Building Strathcona Power — August 2026

To recap, I’m building up a boutique energy retailer (Strathcona Power), to be your local, human option for power and natural gas.

This is a follow-up to July’s status update.

Pricing Update

This section is general notes on electricity and natural gas pricing in Alberta, looking back at July and forward to August.

The floating price for electricity is bouncing off of the lowest price in a decade. So it’s up from last month, but still incredibly affordable at ~4.1 ¢/kWh. Floating natural gas is low as well, and slightly lower than last month, and ~$1.50/GJ below fixed prices. In short, I remain a fan of both and hope you are signed up on floating rates.

Fixed prices are relatively low, but seem to have started to raise, especially seen in the 5 year electricity rate. That said, although the 5 year rate is up more than 1 ¢/kWh over the last 3 months, it’s only back to where it was at the beginning of the year. I suspect (longer term) prices will keep raising, so if you want to lock in, now would probably be a good time. Natural gas, by contrast, has been effectively flat since the start of the year, and is still ~$1/GJ below it’s peak last May.

Our pricing for August:

Term	Electricity	Trend	Natural Gas	Trend
Floating1	~4.1 ¢/kWh		~$2.46/GJ
1 year Fixed	6.99 ¢/kWh		$3.79/GJ
2 year Fixed	7.49 ¢/kWh		$3.89/GJ
3 year Fixed	8.59 ¢/kWh		$3.89/GJ
5 year Fixed	9.89 ¢/kWh		$3.99/GJ

Retailing Progress

The retailing business continues to grow, up 10 sites to a total of 138. I scaled back my previous online marketing campaign, as it wasn’t turning into sales, and launched a replacement. This second one is more aggressive (in that I’m spending more on it). It’s only been live for a couple of days, but I have high hopes of it bringing in sales in volume. I suspect much of my coming time will be spend on the phone following up with incoming leads. This is perhaps the only downside of this replacement campaign: it’s going to require a lot more hands-on action to maintain from my side.

Generation Progress

A secondary line of the business I’ve been focused on is building my own generation capacity, to compliment the retail sales.

For my first 10 kW of generation, my loan has fallen apart, and in one of the most frustrating ways possible. In short, it was a municipal loan program that defined a number of pre-approved projects, but I was working under their “other projects” category. To qualify, I needed to establish that the generators were “renewable energy”; after much back and forth over definitions, they agreed to use the same definition that the Alberta electrical grid does; the provided the following email instructions:

Hi Will,

Thanks for taking my call this morning. […]

For the unit to be eligible for [the loan program], using the renewable energy pathway, the unit needs to meet the definition of ‘renewable energy’ from the micro-generation regulation. I re-reviewed the definition of renewable energy in the micro-generation regulation, which states the following:

“renewable or alternative energy” means electric energy generated from

(i) products having current EcoLogo certification, or
(ii) solar, wind, hydro, fuel cell, geothermal, biomass or other generation sources, if the greenhouse gas intensity of

    (A) the electric energy produced, or
    (B) the total energy produced from the simultaneous generation of electric energy and production of thermal energy from the same fuel source

is less than or equal to 418 kg per MWh;

[…]

Let me know if you would like to set up a call to discuss further, or if you would like me to speak with the engineer who provided the letter to confirm the requirements.

Thanks,

[signed, the Program Director]

In my opinion, the generators are operating within the electricity market, and so this seems like the appropriate “industry standard” definition. I also like this definition because it allows you to consider technologies or techniques (or a combination thereof) that might not have existing when the legislation was written that still meet its goals.

As requested, I paid an engineer to write a letter confirmed that generator met the requirements as outline, and submitted it, and thought I was finally figured out and I just had to wait for their process to complete: they had given me a criteria, in writing, I had shown how I met it.

And I was met with under disappointment. About three weeks later, I received this follow up email:

Hello William,

Thank you for your patience as we reviewed this matter with the City […].

In consultation with the City, we have confirmed that the proposed CHP upgrade does not meet the definition of renewable energy.

I understand that in previous conversations, we had spoken about the definition of ‘renewable energy’ as outlined in the Micro-generation Regulation. As [the loan program] is not governed by this regulation, however, and ‘renewable energy’ is not defined in […] the pieces of legislation that govern [the loan program], the program is using the industry standard definition of renewable energy to determine eligibility; i.e., energy generated from natural resources that naturally replenish faster than they are consumed (e.g., sunlight, wind, water, geothermal heat).

