Dana Kreil’s farm near Eckville lost power for about 40 minutes on Friday morning.
She was just about to call her power provider Fortis Alberta when the lights came back on around 10 a.m.
Kreil appears to have been one of tens of thousands of Albertans, including about 15,000 Fortis customers, hit by rotating brownouts beginning shortly before 7 a.m. and lasting for various periods until about 11 a.m. City of Red Deer said it had no reports of power outages.
Alberta Electric System Operator (AESO) says the problem was caused when a natural gas generation plant unexpectedly tripped just before 9 a.m., taking 400 megawatts out of the system, and wind power predictions fell 900 megawatts short.
AESO operators predicted at midnight a surplus of 800 megawatts of extra power would be available, which included 1,100 megawatts of wind power. By 6 a.m., it was apparent wind estimates were off the mark.
“That’s when we knew we we going to have a tighter situation,” said AESO vice-president, Grid Reliability Operations Marie-France Samaroden in a news conference to discuss the latest GRID ALERTS, including one on Wednesday and another in January during a deep freeze.
Enmax and Epcor power outages show numerous neighbourhoods were hit in both cities at various times.
As well, a number of generation plants were offline for routine maintenance in what is typically a lower-demand time of year. Restarting generation plants and getting them back up to full power can take anywhere from four to 12 hours if they need to be restarted.
But rotating outages occurred throughout the province, said Samaroden. There is a system in place where electricity providers can cut power when needed to different areas at a time and in a manner so hospitals or other critical infrastructure are not threatened.
The drama began about 6:49 a.m. when AESO declared a Grid Alert “due to tight supply. Generation is slowly coming online, and we expect conditions to return to normal by 10:00 a.m.,” AESO posted on X.
Shortly before noon, AESO said the Grid Alert had been lifted.
“Supply forecasts remain tight, please continue to conserve electricity where possible,” AESO said.
On Wednesday night, AESO issued a grid alert “due to unexpected generation loss.” The alert was lifted about 40 minutes later.
Premier Danielle Smith told reporters that the province’s power grid is too reliant on unreliable sources such as solar and wind.
Smith said on social media that she recognized the situation might be “alarming” to some, but assured that the government was working with AESO and was committed to protecting the power grid.
Alberta NDP Critic for Energy Nagwan Al-Guneid pointed the finger at the UCP government for Friday’s rolling blackouts.
“Albertans should have the security of a reliable power supply, but the regular grid alerts and rolling blackouts that we’ve been experiencing recently show that the UCP are mismanaging our energy needs,” said Al-Guneid in a statement.
“For months, Danielle Smith and the UCP have tried to shift blame of their failures onto whomever they can think of, but after five years in government, they need to take responsibility for their fumbling of our energy grid while making Albertans pay some of the highest electricity prices in the country.
“This UCP government needs to focus on implementing a diversified energy mix on Alberta’s grid while accelerating solutions like storage and building interties so that Albertans can be confident that they will have the power they need when it is needed.”
