Danielle Smith’s wind and solar double standard

By now, we’ve all gotten used to conservative governments saying one thing and doing another. But few have plumbed the depths of hypocrisy that Alberta’s UCP government is mining right now with its contradictory approach to managing the province’s energy assets and their environmental impacts. While oil and gas continues to get the freest of passes, the province’s successful wind and solar industry is being held to the highest possible standard. If you didn’t know any better, you might think Danielle Smith’s United Conservative Party was trying to sacrifice the province’s future in order to protect its past.

It wasn’t that long ago that Alberta’s wind and solar was booming with activity and investment. According to the Canadian Renewable Energy Association, Alberta was home to more than 90 per cent of all new renewable capacity in Canada last year. That activity wasn’t a reflection of subsidies or government support but instead, the high quality of Alberta’s wind and solar assets and an electricity market that encouraged its development. It meant thousands of new jobs and billions of dollars in new investment, most of which was concentrated in more rural and remote parts of the province. And then, without any warning, the government put a stop to all of it.

Its seven-month moratorium expires today, but it will be replaced with a bunch of new regulations — red tape, as conservatives otherwise call them — that tell landowners where and how they can build wind and solar projects. The regulations will create large buffer zones around “pristine viewscapes,” ban wind development on top-tier agricultural land, and require project developers to put down deposits against the cost of reclaiming and remediating their facilities after the end of their useful lifespan.

On their own, these new regulations aren’t automatically onerous, even if they fly directly in the face of the government’s libertarian values. But when you compare them to the regulatory regime in place for other forms of energy development, the weapons-grade hypocrisy here becomes immediately apparent. As the Pembina Institute’s Simon Dyer said, “I imagine Alberta would be the only jurisdiction in the world to consider renewable energy riskier than oil and gas development.”

Alberta’s direct and documented exposure to the risks associated with oil and gas development makes that position even more untenable. There are tens of billions of dollars — possibly hundreds of billions — worth of environmental liabilities associated with its growing collection of oilsands tailings ponds, which the companies responsible for filling them have done almost nothing to address. There are billions more worth of unreclaimed and abandoned conventional oil and gas wells dumped on the public by the oil and gas industry.

It gets worse. Despite record profits in the industry over the last two years, municipalities are owed more than $250 million in unpaid property taxes by oil and gas companies, a bill that actually grew by more than $40 million in 2023. “That’s not a regulator, that’s a cheerleader,” said Paul McLauchlin, the president of the Rural Municipalities of Alberta, in an interview with the Globe and Mail. If you truly are acting on behalf of Albertans as it relates to the oil and gas industry, and you’re allowing this behaviour to exist on the landscape, it’s quite shocking.”

And yet, for some reason, the government is focusing its regulatory attention on wind and solar. The oil and gas industry still doesn’t have to post a deposit when it drills new oil wells, and it doesn’t face any restrictions on its activity based on the type of agricultural land it’s exploiting. Indeed, while wind and solar project proponents have to come to a voluntary agreement with landowners, oil and gas companies can compel them to provide surface access for their operations. Calling this a double standard doesn’t do the differences here justice.

There are no restrictions on oil and gas development in “pristine viewscapes,” of course. As conservation specialist Phillip Meintzer noted, “Suncor plans to mine the McClelland Lake Wetland Complex starting in 2025. It has one of Alberta's largest & most beautiful patterned fens which took 10,000+ years to form. Should McClelland not be protected as a ‘pristine viewscape??” And while it’s not oil and gas, there’s the province’s ongoing flirtation with the Australian coal mining companies that want to carve up the Rocky Mountains, perhaps the most iconic viewscape in the entire country.

As the Pembina Institute’s Jason Wang, Courtney Smith and Scott MacDougall argued in a position paper, “The inconsistency between the treatment of the renewable energy sector and the oil and gas sector is especially concerning given renewable energy lowers costs to consumers, generates stable revenues for landowners and municipalities, creates job opportunities, and is a critical solution for addressing the climate crisis. This contrasts with the oil and gas sector’s troubling legacy of unfunded liabilities, and orphaned and abandoned assets. The Alberta government should make it a priority to improve its rules for the sectors with the largest issues, which need the most substantial reforms.”

Instead, it seems determined to do the opposite. And while that will frustrate urban Albertans who want to see their province start taking climate change seriously, it should infuriate the rural Albertans who overwhelmingly voted this government into office. They’re the ones who will pay the highest price here, both in terms of lost economic opportunities and the impact that will have on their community’s finances. According to new analysis from the Business Renewables Centre Canada, rural municipalities in Alberta would bring in $277 million in annual tax revenue by 2028 if all the projects scheduled before the moratorium proceed. With these new rules, and the market design ones that have yet to be released, it’s a safe bet that some of that money — and maybe most of it — is now gone.

Those investments will get made in different jurisdictions, where the wind blows and the sun shines but the government isn’t determined to hamstring the companies that capture the energy they create. None of the UCP’s new rules for wind and solar will do anything to slow down the global energy transition, much less prevent their economic consequences from being visited upon Alberta. But its double standard on red tape and regulations will serve as a useful reminder to future generations of who was really in charge at the time — and what really mattered to them.