While other energy sectors fall prey to recession, wind power continues to attract billions of investment dollars and transform the landscape of southwestern Alberta. Just how big can the industry get?
by Benjamin Freeland
Anyone who has spent any time in Alberta’s southwestern corner can attest to the truly awesome power and persistence of the region’s wind. The wind that blows from the Rocky Mountains through the municipalities of Pincher Creek, Cardston, Crowsnest Pass and Waterton Park east towards Lethbridge and Magrath is serious stuff. For much of the time it is the bane of the region’s residents, kicking up dust storms, spreading debris, knocking down utility poles and flaring local tempers.
The last decade has seen the residents of southern Alberta’s “Wind Belt” grow rather less ill-disposed towards the region’s near-constant wind, however, as it has transformed into a vital economic lifeline in the form of wind energy. With a growing, energy-hungry province at the door and an ever more pressing demand for green energy, the wind industry has turned a once economically depressed corner of the province into an economic powerhouse and has added a much-needed sustainable component to a resource economy long dominated by oil and gas. In the town of Pincher Creek, the central hub of the Wind Belt, wind energy converters (WECs) have become such an iconic presence that the town’s official crest proudly features a wind turbine, and bumper stickers reading “I ♥ Alberta Wind” now outnumber the once-ubiquitous “I ♥ Alberta Beef” stickers.
The mercurial fortunes of southwestern Alberta’s rural economy, characterized by the decline of the fragile cattle industry in the 1990s followed by the sudden emergence of wind, have been felt most closely by the region’s ranching community. Malcolm (Mac) Main, a fourth-generation rancher in the hamlet of Twin Butte near Waterton Park, has seen it all and, like most of his fellow landowners, he is an ardent supporter of the ascendant wind industry. “It’s brought a lot of tax money into the area,” he explains. “Wind is really highly taxed, even more so than oil and gas.” As co-owner of the historic MX Ranch located adjacent from the Shell Waterton Complex, Main is no knee-jerk supporter of big business; in 2000 he became something of a prominent local figure as a result of the suit his family launched against Shell Canada for pollution incurred by the sour gas extraction plant next door to his property. Nevertheless, he insists that the wind industry is an entirely different creature. “They’ve been extremely co-operative,” says Main of the wind industry executives who are now a familiar presence in Pincher Creek and the surrounding towns. “They’re really easy to work with.”
Alberta’s image as an oil and gas province and its unfortunate reputation as an environmental vandal are such that it is easy to overlook the pioneering role the province has taken in promoting wind energy as an alternative to non-renewable, environmentally suspect energy sources. Canada’s modern wind energy industry was indeed born in Alberta, with the opening of the Cowley Ridge Wind Farm, located west of Pincher Creek, in 1993. And while Ontario maintains a substantial lead in total wind power generation, southwestern Alberta easily possesses the densest concentration of wind farms in the country.
Pincher Creek has since emerged as a veritable wind powerhouse, already generating as much as 30% of Canada’s total wind energy by 2005. Adjacent communities such as Magrath, Fort Macleod and the Piikani (Blackfoot) Reserve have been quick to follow suit. Even a Hutterite colony in the area boasts some 60 turbines. The province’s current installed wind energy generation capacity – all concentrated in the southwestern corner – stands at 524 megawatts. But applicants have proposed building as much as 11,721 MW, almost as much power as Alberta produces from all sources right now. The Alberta Electric System Operator (AESO), which is charged with matching supply and demand, has the more realistic target of 2,700 to 3,000 MW – still greater than the entire country’s current installed wind capacity – over the next decade.
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