequence is that 72 per cent of Albertans choosing the default option have no choice but to pay for those hourly price swings. Residential consumption represents only about 13.5 per cent of Alberta’s power demand, but on a numbers basis it is large “and they vote,” said Robert Spragins, the new head of Alberta’s Utilities Consumer Advocate

The same day Alberta jacked up its regulated power rate 48 per cent to historic highs, speakers at a conference in Calgary said strong electricity prices were needed to attract new generation to the province. Consumers not locked into a long-term contract — about 72 per cent of residential users in Alberta — will pay 13.5 cents per kilowatt-hour in December, the highest monthly rate since the regulated option was launched in 2002. “If we find the policies and structures aren’t working as well as expected, it’s time to revisit those mechanisms,” said Kathryn Wood, acting assistant deputy minister of electricity, who was speaking at the Alberta Power Summit in Calgary on Tuesday. Alberta has the strongest growth in power demand across North America, averaging 3.5 per cent a year against 2.5 per cent across Canada, driven in large part by oilsands development.

In a laboratory in Burnaby, General Fusion physicists and engineers in bright red smocks are busy assembling an experimental reactor. They hope to test a prototype in 2014 and eventually become the first to commercialize the technology, offering a safe, cheap, pollution-free and virtually inexhaustible source of energy. An Australian physicist was the first to fuse heavy hydrogen isotopes in a laboratory in 1932, replicating the process that powers stars. General Fusion plans to inject two rings of superheated plasma into a metal sphere containing a vortex of molten lead and lithium then hit it with a wave of energy made by about 200 pneumatic pistons squashing the atoms together. If all goes as planned General Fusion hopes to have a working reactor on the market by the end of the decade. But even if the technology works some remain skeptical of its marketability.

BrightSource Energy said that it has struck a deal to add energy storage systems to three massive solar thermal power plants it will build to supply electricity to utility Southern California Edison. Energy storage will allow the plants to operate into the night, meaning that BrightSource can now forgo building one 200-megawatt solar station that previously was needed to meet its obligation to generate 4 million megawatt-hours of electricity annually for the utility. BrightSource spokesman Keely Wachs said in an e-mail that only six of the seven planned solar “power tower” stations will need to be built, saving some 1,280 acres of desert land. If approved by state regulators, the amended contracts with Southern California Edison will also result in lower costs for utility customers. Both issues have come to the forefront as some environmentalists increasingly object to industrializing swaths of California’s Mojave Desert for solar power plants.  Solar thermal developers, meanwhile, compete against ever-cheaper photovoltaic power plants as the price of solar modules continues to fall. When four of the nine big solar thermal power plants approved by the California Energy Commission last year changed ownership, the new developers announced they would switch to solar panels like those found on residential rooftops and which convert sunlight directly into electricity. BrightSource, on the other hand, has developed a new solar thermal technology that deploys vast arrays of mirrors called heliostats that focus the sun on a water-filled boiler that sits atop a tower. The intensive heat creates steam that drives an electricity-generating industrial turbine. Such solar thermal plants produce electricity more efficiently and consistently than photovoltaic stations.

Sundance#3 went offline at 21:02 and Sheerness#2 went offline at 21:53 Friday; Sundance#3 came back online at 11:40 Sunday and Sheerness#2 is back online.

Premier Alison Redford said she will soon announce the details of a panel to review the economic need for more electricity transmission lines in the province. Many energy consumer groups say a number of new projects will cause electricity prices in the province to skyrocket. On Friday, Redford described Bill 50 as an “unfortunate piece of legislation. It was too bad we had to introduce it.” Redford said she also wants to look at whether wind, solar and other forms of local generation could play a larger part in Alberta’s electricity supply. Thousands of Albertans were still without power Sunday night after a violent wind storm downed power lines across the southern part of the province. Jennifer MacGowan with Fortis Alberta said the trouble began about 1 p.m., when strong wind gusts blew in as part of a chinook system. At the height of the problems, about 20,000 people were without power. Extra crews and contractors were brought in to deal with the damages, but as of 7 p.m., 5,000 customers from Rocky Mountain House, Alta., down to Taber, Alta., were still in the dark. The storm, which worsened just before lunch and lasted throughout the day, saw winds gusts of up to 144 km/h in Claresholm, Alta., about 130 km south of Calgary.

Maritime Electric has modified its plans for a third interconnection power cable to the mainland, and it will cost about $78 million. The province is looking to P.E.I.’s federal cabinet minister Gail Shea to convince Ottawa to pay half the costs. The current two cables are at the end of their life span. The condition of the existing two have caused blackout problems and often force the province to use an expensive back-up generator.

 Sundance #5 went off line mid-afternoon for a couple of hours as it returned back  on line before last evening.

Japanese wholesale power supplier J-Power said it halted a 1,200 MW coal-fired power plant in Yokohama after a coal silo caught fire, with no schedule for a restart pending investigation into the incident. J-Power, formally known as Electric Power Development Co, said it had shut the two coal-fired units, each with a capacity of 600 MW, at the Isogo power plant near Tokyo by 04:05 a.m. Friday (1905 GMT Thursday). The Isogo plant supplies electricity to Tokyo Electric Power Co, the operator of the cripppled Fukushima nuclear plant, and Tohoku Electric Power Co. Despite the shutdown, Tokyo Electric said there had been no imapact on power supplies to its customers. It has lowered its available power supplies for Friday by 900 MW from a peak demand forecast of 43,300 MW.

European electricity curve prices fell on Thursday, battered by falling EU carbon and gas prices and weaker coal but rebounding later as carbon recovered somewhat and oil gained ground. The Cal ’12 baseload contract was last off 10 cents on the day at 53.80 euros a megawatt hour, having hit an intraday low of 53.35 euros earlier. The French contract fell by 30 cents to 52.90 euros. Oil prices rose to more than $107 a barrel on Thursday, helped by bigger-than-expected U.S. stockdraws.

Sundance #6 returned on-line late yesterday morning.

The Ontario Power Authority announced Monday that it had reached an agreement with Greenfield South Power Corp. to stop construction on a 280 MW plant in Mississauga and is working on an agreement to “relocate” the plant. A significant amount of construction has already been done, a construction lawyer says termination-for-convenience clauses are rare, the opposition Progressive Conservatives may get the Auditor-General involved and the Ontario energy minister says the province may have to improve its siting guidelines.  According to Greenfield Power’s website, the financing for the project was finalized in May, 2011. As of the end of September, the foundations of the power plant buildings, steam turbogenerator pedestal, the gas turbogenerator pedestal and other structures were “nearing completion,” the firm said.  The province has not revealed any information indicating the cost to the government. In an interview Tuesday Vic Fedeli, the Ontario Progressive Conservative energy critic and Member of Provincial Parliament for Nipissing, criticized the government for not revealing the cost. “You would think that when Minister Bentley announced the termination that he would know how much it was going to cost,” Fedeli said. “He was asked that question and did not provide an answer. This is the taxpayer’s money we’re talking about.” Bentley still did not reveal the cost Wednesday.

Vestas Wind Systems A/S the world’s largest maker of wind turbines, has announced that it has received a 59 MW order from Exelon Wind, a division of Exelon Power with operations in eight states, for a project in eastern Michigan.The Harvest II Wind Project, in Huron County on the tip of the Wolverine State’s thumb, plans to deploy 33 of Vestas’ V100 1.8MW low wind-speed turbines.