Ezra Levant critiques Alberta’s NDP (2015–2019) for policies like an early coal phase-out, carbon tax, and Bill 6, blaming them for economic damage—credit downgrades, job losses, and energy imports. Michelle Sterling from Friends of Science argues grid instability stems from unreliable renewables (wind: 1.3%, solar: 1.27%) and insufficient natural gas backup, warning of industrial flight like in Germany or Ontario’s 75,000 lost jobs. Levant mocks Environment Minister Stephen Guilbeault’s premature praise for the phase-out, which coincided with blackouts. The episode contrasts Alberta’s privatized liquor system with Ontario’s LCBO strike, framing it as a clash between market efficiency and government monopolies, while defending Rebel News against mainstream media suppression under Trudeau’s taxpayer-funded bailouts. [Automatically generated summary]
Stephen Gilbo applauds Alberta's early phase-out of coal, then he gets proven wrong yet again just days later.
It's July 12th, 2024.
I'm Sheila Gunread, and you're watching the Ezra Levant Show.
shame on you you sensorious bug today's ezra levant show monologue takes us back to a dark era where all hope seemed lost It was a time of great sadness, job losses, business closures, and despair.
Yes, I'm talking about the NDP years here in Alberta, 2015 to 2019.
You see in a flash of disgust at 40 plus years of old progressive conservative corruption, and thanks to a vote split on the right between the Wild Rose and the old PCs, Albertans elected the far-left-wing anti-fossil fuel New Democrat Party to lead one of the most right-wing and pro-fossil fuel places in North America, if not the world.
The collective we, and I don't mean we, burned the house down because we didn't like the wallpaper in the kitchen.
It also ushered in one of the most economically devastating periods in Alberta's history, one which we are only now beginning to recover from.
Instead of Stephen Harper's slow and sending conservative so-called hidden agenda, Premier Rachel Notley's radical green socialists got right to work undoing the fabric of Alberta's economy.
First a carbon tax, then an attempt to put bankers' hours on family farms through Bill 6.
All of this led to a series of credit downgrades, and then there was the accelerated phase-out of Alberta's coal-fired electricity.
Alberta, for those of you who don't know, has hundreds of years of some of the world's cleanest burning coal under our feet.
And unfortunately, that's where it will all stay.
Because with the radical socialists in power here in Alberta and Justin Trudeau's liberals in power in Alberta came a game of environmental one-upmanship where the loser was always Alberta.
Trudeau planned to phase out coal-fired electricity across the country by 2030, yet the NDP accelerated that by setting a goal of 2023.
That resulted in economic carnage for Alberta and the electricity companies themselves.
Alberta taxpayers had to pay three power companies, Atco, Transalta, and Capital Power, $97 million per year, payable until 2030, to shut down six of 18 power plants early.
It was a $1.4 billion hit to taxpayers who were then going to be hit with increased electricity bills.
The plan, according to the NDP, was to rapidly replace coal electricity on the grid with natural gas.
But something was happening in the attitude of investment to Canada and Alberta specifically that would leave us in the dangerous spot we find ourselves now.
And I really do mean dangerous, some context.
In Ottawa, Justin Trudeau's liberals, who are anti-oil radicals in their own right, passed legislation to make sure that pipelines were never built again.
They appointed activists like Catherine McKenna to head the Environment Ministry and other key ministries.
The Liberals polluted the upper levels of the bureaucracy with foreign-funded activists from large multinational green charities.
In Alberta, our own Premier Rachel Notley acted like a scarecrow, standing in the field to shoo away oil and gas investment to friendlier jurisdictions like North Dakota, Texas, or Iraq.
Notley did the same as her ally Trudeau in Ottawa.
She put anti-oil MLAs in charge of key ministries.
Shannon Phillips, who once co-authored a book about how to block a pipeline with Greenpeace activist Micah Dema, was plunked right into cabinet.
The oil sands advisory group, a panel convened to steer the future of that great resource, was colonized by forest ethics-owned Sappora Berman and her ilk.
What resulted was exactly what was intended: blocked pipelines, canceled projects, investment flight, mass layoffs, and a gutting of Calgary's once vibrant downtown core, where the oil companies used to have their head offices.
