Mapping the evolution of Canada’s wind energy fleet
Introduction
Despite wind energy being a significant and growing contributor to the Canadian electricity supply, until recently there was no comprehensive map or index of wind energy infrastructure with sufficient granularity to detail individual turbine locations at a national level. Regional inventories that do exist, for example in the province of Nova Scotia (NS) [1], often give wind farm locations as a single representative point. Maps of higher accuracy can be found in jurisdictions such as the United States [2], the United Kingdom [3], Denmark [4], [5], and some sub-national regions of Canada such as Ontario (ON) [6], [7], to name a few. A Texas-based company, IntelStor, has set out to map the geographic locations of the global wind fleet, having already catalogued over 100,000 turbines as of April 2019 [8], [9]. To better document Canada’s wind energy fleet, the University of Alberta, in collaboration with Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) and the Ottawa branch of the Canada Centre for Mineral and Energy Technology (CanmetENERGY), sought to consolidate fleet information regarding Canadian wind energy into a more comprehensive database in order to enable, for the first time, a comprehensive perspective on the operating fleet across the country. The results of this work are presented here along with a overview of the evolution and state of wind energy infrastructure in Canada. The value of publicly available database has been demonstrated in the United States for researchers, private companies and government agencies conducting studies ranging from wake effects, to avian impacts, to geospatial analyses of renewable energy technical potential [10], as such the Canadian data resulting from this research are publicly available via NRCan [11].
As of 2021, Canada was ranked 9th in the world for onshore wind energy, with a total installed capacity of 14.0 GW across all 10 provinces and 2 of the 3 northern territories. Fig. 1 provides a map of Canada annotated with provincial installed wind [12] and total generation [13] capacities, with colour representing provincial wind penetration. For the most part Canada’s provinces operate their electricity systems predominantly to serve their domestic loads, however there are a few notable outliers including Newfoundland and Labrador (NL) where over 5000 MW of its generation capacity is purchased by Hydro Quebec, and Prince Edward Island (PE) imports just under 2/3 of its electricity from New Brunswick (NB) [13]. Outside of these two provinces, wind energy fleets range from 5% to 10% of installed provincial system capacities. Combined, wind energy generated 5% of electrical energy generated in Canada in 2019 [13], making it the 5th largest electricity source behind hydro (61%), nuclear (15%), natural gas (9%) and coal (8%).
The goals of this work are three-fold: 1) to document the methodology for cataloguing wind energy projects for those looking to use the data as well as someone looking to replicate a map in another jurisdiction, 2) to describe the data was collected such that it might be useful for other studies, be they energy, health or ecological impact related, and 3) to analyse the evolution of wind farms in Canada to assist in future system-wide and project development planning.
Section snippets
Significance of a wind turbine database
Wind energy is playing an increasingly significant role in Canada, and in 2019 was the 5th largest source of electrical energy generation [13], and will soon overtake coal which is being phased out across the country. Recent projects in Canada have been announced with winning bid prices as low as 37 CAD/MWh in Alberta and 35 CAD/MWh in Saskatchewan for 20-year contracts for projects beginning operations in 2019 and 2020 respectively. These costs are consistent with North American data showing
Methodology
Although Canada is the focal case study for this paper, the methodologies and evaluation metrics defined below are not region specific. That is to say that many of the developed methods and their associated analyses could be applied to further operational wind fleets, regardless of jurisdiction.
Canadian policies and wind fleet evolution
The map not only provides the physical location of the turbines, but also enables an examination of the evolution of the wind fleet in the country. A total of 276 projects, comprised of 6911 individual turbines with 14 GW of installed capacity have been accounted for, with the vast majority having been commissioned after 2005 as can be seen in Table 2. Additional projects will be added to the NRCan database as they are commissioned.
The first commercial wind farm in Canada began operating in
Discussion
The publication of a wind energy database in Canada helps to track the evolution of wind projects in the country and to understand how future wind farms may evolve by looking at recent projects and project evolution. Over the course of the past two and a half decades, wind turbines have increased in size significantly. As demonstrated in Fig. 6, the average turbine height and rotor diameter installed in Canada have doubled and tripled respectively since 1995. Average installed turbine capacity
Conclusions
The purpose of this work was to create an exhaustive data set of Canadian wind power infrastructure, discuss the methods used, challenges encountered, and document the historical growth of the industry. The database of utility-scale wind turbines in the United States lists the following as range of research applications of such databases [10]:
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assessments of climate and health benefits of wind power;
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analyses of electric grid impacts and requirements related to high penetrations of renewable
CRediT authorship contribution statement
William Noel: Investigation, Data curation, Writing – original draft, Formal analysis. Timothy M. Weis: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing – original draft, Project administration. Qiulin Yu: Data curation, Formal analysis. Andrew Leach: Funding acquisition, Supervision, Writing – review & editing. Brian A. Fleck: Resources, Supervision, Writing – review & editing.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to R. Kilpatrick of NRCan and P. McKay of the Canadian Renewable Energy Association (formerly the Canadian Wind Energy Association) for reviewing and providing comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
Funding sources
This work was supported by Natural Resources Canada and the Canada First Excellence Research Fund, Future of Energy Systems Institute, University of Alberta, Canada .
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