Extreme weather squeezes electricity systems. These strategies can help keep the power on

On Saturday evening, amid extreme cold temperatures near -40 C in most of Alberta, residents received an emergency alert asking them to reduce power use or risk rolling blackouts. 

Climate change is already making extreme weather events more frequent across the country and around the world.  Extreme cold or heat drives up demand for power for heating and cooling, which can also cause power shortages and increase the risk of emergency measures like rotating blackouts or even unplanned outages.

Here are five strategies that could reduce the risk of shortages during extreme weather events across the country — many of which Alberta successfully deployed to a small extent, demonstrating their potential.

Diversifying power generation and system components

According to the Alberta Electric System Operator, one of Alberta's natural gas generators was down for maintenance in addition to some unplanned outages due to weather. This scenario also factored into outages that occurred during a cold snap in Texas in 2021.

Meanwhile, there was next to no wind blowing, so the province's wind farms weren't generating power, and solar plants weren't operating after dark.

In other words, each of these types of generation was showing its weakness. 

WATCH | How extreme cold led to an electricity shortage: 

–50 C in Alberta: What happens when extreme cold hits? | About That

12 months ago

Duration 5:51

Alberta's electricity grid was pushed to the limit when record-low temperatures triggered an emergency alert to prevent rolling blackouts. Andrew Chang explains how the extreme cold led to a dangerous electricity shortage.

Jason Wang, a senior analyst for the electricity program at the Pembina Institute, an Alberta-based clean energy think-tank, said there's a lesson from this — and it's not about the reliability of power produced by gas versus from renewable sources.

"What it points out is a diversity of assets is important to the grid," said Wang, who lives in Edmonton. 

And that diversity of assets includes more than just generation, he added, but also things like storage and interconnections that allow power to be transferred into Alberta from other provinces or the U.S. 

More diverse power generation did help with Alberta's recovery. A subsequent grid alert on Monday — the fourth in four days — ended after more wind and solar power helped ease the strain on the system. 

Xiaodong Liang, the Canada Research Chair in Technology Solutions for Energy Security in Remote, Northern and Indigenous Communities at the University of Saskatchewan, noted that solar works more efficiently when it's extremely cold.

Adding storage

Wang says the first thing Alberta should do in terms of diversifying its grid is to add storage.

Alberta doesn't have much energy storage, and most came online only recently, but Wang noted that it made a difference over the weekend — the grid alerts would have been longer without them, he said. "It basically bought us a couple of hours of time." 

According to AESO, Alberta currently has 190 megawatts (MW) of storage, putting it a little bit behind Ontario, which has 228 megawatts, but ahead of most other provinces.

Wang added that the AESO and the provincial government have recognized the importance of storage, and a government bill to enable more energy storage was passed in May 2022, but hasn't yet been proclaimed or implemented.

Wang said there are many ways to store power, from batteries to pumped hydro in some parts of the country.

"What's really important going forward is for every jurisdiction to incorporate storage," he said.

Making power imports easier

While most provinces can import power in emergency situations relatively easily, Alberta's grid is "uniquely islanded," Wang said, with only three connections to B.C., one to Saskatchewan and one to Montana, all of them with relatively low capacities.

To make matters worse, when Alberta's alert was issued, B.C. was unable to provide power as it was "in the same boat" with its own extreme cold snap, according to Marie-France Samaroden, vice-president of grid reliability operations with AESO.

"We often count on some level of support from our neighbours," she said. "Others were in challenging situations, so it's a broader challenge to Alberta."

The province did receive 150 megawatts of power from Saskatchewan, an unusually large amount from that province, AESO said.

Liang said interconnecting to other provinces and regions "significantly improves resiliency."

Wang thinks Alberta should work with its neighbours to expand its grid connections or interties, explaining "those would add tremendous flexibility."

However, he said there hasn't been any public initiative to start the process. 

The map below show which grids in North America are interconnected.

Making the grid smarter

Alberta's emergency alert asking people to conserve power worked, said Leif Sollid, communications manager for AESO. 

"The response was phenomenal," he told CBC News Sunday. "Within seconds, we saw power demand on the system drop by 100 MW."

That was followed by a second 100 MW drop. "And that got us through what we call the hump," he said.

Asking electricity users to cut usage — or even feed extra power into the grid — is called demand response.

That's something that some provinces such as Ontario already have through time-of-use pricing, charging higher rates in the early evening, when everyone is cooking and running their dishwasher, than at night, when everyone is asleep. 

While the Alberta case involved people manually switching off appliances and other uses of electricity, it illustrates the potential for smart systems that automatically send a signal to things like EV chargers, themostats and washing machines to let them know when the power supply is high or low and therefore the best time to run.

Wang said implementing demand response in Alberta would require co-ordination between groups like government agencies and consumer groups, but could save money for everyone.

Planning for the changing climate and the energy transition

Both Wang and Liang said better long-term planning could have helped avoid the situation over the weekend.

Wang noted that the addition of both regular and backup generation has been "basically stalled" in the last couple of years in Alberta, although the province's gas capacity is projected to grow significantly over the next two years.

Liang said those managing power grids across the country need to consider and model climate risks, from wildfires to storms to extreme heat and cold. And they should have resilience standards in place for performance under such conditions. That might include, for example, standards for the amount of storage needed. 

According Electricity Canada, the industry association for power utilities, climate adaptation plans for industries are not yet mandated, but most electricity companies have been proactive in monitoring and planning for climate change and extreme weather. In 2021, the group released a guide to adaptation planning for electricity companies in Canada, developed with funding from Natural Resources Canada.

A Canadian Climate Institute report last year on building resilient grids for a net-zero future found that while regulator and utility mandates prioritize short-term reliability, "they do not necessarily create incentives for prioritizing long-term resilience and adaptation."

It's not the just the direct impacts of climate change itself that needs to be considered by utility planners, Wang said, but the growing electrification of things like vehicles and buildings and the addition of renewables and storage.

"The energy transition is bringing a paradigm shift in how the electricity and energy system works, and every province is in a different stage of realizing this and incorporating it into their plans,"  he said.

However, that and all the strategies that come with it will not only improve the resiliency and reliability of the grid, Wang said. 

"Most of these will be able to save households on their electricity bills, which I think is the most exciting part."