Alberta's sun-baked, windswept prairies filling with wind, solar projects

S&P Global market Intelligence

While southeastern Alberta's agricultural economy was revived in the middle part of the 20th century by government-sponsored irrigation, the small farms have been replaced by large-scale operations that can profit from the massive tracts of cheap land. That low-cost land, coupled with depopulation and what is seen as some of the best onshore wind and solar power resources in the world, has attracted a new generation of wind and solar farmers.

Alberta's wide-open power generation market allows producers to bid power into an hourly auction run by a government agency, sign private power-supply agreements or do both to generate revenue. Transmission resources are abundant and accessible, and the province has a "technology innovation and emissions reduction" trading system, known as TIER. A mandate to shutter coal-fired plants by 2030, which a decade ago provided the bulk of baseload power in the province, has also bolstered the renewables sector, which has seen a sharp decline in production costs that has opened the door to new development, Greengate's Balaban said in a May 31 interview.