Residential Solar in Alberta

My previous posts have covered fairly universal stuff about solar. This post however focuses in on Alberta.

System Sizing

Residential solar is classified in Alberta as Micro-generation, which applies to electrical generators sized below 5MW. Small micro-generators, which I have to imagine covers every single residential customer, are those smaller than 150KW.

In Alberta, the Micro-generation Regulation says that a micro-generation unit “is intended to meet all or a portion of the customer’s total annual energy consumption at the customer’s site”. This has the interesting result that the utilities limit the size of a system they’re willing to connect to the grid, such that no house is generating hugely more energy than it has historically consumed.

Some of the reasoning for this makes sense; utilities need to upgrade equipment to manage distributed generation if too much is occurring, but self-consumption helps limit the need here. However, I do find it’s a curious choice if micro-generation is intended to play a part in the decarbonization strategy of the province. You end up limiting the amount of capital a single homeowner can provide to the project of decarbonization, and in general make residential solar a bit more expensive (as cost per watt tends to drop as systems get bigger, as fixed costs are amortized across more generation).

My experience with solar provider quotes suggests that various regions within the province, and various contractors and providers have differing interpretations of this rule. We got proposals for systems that covered anywhere from 90-200% of our annual consumption. We ended up choosing the second largest system we were quoted.

Net Billing

Micro-generators in Alberta are compensated via a Net Billing model. Under Alberta’s Net Billing model, micro-generating consumers are credited the retail rate of electricity for their exports. This is a less financially lucrative model than Net Metering. The main reason being distribution and transmission fees.

In Alberta, in addition to paying your retail rate for electricity, you also pay for distribution and transmission of the electricity. These fees are often an appreciable fraction of your electricity cost (39% of the variable, per kWh, cost on my most recent bill when I wrote this post). As a result of this, if you export 1kWh to the grid, and then consume 1kWh later, you still pay the distribution and transmission costs. This is in contrast to Net Metering systems, where 1kWh produced earlier in the day cancels out 1kWh consumed later in the day, making it more lucrative to be a micro-generator under a net-metering system.

It’s worth noting the phrasing of the net billing: you are reimbursed your retail rate. This has lead to some electricity providers to create interesting incentive programs for micro-generators, like the Solar Club. These programs allow micro-generating customers to switch between two rates with little effort: A winter, or ‘import’ rate, which is relatively low, and a summer ‘export’ rate, which is often 3-4x as high as the import rate. The idea being that during the summer, you accumulate a lot more bill credit, which you then consume during the winter.

This kind of program is made possible through the various ways electricity companies are able compensated for carbon-free generation; they’re passing on the profit they can make from renewable energy certificates and the like.

PACE Financing

One of the interesting ways in which climate change is altering the world is finance. Saul Griffith has argued before that financial innovations will be key to meeting our climate change ambitions. An interesting up and coming development is PACE financing, where PACE is “Property Assessed Clean Energy”. Basically, PACE financing associates a loan with your property, not you. As a result, when you sell the property, the obligation on the loan goes to the new owners, not you. These loans are paid through the already existing property tax system.

PACE, or PACE-like financing is a valuable innovation because it encourages spending money on retrofits to houses that will last long past a single owner. For example, a solar array’s expected lifespan is ~25 years. The ability to amortize the cost of said array across 25 years without worrying about what happens when you sell your house is really valuable to encourage investment in energy efficiency and micro-generation.

Provincially, Alberta has legislation to support the creation of PACE like financing programs in 2019, however as far as I know, no municipality yet has a program up and running. The City of Edmonton is in the late stages with the Clean Energy Improvement Program (CEIP), but at this time the program isn’t yet up and running.

Since I used to live in Toronto, I will note that Toronto has a PACE-like financing system through their Home Energy Loan Program – City of Toronto, which through cursory inspection looks awesome.

The Raven Tower

I finished The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie a few days ago. Though it had a bit of a slow start for me, when it grabbed me I really enjoyed the ride.

I’m hesitant to write too much about it. When I recommend her previous work, Ancillary Justice, I tell people to go in as cold as possible… ideally don’t even read the book summary. Half the joy of Ancillary Justice for me was the experience of figuring out just who your main character was. In The Raven Tower, I feel similarly… there’s a real joy in experiencing the story unfold around you with as few markers to guide the way as possible.

Xenophon’s Hellenika

After finishing Herodotus, I was hungry for more ancient history. Herodotus had thoroughly entertained me for large swathes, and so I felt eager for more.

Given my hunger, and a pre-existing irritation that The Peloponnesian War was incomplete, leaving the closing chapters of the war untold, it seemed that Xenophon’s Hellenica was the best bet for me to read next. I was also heartened by the existence of a Landmark edition, with a new translation by John Marincola.

It turns out that the Landmark edition has a huge, and extremely helpful introduction. Hellenica is a complicated work. The history it recounts is flawed in many ways; Xenophon tells a history which pre-assumes reader knowledge of many major events… without actually recounting said events himself. He also appears to exhibit a variety of biases (pro-Spartan, anti-Theban) which affect the way he tells his history.

