Neudorf pushes back against Nenshi claims
By Al Beeber - Lethbridge Herald on August 24, 2024.
LETHBRIDGE HERALDabeeber@lethbridgeherald.com MLA for Lethbridge East and Minister of Affordability and Utilities says Alberta has a stable electricity grid and its treatment-based approach to addictions is working.Neudorf on Friday at his constituency office addressed several matters discussed by Alberta NDP leader Naheed Nenshi on Tuesday during a wide-ranging interview with the Herald.
Nenshi told the Herald that January’s emergency alert after extreme cold drove demand to record levels was one spark that prompted him to return to the political arena, adding that the UCP government “just hates renewable energy.”
Neudorf says Alberta’s free market system generally allows for the most competition and lowest prices although that doesn’t mean the cost of power never goes up.
“What happened in Alberta’s case is the NDP government mandated off coal so that changes the supply/demand ratio and it adds cost until new generation can be built. So Albertans since 2015, 2016 have been paying about $100 million a year to not generate electricity from coal. On top of that, they’ve had to pay for new generation to be built and come online and then also purchase the electricity that’s coming online,” said Neudorf.
He said the government is still dealing with lawsuit’s over the NDP’s switch from coal due to massive capital assets being abandoned in the ground. A lot of electricity plants have switched to natural gas which is driving prices down in Alberta, but another consideration is when the province goes from 15 coal mines with co-generation and a stable electricity grid to renewables suddenly, the province had to build transmission lines to more than 200 different sites.
“That’s why the cost of people’s utility bills is not just the price of electricity, it is also the cost of transmission,” said Neudorf.
The MLA says not everyone reads their bills in detail every month and he often gets asked why those bills are so high.
Some of the cost of power last year was due to electricity prices peaking and there are also taxes as well as fees.
Neudorf says the carbon tax is more than four times the rate of the natural gas price itself.
The government has also been trying to address local access fees and the rate of last resort to provide a balanced default rate to consumers, that rate – which is basically a floating rate – being volatile over time.
The province is focused on making all Albertans benefit from Alberta’s ability to generate electricity and “it’s very strong and stable grid,” calling Alberta’s grid one of the most stable in North America.
On average, Albertans will experience three days or fewer of power outages a year while on the East Coast, there can be 33 to 36 days without power.
“We’re very very fortunate but we have very high expectations so we’re working on that,” he said.
The only way to get costs down is to have more load and use more electricity for the same infrastructure “and then everybody gets a smaller bill.
“That’s why we have such an aggressive strategy to attract data centres – they use a lot of electricity. If we put them in the right spot on the grid, we can really begin to lower those transmission costs. It’s also why we’re looking at demand-side management,” said Neudorf.
“We learned that on January 13 when we sent out the emergency alert how much electricity came off very very quickly. That means we can control a large amount of our electricity usage if we know how to so we’re trying to further educate Albertans and make sure that they’re well-informed.”
A review by the Market Surveillance Administrator has determined that on Jan. 13, high demand, unanticipated generation outages, low wind generation and reduced electricity imports because of extreme weather in neighbouring provinces contributed to the shortage of power.
That shortage prompted pleas for Albertans to reduce their energy consumption.
The report suggests that the emergency alert reduced energy consumption by 350 megawatts which ensured rolling outages in Alberta were avoided.
On April 5, the Alberta Electric System Operator directed transmission and distribution companies to reduce power consumption by 244 MW to avoid a potential system failure which prompted rotating outages during a period of 26 minutes. High demand wasn’t the reason for the shortage but rather challenges with accurately forecasting wind generation. Also a factor were unplanned generator outages, says the report.
The report says that without the extreme temperatures in January, the alert wouldn’t have been necessary, noting that there was a record peak demand of 12,384 MW on Jan. 11. The extreme cold is estimated to have increased peak demand by 10 per cent compared to average temperatures in January.
The NDP leader also criticized the province’s addictions strategy, saying “the UCP’s single-minded focus on abstinence-based recovery is not working. The so-called Alberta model has already failed. We’re losing more people to addiction and drug poisoning than we were before the UCP came in.” But Nenshi also said a mistake was made putting one large centralized supervised consumption site in downtown Calgary which centralized the addiction problem there and led to people preying on the addicted.
Neudorf, however, says the Alberta model is being adopted globally.
Providing easier access to hardcore drugs isn’t solving addiction, he said, instead it perpetuates addiction, said Neudorf.
“We’ve had to do a lot of cleanup,” he said noting efforts to legalize more drugs in other provinces has backfired.
“There’s a reason the Alberta approach is being adopted globally – because we’re trying to help people recover. We don’t just want to leave them in an addiction and facilitate further addiction. That’s just a ticking time bomb, you never know which injection is going to be last one…the only true cure is to get people into recovery and get them off of those drugs,” said the Minister. 3
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