So, coal is being taken offline, and natural gas is supposed to replace it.
Okay, but if you were a natural gas company seeing what was happening in coal and in the oil and gas sector, thanks to two levels of government being adversarial to fossil fuels, would you invest billions of dollars in the Alberta power grid?
They didn't, at least not early enough.
And now, Alberta has grid alerts.
This place, rich with natural resources, with hundreds of years of coal under our feet, natural gas and bitumen seeping out of the ground.
It doesn't have enough energy to keep the lights on in the wintertime and run our furnaces simultaneously.
This past winter, during a very seasonal deep freeze where we saw minus 53 at my farm, Albertans received an amber-style alert on their phones warning that we faced a catastrophic grid failure if we didn't immediately reduce our energy use.
Our diminished grid could not keep up.
All that coal and not enough electricity, and not enough brains or humility in the federal government to reverse course, even as the new Alberta Premier, Daniel Smith, fights back.
Alberta's last coal-fired generation station swapped over June 18th, with Capital Power announcing that Genesee has ceased coal operations.
It's now gas-fueled.
And a jubilant environment minister and former Greenpeacer in his own right, Stephen Gilbo, lauded the announcement on July 5th.
He posted on X: To those who say we can't build a cleaner grid quickly, Alberta just phased out coal today six years ahead of schedule.
When Canadians set their mind to it, we can accomplish anything.
Except, well, except the only thing we accomplished was yet another grid alert.
Three days later, as the temperature touched 28 degrees Celsius in Alberta, the Alberta Electric System Operator, or the AESO, announced a grid alert.
Alberta's grid could not keep up with the demand caused by the increased usage thanks to seasonal summer temperatures.
See, Alberta didn't get off coal.
We just got off coal jobs here and coal royalties.
We still use coal-fired electricity.
We get it from our friends in Estevan, Saskatchewan, and Montana when our flawed grid can't keep up.
The only thing Gilbo accomplished is looking like an idiot, which would be funny, but again, Albertans pay the price.
Michelle Sterling from Friends of Science joins us after the break to further explain what's going on in Alberta's electricity system.
Stay with us.
So you heard my theories in the monologue about why I think Alberta is getting these grid alerts.
But I thought I'd call in a bit of an expert, my friend Michelle Sterling from Friends of Science, who is very humble, would probably not consider herself an expert, but I think she's one of the people in this province and probably in this country who most carefully watches the electricity grid and the problems with it.
So Michelle, thanks so much for joining me.
Tell us, Alberta gets these grid alerts now.
They seem routine, which is bizarre in a place that has so much natural resource wealth.
We get them when it's hot, we get them when it's cold.
What's going on with the scarcity in our power grid?
Well, basically coal phase-out.
As you mentioned just before we went on air, that's the fundamental problem.
We had a number of excellent coal-fired power plants.
I think the Keep Hills, when it was opened, was the top plant in North America in terms of emissions reduction and management.
And the NDP wanted to phase out coal early.
And the objective was originally that the older coal plants would all go offline by 2030, but the newest ones, like Keep Hills, would continue operating to the end of their useful life, which would have left us that reserve capacity.
And instead, now we're having to build replacement gas plants or to convert existing coal plants to gas plants.
And the thing is, we have no reserve capacity like we used to have.
If you look at the 2022 ISO market statistics report, you find there's a huge drop in reserve capacity.
That means the extra power that you could like ramp up in the event that a plant goes offline for some reason, which does happen, especially in extreme weather conditions, or some other sudden surge that might trigger like a big lightning storm or very extreme weather of some kind that might trigger a power outage somewhere and you have to try and get the system back up and running.
We don't have that anymore.
So we rely on imports from coal-fired power in Saskatchewan and coal-fired power in Montana and some hydro from BC.
BC right now of course is in a drought and they have a problem with their hydro facilities because of that.
So that's the main reason why we're facing these problems.
And you see, the weather is also regional.
So, you know, when there's an extreme weather condition, quite often, like, for instance, the wind will just die off.
So that's what happened in this past event.
