“This is what happens when ideology runs the power grid,” said Alberta Premier Danielle Smith in July 2023 when asked about the province’s sky-high electricity rates.
Smith was attempting to cast blame on renewable energy policies of the former New Democratic Party government that had left office more than four years earlier.
Just one month later the premier abruptly signed a moratorium on all wind and solar projects followed by additional onerous restrictions that eventually drove almost 11 gigawatts of proposed renewable electricity projects out of the province. Alberta currently has the highest electricity rates in the country by a wide margin while also producing almost eight times the emissions per kilowatt hour compared to Ontario.
Political hypocrisy aside, Premier Smith might at least be given credit for being ahead of the curve in terms of weaponizing the powers of the state against renewable energy generation. This month the Trump administration abruptly ordered Danish wind company Orsted to halt to an almost complete $4 billion offshore wind project in New England citing “national security interests” — a move that Rhode Island Governor Ned Lamont called “sudden, erratic and insane.”
Regulatory Rug Pull
For all their free enterprise talking points about government getting out of the way of business, Smith and Trump are instead providing a master class in exactly the types of regulatory sins they purport to oppose: imposing ideology on the marketplace and undermining investor certainty.
Shares of Orsted plunged 16 percent after Trump’s regulatory rug pull and the company was forced to try to abruptly raise over $9 billion to maintain cashflow. Financial analysts were likewise stunned. “It was beyond my wildest imagination that something like this could happen to a multi-billion dollar project that is nearly complete,” Atin Jain, an energy analyst at BloombergNEF told the Washington Post. “No financial model would have anticipated this type of action. It is beyond the boundaries of what any investor would have considered a reasonable risk.”
The U.S. president provided the following measured response via social media post: “Any State that has built and relied on WINDMILLS and SOLAR for power are seeing RECORD BREAKING INCREASES IN ELECTRICITY AND ENERGY COSTS. THE SCAM OF THE CENTURY! We will not approve wind or farmer destroying Solar. The days of stupidity are over in the USA!!!”
The culture war that previously fixated on washrooms, drag queens and pronouns apparently now includes energy generation. And as in any war, the first casualty is truth. Despite the ALL CAPS criticism from the president, wind and solar are already the cheapest sources of electricity and prices continue to collapse.
More than 90 percent of U.S. energy that came online in 2024 was from renewables. Clean energy investment worldwide now exceeds money flowing towards fossil fuels by a two-to-one margin. Solar generating capacity doubled in the last three years while grid battery storage grew at almost three times that rate, leaving even experts in the field gobsmacked by the pace of change.
Trump’s futile efforts to hold back the tide on the energy transition will likely only succeed in higher costs for American families. Likewise, Danielle Smith’s ideological opposition to clean energy has accomplished little more than driving investment elsewhere, while stoking extremist views against renewable energy.
“In my numerous discussions with the province’s Ministry of Utilities and Affordability headed by Nathan Neudorf, it’s become clear that they want municipalities to take a leading role in voicing concerns over energy initiatives, such as wind turbines,” boasted Mark Mallett, founder of renewable opposition group Wind Concerns. Mallett is also running for municipal office in the upcoming Alberta’s St. Paul County election, “representing the vast number of citizens here who do not want this beautiful region turned into an industrial wind turbine wasteland.”
Market Decisions
Smith and her ideological allies have made impressive progress kneecapping what used to be a thriving local clean energy industry. A recent report from the Pembina Institute showed that for the first time in four years, the number of proposed renewable energy projects in Alberta shrank despite the province having the best clean power resources in the country. Prior to Smith’s abrupt clean energy moratorium in 2023 Alberta attracted 86 percent of all wind and solar investment in Canada. The premier’s ham-handed interventions in the energy sector are apparently not over. Changes just announced to Alberta’s electricity markets favouring natural gas over renewables may further increase rates by up to 30 percent.
Other less myopic jurisdictions are eager to attract clean energy investments spurned by oil industry ideologues like Smith or Trump. Nova Scotia premier Tim Houston is pitching partnership with the federal government for a 66-gigawatt offshore wind development that would be capable of supplying more than a quarter of Canada’s energy needs and attract up to $10 billion of investment.
British Columbia is likewise courting renewable energy companies displaced by the politics of power generation. “We’re seeing major jurisdictions move away from clean energy,” said Premier David Eby at the launch of nine new B.C. wind farm projects last December. “I couldn’t think of better timing for an announcement like today’s with $5 billion to $6 billion of private sector clean energy investment in B.C.”
Ideology and electrons have nothing in common. Politicians — especially those who espouse free market ideals — should get out of the way of an accelerating clean energy revolution.