The History

Hellenica starts very nearly at the end of Thucydides, as to provide a continuation of the Peloponnesian War. Maybe it was my time away from Thucydides, but I found Xenophon’s continuation to be dry and laconic. It mostly felt… obligatory. The best parts of Xenophon only start after the end of the Peloponnesian war. His recounting of the Thirty Tyrants , a bloody oligarchy installed in Athens at the end of the war with the support of Sparta, was a fascinating account of a horrid time, and extremely helpful.

There are sections of Xenophon that shine, where his writing totally comes alive. I was particularly impressed with his description of Jason of Pherai via his tale of Polygamous of Pharasulus which opens Book Six. By the end of his discussion of Jason, I half expected a movie starring Jason Momoa to be in production.

Xenophon covers some interesting parts of ancient history: the Battle of Leuctra, where the Spartans faced a huge defeat (the trophy erected there was eventually replaced by a permanent monument, which stands today), and the rise of Thebes.

Greek histories are fascinating at least partially because of the way in which they show how many Greek ideas form the headwaters of an intellectual tradition we live in today. I continue to be fascinated by the way in which many of our ideas of government harken back to Athens (often intentionally!). I enjoyed the places where you could see the construction (deconstruction and reconstruction) of the Athenian state, and the pieces reflected in modernity. Occasionally I lose touch that these are the tales of real people who really lived and died. Seeing photos of archeological sites and contemporaneous artifacts reminds me. This has reinforced a desire to visit Greece one day to see some of these sites myself.

Thoughts

Despite some strong sections, I struggled with Hellenica quite a bit compared to Herodotus, and even Thucydides. Despite Herodotus’ discursive style, both he and Thucydides were much more focused in their writing. Each book can be given a single sentence thesis statement: Herodotus recounts (along with everything he knows about the world) the Greek victory over an enormous invading Persian force. Thucydides recounts (most) of the Peloponnesian war, a 27 year long war between Athens and Sparta.

I cannot make a similar thesis statement for Xenophon’s Hellenica. He starts by recounting the end of the Peloponnesian war, starting off where Thucydides ends, but then simply seems to tell of most battles involving Sparta for the next 40 years or so. You could perhaps say he’s telling history as it was important to him and his family; the history ends shortly after the fall of his son Gryllus who died at the Battle of Mantinea). Yet the scope of the work is far too broad to be just a memoir. However, where both Thucydides and Herodotus had (different, but) clear methods to their histories, Xenophon rarely hints at any methodology. Mostly you have no idea where any of his information is coming from, which poses a particular challenge when other sources have contradicted him.

The Landmark edition of Xenophon leans into this challenge by providing selected translations of Diodorus Siculus and The Oxyrhynchus historian (a.k.a P). I didn’t read all these parallel histories; it became exhausting after a while, but I am glad that they were included. (I am also very happy to have learned the story of Oxyrhynchus Papyri via the inclusion of P’s work. )

Unlike Herodotus, I leave Xenophon with no energy to seek out more ancient history at the moment. I need a break. I don’t think reading Xenophon was a waste of time, but it wasn’t as enlightening or interesting as the previous two histories I’ve read. At the end of Hellenica, we are left just about where Philip II of Macedon begins to take over Greece; his son would be Alexander the Great. Interestingly, despite this incipient change, Xenophon barely mentions the Macedonians in his history. If I wanted to continue a chronological exploration of the Ancient Greek world I’d seek a history of the rise of Macedon next.

Random Notes

  • “Alketas the Spartan was keeping guard over Oreos…” is a sentence… apparently Oreos was a place!
  • The Landmark Edition calls the work Hellenika, whereas many others render it as Hellenica. I am not sure what the deal is there.

Sacralization and Institutionalization

While wandering around on the internet, I ended up reading the a chapter of Matthew Sam Neil’s 2018 thesis “Locating Jazz in 21st Century America” called BadBadNotGood and Jazz Blasphemy (Chapter 6). I thought it was a really interesting discussion of how and why Jazz has developed its reputation is a high-brow music, disconnected from time in a sense.

With jazz, sacralization has occurred via similar processes—the establishment of a canon of great artists, the separation of outsider from insider—though the motives for this process of sacralization have been different. For jazz, a tradition was viewed by musicians and critics as being in danger of being lost to a marketplace that was passing it by in favor of rock and pop (Prouty 2013). Jazz’s survival thus depended on its establishment as a high art form, especially as a uniquely American achievement. To do so necessitated following the norms of Western art music and similar processes of sacralization. This included viewing the cultural form of jazz as a tradition that must be treated with respect and not as mere entertainment (Levine 1988, 146).

The thesis is focused on Jazz as an American art form; given that a lot of the most interesting Jazz I’ve been hearing over the last few years is coming out of the UK (and in particular London), I’d be interested in analysis of that phenomena, and how non-American institutions see Jazz.