Photo of wind turbines and powerlines

December 4, 2025


For 24 years, Albertans have been living with a failed experiment. Under Premier Ralph Klein, the province embarked on the deregulation of electricity, creating a competitive market for power generation and then completely deregulating pricing in 2001. The results of this experiment have been disastrous, as this month’s Alberta Views shows, with reference to research supported by the Alberta Federation of Labour (AFL).

In November 2024, the AFL report Power in the Public Interest, by economist Edgardo Sepulveda, showed that Albertans had paid $24 billion more for electricity than they would have if they had paid the same prices as their counterparts in the other provinces. The report showed that Alberta’s electricity prices are consistently the highest in the country. This hurts all kinds of consumers: residential, industrial, commercial, and farmers.

Source: Alberta Views

AFL president Gil McGowan said, “The change to deregulated electricity generation was an ideological leap of faith,” and he called for a return to a regulated market, which is now a key pillar of the Worker Agenda. “Returning to a regulated system is a return to the tried, tested, and true. Regulating the profits of generators to avoid price gouging and ensure reliability is literally what we used to do successfully for decades here in Alberta, and it’s what they currently do in almost every other province and state in Canada and the US.”

Edgardo Sepulveda is a regulatory economist with more than 30 years of experience in the telecommunications and electricity sectors. He has advised governments, regulatory agencies, companies, unions, and consumer advocates in more than 40 countries.

This month, Sepulveda published a comprehensive rebuttal to the Alberta Electric System Operator’s recent seven-page report “Let’s Be Reasonable: Alberta Electricity Prices in Context,” which attempts to defend Alberta electricity prices as “reasonable.”

What Sepulveda found is that none of AESO’s arguments really add up.

  • Alberta had the least reliable grid in Canada and the United States from 2021 to 2024. Our province is faring poorly on price AND reliability.
  • When comparing Alberta to other provinces that are non-hydro-dominant — Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick — our prices are still higher.
  • When available data is interpreted correctly, “Alberta’s electricity prices increased by 149% compared to just 61% for Canada as a whole.”

Sepulveda concludes, “Because AESO’s existence is deeply tied to this market model, it cannot acknowledge the real causes behind the province’s high prices and poor reliability. Small incremental changes will not suffice.”

The electricity CPI (Consumer Price Index) shows Canada has seen an annual average increase of 2.5 per cent while Alberta’s rate of increase has been almost double the Canadian average at 4.9 per cent. The reason electricity costs so much in Alberta is that our system is privatized and deregulated. Most other provinces have publicly owned electricity systems.

It’s time to reregulate electricity, exactly as the AFL has recommended.

Read Sepulveda’s analysis for yourself.