The sun was producing a lot, lots of solar during the day, but as the sun goes down, you lose all that solar and there was no wind.
And if you look at Brian Zinchuk did an analysis of it, and he was kind of mocking the fact that the Pembina Institute had said, oh, yay, we went off coal, we're coal-free, first time in years, and two days later, we're grid alert.
So and Pembina was saying, you know, renewable energy is the most cost-efficient.
Well, it's not if you're facing potential blackouts because they cost a lot of money.
And at that time, Reliable Alberta was tweeting that on July the 9th, at this moment, 98% of Alberta's electricity is produced by fossil fuels.
Wind is at 2.9% of capacity and producing 1.3% of total generation, while solar is at 8.2% and producing 1.27%.
So obviously they're not producing up to their capacity.
And at the same time, we're importing 420 megawatts or 4% of power, which we have to pay for.
Now, one other thing I'd like to mention, you know, some people online were saying, oh, well, you know, obviously the thermal operators shut down their plant to drive up prices and mess things up.
You know, these are very sophisticated plants.
They take a long time to start up.
And in extreme conditions like heat, extreme heat, or extreme cold, they're mechanical and they can fail.
And if there's a risk to the plant equipment, they cannot operate.
So, and they're allowed to not operate.
Likewise, they are allowed to do what's called economic withholding, which is legal and bidding for the price point that they want to achieve.
They're not allowed to do physical withholding, which means, haha, we're going to shut the plant off.
Because if they do that, they get fined a lot of money, millions of dollars.
So, you know, that's the situation.
But we should not add more renewables.
And whatever storage we had, we used a bit of it.
Some of the storage facilities were not operating.
You can check Brian Zinchuck's pipeline online.
But storage is very limited in the amount that it could possibly serve us.
The ISO was saying that the peak demand was 11,599 megawatts.
And we had just 545 megawatts of contingency reserves available, 114 megawatts of which were used to cover the shortfall.
So, you know, they managed.
But, I mean, that's a huge demand, peak demand, that can never be met by battery storage.
I mean, maybe for trillions of dollars, but we don't have that.
So that's my rent.
Trillions of dollars and the use of plenty of arable land space that we could be doing something better with.
I wanted to ask you, and we've talked about this on my show in the past, the difference between the ability of a natural gas plant to ramp up to meet demand versus coal.
Can you explain that a little bit to us?
Sure.
Well, coal plants are not good at ramping up and down.
They're very, very good for baseload.
That's why even the last couple of coal plants we had before they shut down, they were running flat out at 820 megawatts 24-7 and almost without fail.
And so that's what you want.
You want the cheapest power for the baseload.
And baseload is, you know, if you look at the province, you look at your house, every house has things that are always on, whether it's your TV quick start, whether it's your fridge, your surveillance lights outside.
You've always got a certain draw of power.
And the same in the cities.
You know, the lights are on in buildings because they don't want to cause power surges turning off and on, plus people do work there at night.
Anyway, so there's this constant draw of power that we know is required every day.
Fill that mostly with baseload, the cheapest being coal, because it runs all the time and it's very difficult for it to ramp up or down.
Whereas natural gas is rather like your gas stove or more closer to a jet engine actually.
But this jet engine is strapped to the ground and the other one's strapped to a plane.
Constant Power Draw00:10:30
But it can turn up and down very quickly and respond to these changes in solar and wind because the wind can drop off dramatically and quickly and so can the sun.
Clouds going overhead.
If you look at some of the grid alerts we've had in the past, I think it was after the Travis Solar Farm came online, which is a huge solar farm.
So when it suddenly gets cloudy over there, you lose like 400 megawatts of solar generation.
So we need more gas plants.
And I think back in 2014, we interviewed Evan Berry of the Independent Power Producers of Alberta.
And he said that we'd have to build eight equivalent natural gas plants to replace the coal plants.
And that's effectively what we are doing.
And we just don't have enough of them online yet.
So without those gas plants, contrary to what Pemba Institute keeps telling everyone, without that natural gas plant online, we will face grid alerts and blackouts, period.
Tell me why you think there are not enough gas plants online yet.
Because, you know, the NDP announced their early phase-out of coal in 2015, 2016, something they definitely didn't campaign on.
