Electricity Facts

Alberta has over 12,700 megawatts (MW) of electricity generation capacity as well as 21,000 kilometres of transmission lines. Together, this system continuously delivers electricity to homes, farms and businesses in every corner of the province.

Almost half of Alberta’s electricity generation capacity is from coal and almost 40 percent from natural gas. Alberta also uses water, wind, biomass and waste heat as forms of electricity generation.

Over 5,300 MW of new generation facilities have been built in Alberta since 1998.

Alberta currently has 591 MW of wind-powered generation, with enough capacity, when wind is blowing, to serve over 550,000 homes.

Livestock manure is currently being used for biomass power generation at one facility in Alberta.

Alberta’s micro-generation policy makes it easier for individual Albertans to generate their own environmentally-friendly electricity and allows them to sell what they don’t use back to the grid. This gives Albertans more options when it comes to managing their electricity needs.

Since 2005, the Alberta government has had contracts to purchase over 90 percent of its own electricity requirements from green power.

The Alberta legislature building has a solar power system that can provide enough power to light 70 compact fluorescent light bulbs for approximately 5 hours/day, or almost half the power used by an average household in a year.

One compact fluorescent bulb will last as long as 13 incandescent light bulbs.

If you had a light bulb on the moon, connected to a switch in your home, it would take only 1.3 seconds for that bulb to light up over 380,000 kilometres away.

Much of the electrical terminology used today comes from the names of the scientists who made electric breakthroughs, such as: James Watt, Alessandro Volta, Andre Marie Ampere, and James Joule.