Alberta power is cheap. The fee inside your quote isn't.

Alberta wholesale power prices have fallen to their lowest level in eight years. The average pool price in 2025 was $43.68/MWh, down 30.4 per cent from $62.78 in 2024. The first quarter of 2026 averaged $32.15/MWh. Measured in today's dollars, Alberta has never had a cheaper February.

Every energy broker in the province has noticed, and the advice is uniform: lock in while it's cheap.

It is not bad advice. But almost all of it comes from people who sell fixed-price contracts, and none of it mentions the part of your price that does not fall when the market does.

Where the price actually went

The collapse was not caused by weaker demand. Demand rose. Alberta set a new winter peak of 12,785 MW in December 2025, and average internal load grew 2.0 per cent over the year. Natural gas, which fuels about three quarters of Alberta's generation, got more expensive rather than cheaper.

What changed was supply. Enough new generation has come online that the province can now meet its demand with room to spare. That is a change in what Alberta is able to produce, not a dip in the cycle that corrects itself.

The clearest sign of how far it has gone is what the prices are doing to the generators themselves. Through the first quarter of 2026, modelling of Alberta plant revenues found no category earning enough to cover its costs: not combined cycle gas, not simple cycle gas, not wind, not solar. Power is currently selling for less than it costs to make.

The part nobody mentions

A fixed price has two pieces. There is the wholesale cost of the energy, which is what the market charges. And there is a fee on top, which is what the person arranging the contract charges. The fee is not shown separately. It is folded into the single number on your quote.

The wholesale piece has fallen hard. The fee has not.

That changes the arithmetic in a way most buyers never see. Here is the same $10/MWh fee, measured against what three years of Alberta power actually cost to buy forward on four different dates:

The fee did not go up. The energy price came down, and the fee became half as much again as a share of what you pay.

In a $91 market, an unexamined fee is an annoyance. In a $61 market it is a materially larger slice of the bill, and in a $53 market it was nearly a fifth of the energy line. The cheaper power gets, the more the fee matters, and the less likely anyone is to mention it.

This is not an argument against fixing your price

It is worth being clear about this, because the opposite case gets made loudly and it has merit. Prices below the cost of production are not a stable place for a market to sit. Generators that lose money shut in, defer projects, or sell their output elsewhere. Alberta also has real transmission congestion, which means cheap power in one part of the province does not necessarily reach another. A fixed price buys certainty, and certainty has value in a market that has historically delivered both $20 and $900 inside the same year.

Fixing your price can be exactly the right decision. Our own analysis of contracts signed at the top of the 2022 market shows several that are now ahead on their remaining term, because replacing them today would cost more than keeping them.

The argument is narrower than that, and simpler. Decide whether to fix. Then find out what you are being charged to do it. Those are two separate questions, and only the first one usually gets asked.

How to check

You do not need to take anyone's word for it, including ours. The number is already sitting in the contract or quote in front of you. It takes about three minutes to pull it out.

We built a tool that does it. You enter the price, the dates and your annual volume. It compares your price against the Alberta wholesale market for your exact contract term, on the exact day you signed or were quoted, and shows you the fee that was built in and what it costs per year on your own usage.

We are an independent advisory service. We do not sell electricity or natural gas, and we are not owned by anyone who does, which is the only reason we are in a position to publish a tool that measures what other people charge.

Sources

Pool price figures are from the AESO 2025 Annual Market Statistics and from quarterly Alberta market reporting. Forward prices are from our own Alberta wholesale forward curve records, which we maintain weekly. The $10/MWh fee used above is an illustrative figure for comparison, not a quoted rate.