Alberta's Electricity Supply Mix
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.
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.
Value Capture — Price Capture by Fuel Type
Capture rate = what the fuel type actually earned per MWh ÷ the period average price. Above 100% means the resource tends to produce during high-price hours; below 100% means it produces during low-price hours. Dispatchable resources (Simple Cycle, Gas Fired Steam) typically capture above average by ramping up during scarcity. Variable renewables and surplus exports typically capture below average.
| Plant | Capture rate | Capture price | Total output |
|---|
No plants with meaningful output in this window.
Imports and Exports are system-level totals — no per-asset breakdown is available.
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.
No hours with wind/solar data in this window.
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.
No hours with data in this window.
Capacity Additions & Retirements — Rolling 30 Days
Daily change in installed generation capacity (MW). Additions are positive, retirements are negative. Detected by comparing the AESO asset roster day-over-day.
No capacity changes recorded in the last 30 days.
Energy Storage Dispatch
Hourly discharge output (MW) for all grid-connected storage assets, with available capacity (installed MC minus storage booked for DCR) shown as a reference line. Settled pool price is overlaid on the right axis. Note: charging is not visible in AESO's generation data — only discharge is reported here.
No storage dispatch data in this window.
Total Demand
Net Load
Demand duration curve
Price
Price duration curve
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.
| Percentile | Avg. price | Contribution to avg. |
|---|
No price data in this window.
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.
No forecast data collected yet — data accumulates going forward from when this feature was deployed.
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.
No gas price data available.
Intertie Use
Import capability
British Columbia + Montana (combined path)
Saskatchewan
Source: AESO's Available Transfer Capability (ATC) report. Transfer limit = the path's total transfer capability; available = what imports may actually be scheduled against after AESO's reliability margin and any limit it has set (reason shown on hover); actual imports = metered net flow into Alberta. Shaded hours: importers offered more than was available, so imports were rationed. Right of the "now" line, the limits are AESO's posted forward values and can change.
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.
No logged outages in this window.
Dispatched Contingency Reserve
MW of contingency reserve dispatched per hour, broken down by fuel type. "DCR — Other" is reserve provided by loads and interties — it can only be tracked as a system total, not by fuel type.
No DCR data in this window.
Fast Frequency Response
FFR Armed Dispatch is the MW of fast-response capability actively committed to the grid. FFR Offered Volume is the total MW that generators have offered to provide. Both are system-level totals from AESO's CSD summary.
No FFR data in this window.
Supply headroom
Estimate, in three layers. Fast (about 10 minutes): hydro, simple-cycle units and what running gas and cogeneration units can ramp up within 10 minutes. Slow (hours): the rest of running units' spare, plus combined-cycle, steam and cogeneration units that are off but ran in the last 48 hours. Interties (next hour): import capability AESO has made available that importers haven't offered into — imports are scheduled before the hour, so this is never fast. Each unit is counted at what it has demonstrated (its highest hourly output plus reserve over the last 90 days; installed capacity if it has barely run), net of its output and contingency reserve, and only if it is off AESO's outage list and has run recently (48 hours; 7 days for simple cycle). Hydro is counted at the 95th percentile of its recent output. Excludes wind, solar and storage; it is not AESO's offer-based supply cushion.
Headroom vs. price
Unit Commitment
Count of generating units with active AESO directives per hour, by fuel type. A directive tells a unit to be available for dispatch — the API does not specify output level, so this chart shows unit counts rather than MW. The AIL line shows actual demand for context. Source: AESO Unit Commitment Data API v2 (data from July 2024).
No unit commitment directives in this window.