And my suspicion or my hypothesis, and I think there's some truth to it, is if you've got an anti-fossil fuel government in Alberta, coupled with an anti-fossil fuel government in Ottawa, attacks on the oil and gas sector, you've got the bureaucracy now polluted with these activists from Tides and Pembina and forest ethics.
And the investment wasn't there.
It just wasn't a safe place to invest multi-billions of dollars in building a gas plant when you have these adversarial levels of government and now we're paying the price for it and a knock-on effect a decade later.
Well, I think the first issue is really the fact that provincial government, the NDP government, overturned federal legislation when they went to early coal phase out.
So the investors who'd invested in the Keep Hills and the other big coal plants that they anticipated would be running for 60 years and that they would get a nominal but, or I say incremental but regular return on investment, that it would be a solid investment, suddenly their investment world was turned upside down.
That really drives a stake in the heart of investors, period, because the government has shown itself to be very radical.
Then the next issue is, as you say, all of these environmental groups and a radical government in Ottawa threatening criminal action for those who build or operate gas plants.
That tends to put people off.
But the third thing, and probably the worst thing, is that we now have added thousands of megawatts of renewables to the grid.
So I think we're over 6,000 megawatts of renewables.
I should have checked this morning.
I didn't check.
You can see it on the Alberta Electric System Operator, though, in current supply and demand on their graph there.
Or you can check with Reliable Alberta.
Anyway, we added 6,000 megawatts of renewables.
We dumped 6,000 megawatts of coal and we're gradually rebuilding the natural gas.
And I think if you look online, you'll see we have supposedly a maximum capacity of 11,000 megawatts of natural gas now.
But not all of that is online.
And we're still adding more renewables.
When you add renewables, you have to add equivalent conventional backup or you face blackouts.
It's just that simple.
And the ISO knew that back in 2007, you know, because Alberta was the first province to have a wind farm, 1993.
So in those early years, we learned that, wow, you know, this creates huge variability in the power generation.
And when you have these dips and surges, that's when you face blackouts.
So that's the story there.
Don't add more renewables.
No more.
Please stop.
So what does the future hold for Albertans, you know, as we wait for these natural gas plants to come online?
Is it just the normalization of the threat of a rolling blackout or a brownout?
Is it more electricity rationing?
I mean, we had a couple of days, like literally a few days of heat and we were thrown into electricity rationing.
So what can we expect going forward?
Well, I don't have a crystal ball.
Well, actually, I do have one over my shoulder there, but I don't use it for prophecy.
But, you know, that we have seen this all over the world.
In Texas, we've seen it.
We've seen it in Germany, in the UK.
You just add more renewables and your grid becomes more unstable.
And if you, you know, look, the federal government wants us to run electric cars.
They want to electrify all houses so that you would not have natural gas heating at home anymore.
You would rely on electricity.
We don't have anywhere near the electrical generation for that.
And I think Pambina just put out a report on meeting our emissions.
And who else?
Canadian Climate Institute, I think, put out another report on how easy it would be to, you know, make the whole grid green and we can all go to net zero and run on electricity.
It's just not going to happen.
There's not the material supply chain.
There's not the time.
You know, you mentioned about the natural gas plants.
These take about 10 to 20 years to build, one.
That's why converting the existing plants to natural gas is the easiest option, even though in terms of reduction of CO2, it's probably not the best because these are going to simple cycle plants instead of combined cycle, which are more efficient.
And it costs about, let's see, the Shepherd plant in Calgary cost 1.4 billion back in, when did it open, 2010, something like that.
So, you know, 10 to 20 years, lots of planning, the impact study, environmental study, ordering, commissioning, building, operating, you know, takes a long time.
And investor insecurity, it's a problem.
If we don't have, and, you know, the province is growing.
We've added thousands of, hundreds of thousands of people to our population, and we anticipate growing our industrial sector.
75% of the electricity in Alberta is drawn from the industrial sector.
So if you want to have an affordable and job-rich province, you need affordable and very reliable power generation.
Or else what will happen also is like in Germany what happened is industry started saying wait we can't put up with this stuff so they built their own power generation units on site.
