MASSIE ENERGY · RESEARCH TOOLS

Electron Macroscope

Real-time updates on Alberta's power system

Pool price
/MWh
Internal load
MW
Outages
MW
offline right now
Data as of

Alberta's Electricity Supply Mix

ELECTRON MACROSCOPE

Plant detail

Click a slice of the donut above to see individual plants. Cogeneration breaks down by industry first.

Capacity vs. actual output, by fuel type

MC = installed capacity. TNG = what's actually being generated right now.

ELECTRON MACROSCOPE

Spark Spread — Simple Cycle vs. Combined Cycle

Power price minus the cost of gas needed to generate it, using each technology's typical heat rate (NRL Annual Technology Baseline) and AECO gas priced daily, converted from USD to CAD.

ELECTRON MACROSCOPE

Value Capture — Wind vs. Solar

How much of the market price wind and solar actually captured, based on when they produce relative to when prices are high. A rate below 100% means the resource earned less than a flat, always-on generator would over the same period — often called "cannibalization," since wind/solar assets tend to produce at the same time as each other.

ELECTRON MACROSCOPE

Variable Generation vs. Demand

Each point is one hour. Shows whether wind and solar can be relied on during high-demand periods, or whether the hours needing the most power tend to have the least renewable output.

ELECTRON MACROSCOPE

Generation Duration Curve

Same hours, sorted from highest to lowest generation rather than by time — shows how many hours a technology actually produces near its peak vs. how much of the period is spent near zero.

ELECTRON MACROSCOPE

Total Demand

ELECTRON MACROSCOPE

Demand duration curve

ELECTRON MACROSCOPE

Price

ELECTRON MACROSCOPE

Price duration curve

ELECTRON MACROSCOPE

Price distribution by quartile

Hours ranked by settled price and split into four equal-sized groups. Each quartile's contribution to the overall average reflects both how high its prices ran and how much of the period it covers — a quartile can dominate the average even though it's the same number of hours as the others.

PercentileAvg. priceContribution to avg.

Price Forecast vs. Actual

AESO's forecast pool price compared against the settled actual — shows how well the market anticipated price in advance. Forecast is available for the current and next two hours only; historical actual values are settled pool price. Collected hourly going forward; no historical backfill possible since the source report is today-only.

ELECTRON MACROSCOPE

Wholesale Gas Price

Daily AECO gas price, converted to CAD/GJ -- the same figure already used to compute spark spread elsewhere on this dashboard. Gas prices settle once per day, so this is naturally daily rather than hourly.

ELECTRON MACROSCOPE

Intertie Use

Known outages

Capacity offline per hour, based on AESO's public event log. This tracks logged online/offline events only — it isn't a complete record of every outage, and it's separate from plants sitting idle for economic reasons.

ELECTRON MACROSCOPE