The sun sets behind a wind turbine at the Transalta McBride Lake wind farm project near Ardenville, Alta., on Oct. 4, 2022.Guillaume Nolet/The Globe and Mail
Companies developing renewable energy projects in Alberta are pleading for clarity from the province, as Premier Danielle Smith insists that only by putting the sector on ice can the province review policies around end-of-life reclamation and land use when it comes to wind and solar farms.
Ms. Smith’s United Conservative Party government imposed a seven-month halt on application approvals for new wind and solar projects on Aug. 3. Since then, renewable-energy developers, investors and unions have expressed their frustration, and questioned the stated reasons for the move. Those include a need to address end-of-life reclamation, as well as a study into how more renewables affect arable farmland and grid reliability.
Calgary-based BluEarth Renewables Inc. has invested more than $600-million in Alberta over the past three years, developing 333 megawatts of wind and solar projects. It has similar capacity in planned projects and those in development. None of those is directly affected by the moratorium.
Still, the government’s move has given the company pause on the future of the projects, BluEarth chief executive officer Grant Arnold said.
Mr. Arnold said he is hopeful of having a meeting with the government at some point, as the moratorium affects the company’s decisions on where to spend its money. BluEarth also has sizable operations elsewhere in Canada and in the United States.
“I have to assess whether we slow down or stop or maintain the same course, based on what we can learn in the next weeks and months about what is about to happen here,” he said.
Last week, renewables industry officials had been contacted to attend a round-table discussion with Nathan Neudorf, Minister of Affordability and Utilities, though the talks appear to have been postponed. Mr. Neudorf said he plans to meet individually with landowners, municipalities and renewables companies to improve the process.
His office declined to give a timeline for when meetings would be scheduled.
The opposition New Democratic Party on Monday called for public hearings into the renewables application freeze.
Energy and climate critic Nagwan Al-Guneid, who had tried to broker the round-table talks before they fell through, said the moratorium was made without consultation with the industry or due process to limit the impact of investment and jobs. The “overwhelming and passionate public response to this issue makes it clear that closed-door meetings with stakeholders are now insufficient,” Ms. Al-Guneid wrote in a letter to the minister.
The Alberta government is also under pressure to clarify when it made the decision to pause approvals.
As Ms. Smith railed against the federal government’s new draft clean electricity regulations Monday, and questioned their constitutionality, she said that renewable companies should have known a pause was coming “if they listened to the regulators.” But numerous solar and wind developers with applications in the pipeline told The Globe that the Alberta Utilities Commission had asked for more documents to support their applications mere hours before the government announced the moratorium.
The timing of the announcement, and how the government delivered it without consulting the renewables sector, suggests the decision to impose a moratorium was a political one, said Mr. Arnold, with BluEarth. Indeed, numerous industry players have said the regulator could study issues identified by the government such as land use, end-of-life-reclamation and grid reliability without a freeze on applications.
“There’s a concern for me, in terms of, what happens after that moratorium? There’s a pretty strong signal that we will come out of this with terms that impact renewables negatively,” Mr. Arnold said. “We have to make investment decisions on projects that have, long, long development cycles, long permitting timelines and long operational lives. So we have to allocate capital knowing that there’s some uncertainty here, and some decisions to be made for the political reasons.”
Ms. Smith also pointed to the fact that Rural Municipalities of Alberta has raised land-use and end-of-life concerns numerous times. Indeed, at last year’s fall convention, it passed a resolution that urged the government to mandate the collection of adequate cleanup funds via a reclamation bond.
Ms. Smith said Monday that letters released by her government when it announced the pause proved regulators had made the request; the Alberta Electric System Operator (AESO) “asked for us to do a pause to make sure that we could address issues of stability in the grid,” she said, and the Alberta Utilities Commission (AUC) “asked us to do a pause while we figured out how we can deal with end of life reclamation,” she said.
The letters – both dated July 21, two weeks before Mr. Neudorf announced the pause – show no such request.
For example, the president and chief executive of the AESO, Michael Law, thanked Mr. Neudorf for advising the commission that the government would be requesting that the utilities commission would hold an inquiry into land use and reclamation issues. He added that the AESO would support the AUC in its implementation the government-directed pause.
And the chair of the AUC, Carolyn Dahl Rees, said solving the issues of using agricultural land for renewables and the lack of mandatory reclamation security requirements necessitated “a dedicated period of engagement with all of the stakeholders” to “enable a reasonable, robust regulatory framework that is efficient and predictable while being protective of the long-term public interest for all Albertans.”