Reinventing Power Plays
Does Calgary’s lead in powering Alberta spell the end of coal?
The current electricity mainstay – the “thermal utility,” relying on coal-fired megaplants at sites dictated by mine locations – cannot make the grade for the next generation of power supplies, Holden maintains. As an engineer whose career has included running coal-burning stations for TransAlta Corp., he describes the thermal utility as a 1950s creation that cannot adapt to the new era of efficiency and carbon emissions control no matter how hard it tries.
Fully 71 per cent of the energy in coal is used up by mining equipment, crushers and boilers before electricity leaves thermal generating stations, he calculates. By the time power reaches local distribution systems via long-distance transmission lines, all but 23 per cent of the fossil fuel’s energy content is gone, he estimates.
He expects another big slice to be taken out of thermal plant efficiency by the main technology proposed for making coal plants acceptable in the coming era of greenhouse gas emissions control. His arithmetic shows carbon capture and storage will eat 40 per cent of the fossil fuel energy that currently goes all the way to consumers as electricity. The bottom line is that only 16 per cent of the energy in coal will reach houses as power from cleaned-up thermal generating stations, he says.
The Enmax vision packs persuasive power. The federal and provincial governments are covering nearly two-thirds of the new downtown Calgary district energy center’s costs by kicking in $10 million apiece.
But the thermal utilities that still generate about 60 per cent of Alberta’s power – Edmonton’s city-owned Epcor, and Calgary-based TransAlta – are not about to give up. Nor have they lost their power of persuasion. Federal and provincial agencies are also contributing about $10 million each to a clean-coal plant design project at Epcor’s Genesee station west of Edmonton.
The original fossil fuel’s strength was also on display this fall, at an annual meeting of the Coal Association of Canada that drew a bigger crowd than the CERI decentralized energy conference.
The astronomical 1,000 billion tonnes of coal beneath Alberta have more than twice the energy content of all the province’s other fossil fuel resources including the oil sands, Energy Minister Mel Knight observed in a warm welcome to the industry captains. The government remains “strongly committed” to coal development if it can be made clean, he added.
Industry gets the message, suggested Bob Page, a TransAlta veteran, former dean of the University of Calgary’s environmental design faculty and currently an Enmax director as well as chairman
of Ottawa’s National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy.
Industry underestimated parallel growth of popular environmental disapproval and counted too much on facts about improvements to counter negative imagery, he says.
“Perception is reality,” Page warns. “As chairman of the national round table, I’m bound to say this is a moving target filled with all kinds of uncertainty and risk, and one we need to be very careful about.” He predicted “the issue for us in the next decade will be to balance coal’s potential with new environmental costs.”
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