Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s government is launching a national advertising campaign against the federal government’s proposed clean electricity regulations.
Mrs. Smith said Alberta is going to “push back against Ottawa’s disastrous draft electricity regulations,” which the province maintains is creating “rapid and risky” changers to the nation’s power grid.
The premier called Ottawa’s legislation “poorly conceived,” “disastrously uninformed, and totally disconnected from reality.”
Power Bills
In an accompanying news release, Mrs. Smith said Canadians need to be informed about the “negative effects of the federal government’s proposed electricity regulations,” suggesting they will increase power bills for all households, put reliability of the grid at risk, and drive investment out of Alberta.“If left unchanged, Alberta will be forced to achieve net-zero in 12 years without stable sources of baseload power, like natural gas. This would increase the likelihood and frequency of brownouts and blackouts during Alberta’s cold winters and hot summers, and negatively affect many other Canadians as well,” the news release said.
It said Alberta has its own plan to fully transition away from coal-powered electricity by 2024, noting that the province had already reduced electricity emissions by 53 percent between 2005 and 2021. Alberta has a target to achieve a carbon-neutral power grid by 2050 “without compromising affordable, reliable and secure energy for Albertans, Canadians and the world,” said the news release.
The Alberta government said the Constitution of Canada leaves the legislating and regulating of the development of electricity explicitly within provincial jurisdiction.
Alberta maintained that it needs “a diverse mix of intermittent and baseload options to prevent future blackouts and maintain a reliable grid,” and that among all of the provinces, Ottawa’s proposed regulations will incur the highest costs in Alberta.
The premier said at the news conference that electricity systems have been built up over decades.
“Radically redesigning them in 12 years would cost Canadians at least a trillion dollars and possibly as much as 1.7 trillion dollars,” she said.
Unreliable
Alberta’s premier added that wind and solar sources of energy are “intermittent.”“Energy storage technology has not advanced to overcome that, meaning electricity supplies could simply stop, repeatedly and dangerously. In Alberta, we do not have enough non-emitting baseload electricity available from hydroelectric or nuclear, and there’s not enough time to build that by 2035.”
The news release noted that “Alberta’s grid had seven alerts during colder months in 2022 and had three alerts in summer 2023, underscoring the importance of having sufficient stable baseload power sources like gas, hydro, and nuclear available year-round.”
“The federal electricity regulations do not adequately account for regional electricity system differences, Alberta’s energy-only market, the province’s reliance on natural gas generation or the large industrial demand,” it added.
“Modelling and analysis recently highlighted by the Public Policy Forum shows the federal electricity approach could cost Canadians more than $1 trillion.”
At the news conference, the premier said the proposed federal regulations will leave families and businesses with “unaffordable bills” and the provinces with “crushing debt.”
Sovereignty Act Motion
Federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault said on Sept. 29 that Alberta will not get special treatment when it comes to the new regulations.He disagreed that the regulations will impose undue costs or cause reliability problems anywhere.
“I would call on Premier Smith to work with us constructively to ensure that these regulations are the most efficient for all Canadians,” Mr. Guilbeault said at a news conference in Ottawa on Sept. 29.
“How fair would it be for ... the rest of the federation if we started carving out exceptions for provinces?” he asked.
Premier Smith said the province is “preparing a Sovereignty Act motion and I’m hoping we don’t have to use it, ... but we are going to defend our constitutional jurisdiction to make sure that we develop our oil and gas industry at our own pace.”
