Consumers range from residential buyers to huge industrial consumers mining the oil sands, operating pipelines and milling forest products. On the supply side, generators range from wind farms east of Crowsnest Pass to oilsands plants and other petroleum processing facilities which generate marketable electricity surplus to their own needs, to coal-fired plants near Edmonton. Because of lower altitude, cooler temperatures, greater supplies of water for cooling and steam generation, and large near surface supplies of thermal coal, central Alberta is thermodynamically the best place in Alberta to generate hydrocarbon-fuelled electricity.