Alberta Premier Danielle Smith isn’t known for going off script, or the rails. But a heckler tested both her mettle and rhetorical skills at the Pembina Institute’s annual climate conference in Calgary on Thursday.Smith — decked out, appropriately enough, in green — waded into hostile territory to defend her government’s pause on renewable energy projects and explain why a 2035 deadline to reach net-zero is both economically unpractical and technically infeasible.It was a message many didn’t want to hear..About halfway through her ‘fireside chat’ with host Dave Kelly, a heckler in the front row challenged her assertion about the need for base load natural gas to balance a surge of renewable power that she insisted has made the grid unreliable with ‘what do you know about reliability?’ To the audience’s surprise — and chagrin — she shot back. “I know that everybody thinks that this economy is going to be operated on wind and solar and battery power. And it cannot. There is no industrialized economy in the world operating that way because they need base load,” she began, before being interrupted after he suggests that battery storage is indeed the solution...“I know 17 years of solar rooftop, let's talk about it. When there's no sun I got batteries galore. We're the biggest battery manufacturer in the world, Canada. We're fantastic people.”Heckler.Undeterred, Smith fires back again:“And I'll tell you what I know about batteries, because I talked to somebody who was thinking of investing in an under 200 megawatt plant — $1 billion to be able to get each megawatt hour and he would get one hour of storage so if you want me to have 12,000 megawatts of storage, that's $12 billion for one hour of storage, $36 billion for three hours of storage, and there are long stretches in winter where we can go weeks without wind or solar.” “That is the reason why we need to legitimate real solutions that rely on base load power rather than fantasy thinking. And I'm not going to engage in fantasy thinking and say something is possible. We need to have a reliable energy grid. That's what I'm trying to do.”.“That is the reason why we need to legitimate real solutions that rely on base load power rather than fantasy thinking. And I'm not going to engage in fantasy thinking and say something is possible. We need to have a reliable energy grid. That's what I'm trying to do.”Premier Danielle Smith.An exasperated Kelly lets the banter continue before finally bringing it back under control. “It's important and these are important conversations. And it's not like we're all going to come to some sort of (agreement) in the next three minutes,” before asking Smith to outline practical things her government has actually accomplished.Smith is just as quick, and sharp.“We are all in alignment on net zero by 2050. We have our industry in alignment. I'm in agreement with our major trading partners. That wasn't the policy before I came in,” she continues without missing a beat..That wasn't the policy before I came in..“So we have brought our entire populace on board, my caucus on board with the notion that we can be aligned with the federal government on a 2050 target, but you can't then just say ‘oh, well now we want you to do 2030.’ That's not reasonable. What is reasonable is working with us on what we think is going to be a pathway that's practical.”