What this means for consumers is that they remove themselves from the grid.
So they're no longer supporting all the costs of operating the grid.
And then that falls on consumers.
So in Germany, electricity is now a luxury and it shouldn't be.
It should be a human right.
Like if this is climate justice, I don't like it.
It's not just.
Yeah, I think we're on a fast track to heat or eat poverty and Alberta should have known better.
The NDP should have known better about this, but also about plenty of things.
Given what happened in Ontario when they moved towards green energy and then they had a flight of the industrial sector to greener pastures because they couldn't afford the cost of electricity.
But leave it to the Liberals and the NDP to not learn from history.
Those who don't learn from history, bound to repeat it, right?
That's it.
Yeah.
Actually, we have a report by Robert Lyman called The Ontario Government Legacy, which calculates all the billions of dollars and the 75,000 jobs lost.
I think he wrote it in 2018, 2019.
It was a total disaster.
So, yeah.
Michelle, how can people find out more about the work that Friends of Science does, not just on this issue, but on so many other issues with regard to climate policy and the climate attacks on your pocketbook?
Well, please go to our website, friendsofscience.org.
We're also on YouTube.
We have a blog on our website where we post a number of reports from Robert Lyman, who was a federal public servant for 27 years, diplomat for 10 years.
So he writes very insightful policy reports on the impacts of things like carbon tax and the clean fuel standard.
We have a number of engineering reports we have on the grid for Alberta, which is like the true cost of wind and solar for Alberta, solar realities versus fantasies.
These are all posted there.
And if you can't find something, please send us an email and we'll find it for you.
And how do they support the work that you do?
Because you are really up against the well-funded deep pockets of the anti-oil industry.
And you are really a mom-and-pop shop and you're the mom.
So tell us how people can get involved.
Okay, I'm the mom.
You can become a member.
It's $40 for one year, $80 for three years.
You can see it on our website under join.
You can donate.
You can send an e-transfer to contact at friendsofscience.org.
And you can just share our material.
You can join in the conversation on Twitter.
We're on Gab.
We're on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn.
So, you know, please participate.
And we're open to conversations.
How to Support Rebel News00:02:55
Like, not everybody will share our point of view.
That's okay.
Let's talk about it.
We advocate for open civil debate on climate and energy policies and full cost benefit analysis before the policy is implemented.
Michelle, thanks so much for coming on Ezra's show as I fill in and you're regular on my show.
So it's a treat to talk to you in between.
And we'll have you back on again very, very soon.
Thanks very much, Sheila.
Have a nice hot day.
I will.
It's a great day to make hay.
Yeah, that's it.
Yeah, stay with us.
Your letters to Ezra read by me up after the break.
Are you one of those unfortunate souls who still watches the mainstream media?
Maybe you do it like me.
Maybe it's just to fact check your own biases.
I do it all the time.
I listen to CBC Radio to remember how awful CBC Radio is and just to remember that I'm right to want to defund the CBC in all of its pernicious forms.
Well, one thing you'll notice about those mainstream media outlets is they frequently turn off the comments section.
They really don't want to hear from you.
They want your money, of course, extracted from your pockets unwillingly and then given to them thanks to Justin Trudeau's media bailouts.
But they really don't care if you like, agree with them, want to support them, or even if you have an opinion that might be divergent from theirs, or maybe even, you know, complementary to their viewpoint.
They just don't care.
You can just all shut up and just continue to act as their bank account for their failing business model.
Well, it's not like that here at Rebel News because without you, there's no Rebel News.
You know, we rely on your support.
So why wouldn't we care about what you think about the work that we're doing here?
It's why we give you all these ways to get in touch with Mr. Ezra Levant on the show here, but also leave a comment wherever you might find us.
Those of you who watch my show know that I give you my email address.
I also go poking around wherever you might find the show and looking for comments over there.
So today's comments to Ezra Levant's show come to us by way of YouTube comments.
And they are not on an episode that Ezra hosted, but rather on an episode hosted by my friend, the beloved David Menzies.
And he was, boy, he had a bee in his little bonnet or rather his reporter's hat, his safari hat, about the L CBO.
