Albertans already overpaid $24 billion for power. Now the government is adding more strain to a grid that’s already failing them.

EDMONTON — Just weeks after a new study from the C.D. Howe Institute confirmed what the Alberta Federation of Labour (AFL) has been saying for years – that Alberta’s deregulated power market gives working people the highest electricity prices in the country – the Smith government has signed off on a deal that will make the problem worse.

Without any public consultation, the government has agreed to let Meta, a foreign tech giant, to draw power equivalent to the entire city of Edmonton’s usage for at least two years, before the company’s own power plant is even built.

The AFL’s October 2024 report, Power in the Public Interest, found that Albertans paid roughly $24 billion more for electricity between 2001 and 2024 than they would have at the rest-of-Canada price – because of our province’s 25-year-long failed experiment with deregulated and privatized power generation. The C.D. Howe Institute’s June 2026 Commentary, Powering Ahead, reached the same conclusion through its own independent research: Alberta had the highest electricity costs in the country in 2023, caused by the same “market concentration” (i.e., monopoly control) that the AFL flagged a year and a half earlier.

Now, that same broken market will have a giant new customer worth a whole city’s worth of demand.

“Without any public consultation, the Smith government signed a deal that lets Meta, a foreign corporation, draw as much power as the entire city of Edmonton – for at least two years – before Meta’s own power plant is even running,” said Gil McGowan, President of the Alberta Federation of Labour. “As we showed in Power in the Public Interest, twenty years of deregulated, privatized power has already given Albertans the highest prices and the least reliable grid in the country. This deal makes a bad situation worse.”

“When the blackouts hit and the power bills spike, Albertans should remember who signed this deal without asking them first,” McGowan added.

Meta’s $13-billion, one-gigawatt data centre in Sturgeon County is expected to draw power from the existing grid while its own natural-gas plant, the Greenlight Electricity Centre, is built. That project is not expected to come online until the second half of 2030. In the meantime, Alberta’s grid operator has proposed freeing up 1.6 gigawatts of temporary grid access for large corporate users like Meta to bridge the gap.

That’s a lot of new demand landing on a grid that working Albertans already can’t count on.

“Albertans have already overpaid $24 billion because of deregulation and privatization of our power market. Now the government is adding a foreign tech giant to the front of the line, with no public say and no plan to deal with the inevitable fallout,” said McGowan. “The solution is clear: re-regulate generation and put the public back in charge of Alberta’s power.”

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MEDIA CONTACT:
Sloan Thurston
Director of Field Operations and Communications, AFL
communications@afl.org

Sources:
C.D. Howe Institute, “Powering Ahead: Comparing Electricity Prices Across Canada,” Commentary No. 719, June 2026
Alberta Federation of Labour, “Power in the Public Interest,” October 2024