Never let it be said that the Alberta’s United Conservative Party government isn’t in favour of recycling stuff – at least as long as that can be used to create higher costs and more red tape to help strangle the development of renewable energy.
Yesterday, the UCP opened a new front in its War on Renewable Energy by adding a $14-per-panel “recycling fee” to the cost of solar panels.
Naturally, the government framed the effort as an example of environmental responsibility, claiming piously in a news release that “Alberta’s government will not allow solar panels to pile up in landfills across the province.”
With the new fee set to come into effect quickly, on Oct. 1, the province will also ban solar panels from landfills and “ensure they are directed toward reuse and recycling when they reach the end of their useful lives.”
If we could trust the UCP on environmental initiatives, this might be a convincing pitch, but the record of Premier Danielle Smith and her government on this front is not reassuring.
The Business Renewables Centre-Canada condemned the “punitive tax” as “the latest in a string of arbitrary costs the province has placed on the renewable energy industry without the analysis to back it up.”
“While BRC supports the introduction of a recycling fee, we cannot support a punitive tax far exceeding any other jurisdiction,” said the organization’s director, Jorden Dye, in a news release yesterday.
“While governments worldwide are beginning to establish end-of-life recycling programs for clean energy infrastructure, Alberta’s proposed fee is 139 to 3500 per cent higher than any other jurisdiction in the world,” the release said. Well, of course it is! This is the UCP we’re talking about.
BRC-Canada – which was set up by the Calgary-based Pembina Institute to help businesses access renewable energy to reduce emissions, pretty much making it Public Enemy No. 1 in the eyes of the UCP – called the imposition of the fee part of a familiar pattern. It cited its June 2025 study that found costs higher than in any other jurisdiction we reviewed, “imposed without benchmarking to justify them.”
According to the government, “by 2045, more than 95 per cent of the solar panels currently installed in Alberta are expected to reach the end of their lives, generating as much as 72,700 tonnes of material.”
But according to BRC-Canada, since none of the panels sold now are likely to require recycling for 25 to 35 years, “no near-term waste stream justifies the urgency, and the Alberta Recycling Management Authority has not published a breakdown explaining how the $14 figure was calculated.”
Never mind, the UCP had a colourful canned quote for Environment Minister Grant Hunter: “We will not wait until mountains of dead solar panels are piling up in our landfills before acting. We are putting the system in place now to recover valuable materials, attract private investment and build a new recycling industry here in Alberta.”
An image of a stack of dented solar panels was included to lend verisimilitude to the claim.
“Responsible solar energy growth means considering environmental responsibility throughout its life cycle, said RJ Sigurdson, whose unintentionally ironic title is minister of affordability and utilities, in the same government news release. “We’re protecting taxpayers from future cleanup costs and keeping power affordable and sustainable for generations to come.”
In other words, I guess, the UCP is not only picking winners, it’s trying to ensure an industry that has to potential to cut into oil and gas profits are losers.
Well, this is the Trump path, which Premier Smith makes an obvious effort to follow closely even as she spars with critics of the U.S. president’s anti-Canadian trade policies.
So yesterday’s announcement was obviously on brand considering the same government’s 2023 ban on renewable energy projects and subsequent imposition of expensive and complicated red tape on renewable energy projects that was estimated to have driven as much as $33 billion in renewable projects out of the province – although that figure is naturally disputed by the government.
Just in case you were thinking solar panels might be a good way to insulate yourself and your family from the additional $460 a year in electricity costs you can expect to result from the government’s sweetheart deal with Meta Platforms Inc., they’re going to cost you a little more now.
That Meta deal will let the California-based corporation hook into the provincial power grid for a couple of years to run its planned energy-sucking hyperscale AI data centre northeast of Edmonton before a natural-gas fired power-generation plant is brought on line, if it ever is.
That is widely forecast to drive up electricity costs for almost everyone in Alberta.
As has been observed in this space before, nobody loves red tape as much as Premier Smith and the UCP, especially if it can be weaponized against the government’s enemies, real and imagined, and made to help its friends.