Alberta Restrictions Cancel 10.7 GW of New Renewables, 89% of Province’s Peak Power Demand
Alberta has lost 10.7 gigawatts of clean energy capacity in the two years since the province slapped a moratorium on renewable energy and battery storage development, enough to meet 109% of its average power demand and 89% of its peak demand, in what the Pembina Institute calls an “alarming milestone”.
The analysis shows 5.3 GW of solar+storage, 1.6 GW of wind+storage, and 3.8 GW of stand-alone storage projects that have been withdrawn since October 2023 from the project development queue maintained by the Alberta Electric System Operator.
Those losses were equal to 109% of Alberta’s average electricity demand and 89% of its peak demand, Pembina says. Last year, The Narwhal reported that nearly 80% of the province’s electricity was supplied by gas, most of it coming from a few large suppliers—Enmax, Heartland Generation, Capital Power, and TransAlta.
“Though not all proposed projects make it all the way to completion, cancellations for renewables over the last two years have been concerningly high, at 44%,” Pembina writes. “By comparison, 11% of gas capacity proposed in the same time frame has been cancelled.”
The cancellations are about more than just lost power supply, said Will Noel, senior analyst in Pembina’s electricity program.
“Economic development from renewables is not just economic development from renewables,” he told The Energy Mix. “It’s vitally important to clean up our power supply and keep it affordable so we can attract more investment from other sectors like data centres that are looking for clean, cheap power.”
Those investors are now turning to provinces like British Columbia for wind and solar, or to Ontario for battery storage, he added. “If Alberta wants to diversify its economy, it can’t really do it without cleaning up its grid.”
The string of cancellations also “means that Albertans are losing out on low-cost power—as well as tens of millions of dollars each year of potential tax revenues, which would have largely gone to rural municipalities,” Pembina writes. The latest estimate from the Pembina-affiliated Business Renewables Centre-Canada, published last year, pegged those local losses at $91 million per year spread across 53 cancelled projects, some of them in cash-starved rural communities where fossil companies of steadfastly refused to pay their taxes.
The latest Pembina Institute infographic shows another 19 GW of projects that are still in progress as of this month.
The new data is an update on a May 2025 report [pdf] that “detailed the litany of challenges faced by renewable energy developers in Alberta,” Pembina said in a release. “This includes outright bans and ambiguous restrictions on areas of land where wind and solar projects can be built, new requirements relating to equipment recycling and land reclamation, and changes to transmission legislation, all of which will likely add new regulatory burdens and upfront costs.”
It’s “notable,” Pembina adds, “that many of these new requirements are not equally applied to other industries, including other energy sectors such as oil and gas.”
Earlier this month, Pembina said Alberta’s renewable energy queue had hit a four-year low—even as other provinces like British Columbia and Nova Scotia moved to get new projects under way.
“I’d love to hope that this is as bad as it gets and that we can see things turn around,” Noel told The Mix. “We really need to restore that certainty for investors,” including tech companies like Bell Canada, Microsoft, and Amazon as well as big cities like Edmonton and Calgary.
“Right now, both buyers and developers don’t know what the costs are going to be because of all of these price impacts, the stack of policy decisions and market changes and transmission regulations. We really need to see concrete answers in order to spur these contracts.”
Cover photo: Edna Winti/flickr