Government-Owned Liquor Stores Strike00:04:38
That's Ontario speak for their government-owned liquor stores.
The staff there are on strike because they, well, they say it's because there's a plan to sell mixed cocktails in the corner stores.
But really, if you dig down a little deeper, it's got nothing to do with that.
It's about protecting their monopoly.
Oh, and a wage top up, the way it always is.
Look, these people said they were essential workers during COVID.
So if that's the case, get your butt back to work.
Get your essential butt back to work.
You can't have it both ways.
The problem is these people are worried that you, the consumer, might realize that we don't need to pay people government wages to take, where's my coffee cup?
Something across a scanner and hear the scanner beep and then put it in a bag.
Or maybe they don't put it in a bag anymore because just introduce banned bags.
I just drank beer, so I just go pick up the case and go home.
So I don't know what sort of receptacle they put your mixed drinks in.
However, that's not skilled labor.
It's not government wage and benefits kind of employment out here in Alberta with our privatized liquor system.
It is, you get paid what the market and your boss can bear.
You get paid what you're worth, not a government wage.
Maybe you get paid more than a government wage, but that's between you and your employer and not on the backs of the taxpayer.
Anyway, your comments.
Let's go to them.
Drop Zone 33 makes an argument that I would make all day long.
LCBO full-time employees make $31 an hour for stocking shelves and being a cashier.
And these greedy union thugs and their members want more, enough with the monopoly and privatize the LCBO.
Do it fast, swift, and ugly, like what we did here in Alberta.
Ralph Klein, rest his soul, he privatized Alberta liquor in six weeks.
Now we've got liquor stores everywhere, competition, things go on sale.
And you know what?
Beer stores in Alberta, they're standalone.
We can't get beer in our grocery stores, but the grocery stores also own their own liquor stores, right?
So the Sobe's has a liquor store attached.
I don't know why I have to go out one door and then go in another to buy booze, but whatever.
But a lot of these private liquor stores, independently owned liquor stores, are new Canadians living the Canadian entrepreneurial dream.
And every time I walk past an L CBO, I think some new Canadian, some old stock Canadian, some Canadian of whatever stripe is being robbed of an entrepreneurial opportunity by the government.
Just grosses me out.
Let's keep going.
John Hess, 9443, writes, these private liquor stores should already be in every province in Canada.
Yeah, yeah.
In Alberta, we allow liquor consumption at age 18, and we have liquor stores everywhere.
And guess what?
I think it's a pretty safe place to be, unless you're in the downtown Edmonton Corp, but that has a lot to do with the socialism there than anything else and the drugs.
But just do what we did.
We have a model.
Here, take it.
Take it, Ontario, and use it.
Execute it.
Let's continue reading this.
These are redundant jobs, and these people are just highlighting for everyone how unnecessary they are.
John Q. Spartan writes, I couldn't care less if the LCBO is on strike.
It hasn't affected me one bit.
Okay, okay, but what about everybody else?
Plenty of other options for our vices.
Okay, but what if you want a beer?
Why do you have to buy it from a government Yahoo?
To use Doug Ford's language.
I think their union has seriously miscalculated their bargaining power.
Yeah, me too.
If I were Doug Ford, I would be like, fine, you're privatized now.
You're all laid off.
Do what Reagan did with the air traffic controllers.
Last one, Lunacy MR2XI writes, you rebel journalists are always right on.
Why Tune In?00:00:58
Oh, thanks.
People have been complaining about these government-owned LCBOs for like 40-some years, I was told.
There is nothing more gratifying than picking up your liquors at corner stores, just like they do in the States or Alberta, but we can't buy it in convenience stores, but whatever.
We buy it to the store next door to the convenience store.
Like in a strip mall, it's like convenience store, nail place, weed store, liquor store.
It's very convenient.
All these clerks have been overpaid for years.
Shut them down, too expensive for taxpayers, not worth the cost.
When I see Menzies on any news, I make sure to read Bravo Menzies, always thumbs up.
Some Menzies lovers in the audience, I see.
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
I believe the boss is back in the chair on Monday.
And as the boss always says, keep fighting for freedom.