Not talked to businesses? First, if they had paid attention, they would have seen it coming
Premier Danielle Smith is upset with how the media has covered her government’s seven-month ban on approving wind and solar power projects, she told reporters at a news conference on Monday. Smith, who used to work in the media, is also a former journalist.
“I’m disappointed that the media hasn’t talked about the fact that our regulators asked us to do this,” she said. “We gave the letters to everyone in the media on this… The Alberta Electric System Operator (AESO) asked us to take a break so we could fix problems with the grid’s stability. The Alberta Utilities Commission (AUC) told us to stop for a while so we could figure out how to handle end-of-life reclamation.
She said, “So I would encourage you to find that first press release we sent out and see what the two regulators asked us to do.”
Now, most journalists who are worth their salt don’t let politicians pick their stories, even when their bosses are on vacation during those hazy summer weeks.
On Smith’s advice, let’s read these letters and talk about what they say and how they support or don’t support the United Conservative government’s decision, which surprised and angered businesses whose billion-dollar renewable energy projects are now in limbo.
Smith might want to reread the letters because they don’t say what she said they say.
To whom it may concer
Let’s start by reading the letter from the AUC from July 21.available here. In it, the regulator talks about how worried she is about the huge number of new proposals for power generators that have come her way recently. She also talks about two public-interest issues that the flood of applications has brought to light: “the development of power plants on high-value agricultural lands and the lack of mandatory reclamation security requirements for power plants.”
It’s hard to deal with these issues in a one-by-one assessment of an application.”Rather, effective resolution requires a dedicated period of engagement with all of the stakeholders listed above, followed by government direction in the form of provincial policy or new legislation,” commission chair Carolyn Dahl Rees says in the letter.
She says that would “enable a reasonable, strong regulatory framework that is efficient, predictable, and protects the long-term public interest for everyone in Alberta.”
The letter is that. It does ask Smith’s utilities minister to come up with a new plan that takes into account how farmland is used and how these huge concrete and steel wind turbines and fields full of photovoltaic panels will be cleaned up when they die.
But nowhere in that letter does the AUC ask for a half-year hold on approving new renewable energy sources, which is what Smith said it did. The regulator has gone through policy changes before, either on its own or with help from the government, without taking a break from evaluating project proposals. Even when the commission was a part of the old Energy and Utilities Board in 2008, regulators didn’t miss a beat (at least not for almost seven months).
That’s the letter from AUC. What about the letter from the other group that Smith told us to read? It’s shorter, and shorter letters are easier to read quickly.
The letter by AESO does Talk about a “six-month temporary pause” that the government has put on new generation proposals. But, like its sister agency, the electric system operator doesn’t ask for it. Instead, the letter from its CEO just says that the government told AESO about the policy inquiry and the halt.
Nor does the AESO letter say that more wind and solar power makes the grid less reliable, as Smith said in her critique of how well people understand the news. The agency has in the past admitted challengesThat the growth of renewables brings to the grid because of how the wind and sun change, but its proposed solutions never included a moratorium, at least not publicly.
When Globe and Mail reporter Emma Graney asked the premier what the letter said, Smith said, “Just for the record, they did ask us to put a halt on wind and solar.”
Two weeks’ non-notic
When energy economist Andrew Leach looked more closely at the letters Smith wrote to help the public understand them better, he noticed something else.
He said in a that they are both from July 21.thread on social media. That means AESO knew about the UCP’s project moratorium two weeks before renewable power companies and the public found out about it on August 3. Even though it was still asking wind and solar companies for more information on their applications less than 24 hours before the pause went into effect, it’s likely that the AUC, which asked for the investigation, also knew well ahead of time.Globe has reported.
The renewable sector saysIt says it was never asked what it thought about this plan and that it has hurt investor confidence and put thousands of jobs at risk.
As Smith’s story about this controversial story changes, she added a new point that a break from early August to late February shouldn’t be seen as a big deal.
“Look, guys, we’ve had companies that went through a federal regulatory process for 10 years, spent a billion dollars, and had to shut down because they couldn’t see an end in sight. Half a year! You’ll have the answers in six months, said a premier who has often called for faster approvals and less rules.
She said Monday that wind and solar companies should have seen this coming, even though businesses were complaining about not being consulted.
She says she predicted this in a speech she gave at a spring meeting of the Rural Municipalities of Alberta, a group that had pointed out many problems with the wind and solar boom and cheered the moratorium.
“Yes, I said we were going. I told the reporters that in April,” Smith said. “So, whether you guys didn’t cover it or they weren’t paying attention to what the RMA was asking for, it should have been very clear.”
At that March 22 speechSmith did say that renewable energy isn’t reliable and hurts farmland. She also said that there should be more gas-fired power plants in what she called a “natural gas province.”
She talked about the possibility that solar and wind companies could pay to clean up land.
But nothing was said about stopping approvals for more than six months or at all.
If there had been a promise or suggestion from the United Conservative Party that growth in the wind and solar industries would be frozen for a long time, it might have been a bigger issue in May’s election.
But Smith and her team didn’t talk about it again for three more months, until this month when they announced the pause.
One has to wonder what voters and business owners in both urban and rural areas would have thought of a party that wanted to temporarily stop a certain type of energy project because it thought it was bad.