Danielle Smith opens a new front in her war against renewables

Alberta’s wind and solar industry is an unqualified success, one that’s leading the country in new installations, attracting billions of dollars in investment and creating thousands of new jobs. Those new wind and solar farms produce electricity that’s cost-competitive with natural gas even before the carbon price is factored in, and those costs are expected to be significantly cheaper than gas-fired power by 2030. And for some reason, a provincial government that prides itself on putting jobs and the economy above all other considerations is deliberately slamming the brakes on this industry’s growth.

On Thursday, the United Conservative Party announced a six-month “pause” for all new renewable projects over one megawatt. This was presented as a way to “create certainty” for project developers and meet the needs of rural Alberta residents, who are apparently concerned about the pace of renewable development and its impact on agricultural land.

It also speaks to the way in which some Albertans, including the province’s own electricity regulator, have been caught out by the pace of renewable development. “A huge reason the AB govt and some stakeholders feel caught flat-footed on renewables growth is they were never led to believe the growth would happen,” University of Calgary economist Blake Shaffer tweeted. “AESO long-term outlooks have consistently under-forecast renewables growth in this province.” Indeed, the Alberta Electric System Operator, which oversees the province’s grid, predicted in 2021 that it would take until 2041 for Alberta to have 1,000 megawatts of solar power. Instead, it happened in 2022.

Most governments would consider this a good news story they could share with the world. That’s especially true for a government as reputationally challenged on climate and the environment as Alberta’s. And yet, that government — which finds the idea of slowing oil and gas development downright treasonous and believes the answer to climate change involves developing and exporting more fossil fuels as quickly as possible — seems determined to slow wind and solar’s roll.

As energy economist Andrew Leach quipped, “Renewables used to be expensive. Now they're cheap. Alberta has had to find new ways to stop them.”

Premier Danielle Smith’s hostility towards renewables is well-documented, and it was reflected in the conspicuous absence of the words “wind” and “solar” in her energy minister’s mandate letter (modular nuclear reactors, by comparison, were mentioned three separate times). But few people expected her government to actually halt development outright, and that list includes the people directly involved in the wind and solar industry. As the Globe and Mail’s Emma Graney reported, while Affordability and Utilities Minister Nathan Neudorf has met with “landowners, stakeholder groups, consumer advocates and power providers that rely heavily on natural gas,” he’s yet to meet with the Canadian Renewable Energy Association — you know, the group that actually advocates for the interests of wind and solar project developers.

What adds insult to this economic and environmental injury is the obvious hypocrisy at play here. In his remarks, Neudorf suggested one of the driving concerns behind the decision was the prospect of unfunded cleanup costs at the end of a solar or wind project’s life. “The sooner we can actually get those expectations clearly defined and outlined for what happens at the end of life and reclamation, who pays how much, the better,” he said.

This is the same government, remember, that has done nothing to address the growing inventory of unreclaimed oil and gas wells and oilsands tailings ponds that could cost as much as $260 billion to clean up. Oil and gas companies have paid less than $1 billion against this massive looming bill, and despite them posting record profits over the last year, the government appears poised to revive its “R-Star” plan to funnel billions of dollars in taxpayer money their way. There has, of course, never been a government-mandated pause on their activity while they get this far bigger house in order.

That this pause will depress investment in the same rural parts of Alberta that helped elect her government doesn’t seem to matter to Smith. Neither does the prospect of new jobs, additional investment or the positive impact that adding more electricity would have on Alberta’s record-high power prices. Binnu Jeyakumar, electricity director at the Pembina Institute, thinks the moratorium could impact 91 projects worth a combined $25 billion. “It creates uncertainty around future investments while adding unnecessary red tape to these projects.”

In the end, it seems, these are all acceptable casualties in her ongoing war against wind and solar. If the NDP did this, of course, conservatives would be screaming to high heaven about the impact on the business community. But when it comes to energy policy in Alberta, there’s no hypocrisy too big or too obvious that can keep the UCP from rigging things in favour of the oil and gas industry.