BRC-Canada reports renewable energy growth beyond Alberta
Business Renewables Centre Canada (BRC) on Jan. 28 offered its outlook on the 2025-2026 solar market in Canada through an open webinar. While the power purchase agreement (PPA) market in Alberta tanked during 2025, BRC holds out hope for growth in other provinces — particularly Nova Scotia — during 2026.
BRC is a Calgary-based renewables PPA facilitator that claims that more than 90% of the renewable PPAs in Canada to date have been done by a BRC member, either on the buyer or the developer side. The agency operates the Deal Tracker, which was launched in 2019 and lists all new renewable projects in Canada on a quarterly basis, as information becomes publicly available.
Short-term, the bottom line for renewables in Alberta is weak, according to Jorden Dye, the director of BRC-Canada, who moderated the webinar: “It’s very doubtful that renewables [generation] investment will pick back up in the near term.”
“Right now, there is a complex mix of [provincial] policies still taking shape. So once those are settled, we will see the market opening up slowly and absorbing more activity,” says Margret Nellissery, a BRC-Canada senior analyst who also spoke during the webinar.
Top 100 corporate renewables goals
The short-term lag in PPAs is expected to pick up in the years that follow, Dye suggested.
“We looked at the top 100 companies in Canada and their environmental commitments, and asked what would that mean in demand? So [we found] a big demand number with 7.7 GW of new renewable energy demand from just those top 100 companies, going out to 2040,” Dyes says. “That alone would be enough to power just under 2 million homes in Canada.”
This long-term corporate planning for additional renewables will affect most of Canada, BRC discovered.
“The 7.7 GW from the top 100 corporations were spread across mainly across eight provinces, and obviously Ontario came up at the top with a majority of the projects share,” Nellissery says.
Dye adds that Alberta may no longer be the top province renewable energy investment in the years to come.
“In truth, all nine other provinces in Canada [aside from Alberta] have initiated or implemented initiatives in the last couple of years to grow renewables, meaning that Alberta could fall from its five-year reign atop the renewables investment list to the bottom, or near bottom,” Dye says, adding that “if you push that [Top 100 planning] out to the top 500 companies in the Canadian economy, we’re talking about 10s of gigawatts of demand by 2040.”
Apart from the slow corporate PPA market, solar micro-generation has grown markedly, Dye says.
“Congratulations to micro generation in [Alberta] where the total capacity doubled from 2023 to 2025, connected on the grid. We do know from utilities that there’s a lot more down the pipeline, he adds.
Storage optimism emerges
While “policy reforms have resulted in almost total pessimism for wind and solar, it has attracted some small emerging optimism around storage,” Dye says. “[Storage] is poised to expand dramatically in other jurisdictions that have enabled its use in just the next few months and years.”
Dye added that the U.S. market helps predict activity in Canada.
“I think that’s a really important point that in the last five years, we saw the explosion of storage and storage-associated projects for power purchase agreements in the U.S. market,” Dye says. “The U.S. market has always been a good indication of where we are seeing deals go in the Canadian market.”
The overall national impact of renewable PPAs signed since 2019 is significant. “Collectively, these projects have driven around $7.6 billion CAD in investment and supported over 7,000 jobs at peak construction,” BRC calculated.
Benjamin Thibault, a senior strategy advisor at Prairie Sky Strategy, who was another webinar speaker, summarized a dozen or more renewables policy and legislative issues that BRC tracks. Following all these issues is complicated, but “BRC’s annual report — Renewables in Review 2025 — released yesterday, includes a very complete policy timeline for 2025, and is the best way to follow,” he says. BRC also offers a bi-monthly update on policy.
Alberta PPA market flat
“Looking at [Alberta in] 2025, it was not as strong for deals overall,” Nellissery says. “While deal volume increased compared to 2024, Alberta experienced its largest ever dip in off-take volume. Only 6 MW from a solar project was contracted in the entire province.”
Dye underscored the slowdown in Alberta development planning.
“When the corporate procurement market froze up in in late 2023 developers continue to finish building their projects under construction and kept their development pipeline alive,” he says. “But this year tells a bit of a different story, and the headline is that with a frozen commercial off-take market, many developers have given up and walked away.”
Nonetheless, in Alberta alone, the historic development total is substantial. “The PPA back projects that we just saw have produced over 12 TWh of energy annually, and this is enough to power around 1.7 million homes in the province,” BRC counted.
This Alberta market development has also aided local and provincial governments through tax collections. “Focusing on Alberta a little bit, projects enabled by these PPAs alone have generated around $30.8 million in municipal tax revenues across the province,” BRC noted.
Nova Scotia, Saskatchewan renewables rise
“We finally added a new province [to our Deal Tracker], something that we’ve been eagerly waiting for the last couple of years and that is with Nova Scotia. Through the green Choice Program, Nova Scotia Power enabled the off-take of around 262 MW of wind power,” Nellissery says. The Nova Scotia deal that came through the Green Choice Program will produce more than 2 TWh of energy annually, which could power over 200,000 homes in the province, according to BRC.
In addition to the new renewables market warming in Nova Scotia, Saskatchewan also showed growth in development during 2025 and promise for 2026.
“We also saw another deal emerge from another province beginning to slowly open up its market to PPAs, and that’s Saskatchewan. We saw a deal between K+S Potash Canada and George Gordon development, an indigenous owned developer, for a 32 MW solar project,” Nellissery says. This deal, the Wicehtowak Solar Project, is significant being Canada’s largest Indigenous-owned solar project to date.
