CALGARY — Alberta's electricity market is headed for a major shakeup, but some industry players fear a lengthy period of uncertainty could scare away badly needed investment in power generation.
"With government’s direction now received, our immediate next steps involve collaborating closely with stakeholders to build out the detailed design." "Hopefully we can come up with something that works in a short period of time and provide some certainty to the market, but the biggest risk right now is that we have too much uncertainty for investors to make a fair decision about projects," said CanREA president Vittoria Bellissimo.
Under former Premier Rachel Notley's NDP government, there had been a plan to transition from an"energy-only" to a capacity market, but the UCP later scrapped it. In a particularly high-profile example, Alberta was forced to declare an emergency grid alert in January when the system — under pressure from a number of natural gas plant outages as well as wind that was not blowing — came close to buckling.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has previously estimated that transitioning Alberta's electricity grid to clean power could cost upwards of $400 billion, and many experts say that's a fair estimate given the work that will be required.