[_aavaa_]

Title is misleading, they want to start building not “build” (I.e. be operational).

Though that only moves the needles from impossible to laughable.

> If our goal is to double our grid and build a low-carbon economy in less than 25 years, there is no credible plan to do that without nuclear energy

There are plenty of credible plans, they all involve wind and solar. But as anyone watching clean energy news will know, Alberta is trying its hardest to get rid of all wind and solar development from the province.

As for the baseload argument, they already get >60% of the electricity from hydro and nuclear. How much more baseload do you really need? 100%?

[barbazoo]

Doesn't nuclear make sense to increase baseline capacity where hydro isn't available?

[cmrdporcupine]

Ontario has no more room to grow on the hydro front, and doesn't realistically want to import it from Quebec.

So it's natural gas, nuclear, or renewables. And the Conservative gov't here has a bit of a bias against the latter. It's been growing the natural gas sector, undoing a lot of the hard work the previous Liberal gov't had put in on the wind side. Likely nuclear lobbyists now have their ear.

[zybftjmvs]

A village near me in southern Alberta just built a huge wind farm.

[alephnerd]

That project was absolutely funded before Alberta slashed all funding for renewables projects [0].

This as well as the failed pipeline projects have made Canadian infrastructure projects very high risk from a lending perspective, becuase there's now a non-insignificant risk that a province can welch out of financing a deal purely for short term political gain.

This announcement is a good announcement, but it's just bluster if the entire ecosystem around liability and policy stability isn't managed.

[0] - https://thenarwhal.ca/alberta-renewable-energy-investment-co...

[cmrdporcupine]

Not just slashed funding but actually banned renewables projects for a period of time and then when they removed the ban they kneecapped them with extremely prejudicial regulations that asymmetrically apply to renewables projects but not to dirty oil and gas projects (which have left a mess of abandoned wells across the province).

[hodder]

The claim that Alberta is actively trying to get rid of all wind and solar development is internet hyperbole that ignores real capacity data. Alberta actually ranks second in Canada for clean energy growth, and its renewable output surged by over 25% year-over-year into 2026.

The high-profile project cancellations people point to weren't a government ban. They happened because the province changed its transmission rules. Previously, ratepayers subsidized the massive utility costs required to connect remote wind and solar farms to the central grid. The province ended this, forcing private developers to internalize their own grid connection costs. Once forced to pay for their own infrastructure, highly speculative, unfinanced projects simply became economically unviable and dropped out of the queue.

If a private wind or solar developer wanted to build a massive farm in a remote, rural area (like Southern Alberta) where land is cheap but high-voltage power lines do not exist, they only had to pay for the immediate wire connecting their project to the nearest local substation. Taxpayers were subsidizing those players, because it was a "load pays" system.

Please do not fall pray to the general trope that Alberta is a backwards hillbilly province. Subsidizing private developments with public money is not something that should be encouraged.

On Canada broadly, you are correct in your baseload numbers and I agree with you.

(Energy trader here)

[swader999]

I live right in the affected area and allowing more turbines against the eastern slopes of the Rockies would be tragic. Can't put a price on this viewscape.

[actionfromafar]

Oh but you can.

[cmrdporcupine]

Growing up in Alberta in the 70s and 80s I routinely saw photographs and illustrations with oil pumps set against a vista of a wheat field with foothills and mountains in the background, and this was held up as beauty.

We canoed and camped along upper North Saskatchewan, the Brazeau, Pembina, etc in the foothills. Spent half my childhood in the back of the car on the forestry Trunk Road breathing in kicked up sand and gravel from logging trucks in front of us. Couldn't go more than a few hundred feet without hitting a forestry clear cut, or an oil and gas pipe or cutline or a natural gas installation. The whole eastern slopes were already carved up into resource extraction zones then. Pulp and paper mills were the thing that Don Getty was pushing as a "growth" industry then (they were a flop) and they did _lovely_ things to the rivers.

Wind farms though. Terrible things. Eye sore.

[actionfromafar]

> Subsidizing private developments with public money is not something that should be encouraged.

What other kind of subsidy is there?

[cmrdporcupine]

Preposterous take from this parent poster. The AB government routinely subsidizes oil and gas projects and has one of the lowest royalty regimes in the world. The AB government actually put a moratorium on all renewables projects and when they lifted the moratorium they put such intense regulations on renewables projects specifically that it cooled the whole sector despite it being one of the fastest growing industries in the province. The AB government is going out of its way to lift a multidecade ban on coal mining on the eastern slopes of the rockies but thinks that wind farms are a blight. The AB government wants to force BC to allow bitumen pipelines to its coast and to lift tanker bans for same, but openly discriminates against renewables projects on the basis that it will ruin people's views of the foothills. The AB government spread open lies about the cost effectiveness of renewables in public meetings. The AB government wasted the federal government's abandoned oil-well cleanup subsidies while at the same time we have people like this talking about the unsustainability of renewable subsidies.

The people of AB are great. The AB government is one of the most corrupt in the G7.