Building Strathcona Power — January 2026

I’m on a mission:

I am building a boutique energy retailer to provide a human touch to our electricity and natural gas bills, and to make sure that that money get reinvested back into our community. This matters because many of the established players are huge multinationals, with call centers on one continent and their head office in yet another, both far from Alberta.

But it doesn’t have to be like that: the money from our bills can grow our communities and our energy retailer can be human scale too.

Strathcona Power: Deep roots, New Power.

This is my first update (after I announced the series), and will bring you up to speed. I hope to write one of these about once a month.

Pricing Update

If nothing else, hopefully you’ll find this pricing update useful. This is a general observation of pricing trends for electricity and natural gas in Alberta.

Overall, December was very cold, and although Alberta set a new peak electrical demand (at 12,785 MW), realtime power and gas prices have remained comparatively week. Wholesale prices for power over the last month came in at 4.067 ¢/kWh and wholesale gas came in at $3.18/GJ.

In looking at longer term hedges, prices rise as you go further out, with 2028 (or later) wholesale hedges coming in >11 ¢/kWh. Largely, this is likely driven by the expected data centre boom and related expected capacity squeeze.

Our pricing for January:

Term	Electricity	Natural Gas
Floating1	~5.1 ¢/kWh	~$4.07/GJ
1 year Fixed	7.99 ¢/kWh	$3.49/GJ
2 year Fixed	8.49 ¢/kWh	$3.99/GJ
3 year Fixed	9.29 ¢/kWh	$3.99/GJ
5 year Fixed	9.89 ¢/kWh	$3.99/GJ

Overall, I continue to suggest floating for electricity. For natural gas, the 1 year fixed price looks like the way to go.

The Lay of the Land

I’m aiming to build a new electricity and gas retailer here, but this isn’t my first rodeo. In fact, I’ve built and sold a company like this twice before! But this is the first time I’m doing it solo. Previously, I focused on the business processes and backend management and let my partners guide the marketing and sales efforts; this time, I get to manage it all.

As part of our new Backend agreement (signed earlier this month), I have certain, regular “performance thresholds” I need to hit. This is new, and I expect it will have a focusing function. Overall, I need to find a way to maintain bringing on just over one site per day for the next several years. This will likely be the primary Key Performance Indicator (KPI) I mention in these update. My initial target is to hit 120 sites by the end of June.

One of my biggest challenges with these new Performance Thresholds is that they are more than I expect to hit with just me talking to people myself. I will need to develop a plan for a semi- or fully automated marketing.²

I’m also trying to build a generation wing of the business as well. The theory is that my margin selling power to the grid is about the same as selling it to retail customers, but I can bring on generation more directly and in higher volumes that retail customers.³ This is something I started seriously looking into about five years ago, trying to find the right opportunity. About three months ago, a friend came to me with an option that clicked! I expect this generation will be a significant portion of income once they come online. A KPI I will track here is the amount of generating capacity I have live. My initial target is to get 50kW of generating capacity connected.

Finally, the business being this small is still very much tied to and driving the state of my personal finances. I do need it to make money so I can pay my bills! My final KPI will be Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), with an initial target to match the (approximate) local average family income of $100,000/year. Although taxes will bite into that number, ARR seems the cleanest number to share and reference.

Partly by design, these KPI’s are designed to run together: when I hit either of the first two KPI’s (the final target for site count or target generating capacity), I expect to have surpassed the ARR KPI.

Recent Successes

One of the major successes I saw this last month is that my number of site doubled! I think this was the results of networking, so I’m going to try and replicate that going forward.

Administratively, I signed a new service agreement last week with our Backend. Overall, I’ll take it as a win as the signed agreement keeps us in the game, but it increases our service cost by ~20% (without adding any additional services either) and adds reasonable aggressive Performance Thresholds in terms of the number of sites I need signed up, with regular deadlines. This coming month I’ll need to review our pricing structure in light of this agreement update.

I’ve also finalized our new logo, and have started rolling it out. The old logo was just a word mark, and the new logo adds a coat of arms⁴ to it. This is something I’d envisioned doing when the initial logo was put together, so it’s nice to see it live! The wild rose represent Alberta and the lighting bolt represents the power that the company sells.

Old logo:

New logo:

Finally, I was able to cut a cheque for $1,100 to donate to a community non-profit that has blessed our lives, and also helped grow the business. I hope to make this a regular thing.

Current KPI’s

KPI	Status	Target Date
Site Count	81 / 120	end of June 2026
Generation Online	0 / 50 kW
ARR5	$2.6k / $100k

To hit the initial site count KPI, I only need to add an additional ~7 sites/month. Future targets will be more demanding, but for now, this is my focus.

For generation, I have a deposit down for an initial 10kW of generating capacity, but it isn’t installed yet as we need the ground to thaw first. ARR is particularly low at this point because I’m paying interest on that deposit, but it isn’t generated any income yet.

Plans for the Coming Month

These are a number of things that I plan to do to move the business forward:

• finish rolling out our new logo
• continue working on my personal sales efforts. I don’t expect this alone to be enough to hit my Performance Thresholds long term, but actually talking to people always helps get the messaging right.
• submit my funding application for generation Site 1. I’m currently waiting on an Engineering report, and expect the process to take ~8 weeks once my application is in.
• review my list of additional sites for generation. In particular, I need to prioritize the list, set up energy evaluations (required for the funding applications), and start the connection process.
• look into automation for the business. The first two targets are signing up for (or building) a CRM, and building a quote calculator.
• review the company’s online presence: review the website and establish social media accounts.

How You Can Help

Ultimately, the business isn’t going to be a success by itself, and I’m hoping that you will come along for the ride and help with the company’s rise! There are many way your can help:

• if you live in Alberta, sign up for electricity and natural gas, or send me your bill (to William@StrathconaPower.ca) and I can run a bill comparison. If you have a bunch of sites, reach out and we can talk individualized pricing.
• if you’ve previously signed up with me (with my previous companies: Oasis Power or Burst Energy), please move your account over to Strathcona Power! If you have questions about the process, or want to see if I can match your existing fixed rates, send me an email.
• if you’re a marketing agency (or a salesperson) who believes enough in your results to get paid on commission, I’d love to join forces. Straight commission will allow me to pay you much more than I could otherwise and at this point, almost no option is off the table. Please send me an email.
• if you’d like to run a joint fundraiser for your community group, please reach out. This has the possibility to provide recurring fundraising funds to you after the initial push, and unlike chocolates or bird seed, electricity is something your families are already buying…
• if you’re a (nominal) competitor, I’d still love to sit down and chat. The market is big enough and then some for both of us; please reach out.
• if this post is helpful to you, a note of thanks and encouragement (either by email or the comment form below) is always appreciated!

Talk to you in a month!
— William, El Presidente of Strathcona Power