As the CHP unit you have applied to finance doesn’t increase energy efficiency on the property [ed. note: the other possible qualifying criteria] and does not meet the definition of renewable energy, unfortunately, it is not eligible to be financed through the program.

If there is another upgrade that you would like to finance through the program, to meet the Edmonton requirement of three upgrades, please let us know.

Sincerely,

[signed, the Program Director]

My issue here is not that they have a definition (although this is only the second time they’ve been able to provide a definition at all), and thus some projects fall within their mandate and other don’t. No, my issue is that they seem to be redefining the terms of the loan on the fly to disallow my project. In an earlier phone call, I had pointed out the generator technology (combined heat and power) had been explicitly listed on their website on a page entitled “Renewable Energy, Solar PV & Thermal” with the declaration “You can upgrade”, they brushed it off as a “mere” “marketing mistake”. The difference, however, is that the website is not only a “marketing” website, but also the (legal) list of eligible upgrades.

When I called them out, both the website reference and the changing definitions in a response email, pointing out that “I expected you to be good for your word; your conduct here has proven disingenuous.”, they resorted to claiming I had hacked their website with AI²:

Re: the information on the website, what you reference is not from the current [loan program] website. After you referenced this same statement in conversations with a colleague, we had our communications team investigate and it appears that this statement was from a draft page on the website that was never published. I assume you may have used AI to find the information, and it somehow accessed the unpublished page; this has now been deleted entirely to avoid any future confusion. Publicly available program information has not ever mentioned that combined heat and power upgrades were eligible.

There seems to be a pattern here that they will change the definitions on the fly (sometimes inside a phone call, sometimes within an email chain) to get the result they want, without accepting any responsibility of either their words or the results of their actions.

I’m not sure what they want me to do here — just fade away, and pretend their program was all a bad dream? But I’m out thousands of dollars in professional services that were only done to meet the requirements of this loan program (including the engineering letter they explicitly requested to show that I qualified), I’m out thousands of dollars in interest on the generator while I’ve delayed installation (again to meet the program requirements), and further I’ve lost out on ~6 months of operating income from the unit. And that is to say nothing of the hundreds of hours I’ve put into this.

I put this story here not because I expect any of you (my readers) have a “big stick” that would get my loan application through (although that is a nice enough dream), but to give an example of the vagaries one deals with as a business owner. The program was clear enough, and anything not clear I talked to them early about to (try and) clarify, and now, after tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours over 10 months, the project just falls apart. And this isn’t the first time that a government program or announcement has completely turned my business upside down. The deepest cut isn’t the money, although that stings, but the “opportunity cost”: What could I have built instead over the last year? If they had no intention of funding this, I wish they would have told me the first time when I called in October.

Update, immediately prior to publication: the Program Director’s boss called this afternoon to say they are still reviewing the situation, and hope to get back to me in a week to ten days. Perhaps the loan’s not dead after all. I take it as a positive sign that they called me (rather than me having to call them), and am very cautiously optimistic….

I have the (physical) install scheduled for the 24th of this month, although it may take several visits to get it live and running; I’m expecting it to take another two or three months to see money start hitting my account.

For the second tranche (of ~70 kW of generation), they aren’t going ahead without the loan program, at least in their initially proposed form. I’m also (frustratingly) waiting on the interconnect agreements for these.

The third tranche of larger sites (hosting 35 to 150 kW of generation per site) is showing slow progress. I have a confirmed site for a 35kW generator, and am still working on the (property) loan for it; I’m told that our financial position is strong but that building’s “mixed use” status (having both retail space and apartments) is providing complications in getting the loan approved at the bank. I expect we’ll know by the end of the month, one way or another, if there is funding for the property. The connection agreement here is taking longer to come together as well, so I suspect we will have to buy the property first, and then place the generator a little later. I’m still optimistic, as all the pieces are still moving forward.

Current KPI’s

KPI	Status	Trend	Target Date
Site Count	138 / 420	10 / 47	end of January 2027
Generation Online	0 / 50 kW
ARR3	~$6.9k / $100k

Site count growth is holding steady, although the next 6 or so months are going to be demanding. I’ve made my first site count target (of 120 sites by the end of July), so my focus has shifted is on the next target (of 420 sites by the end of next January). This demands ~5x as many site on-boarded each month compared to the historical baseline.

ARR remains low (though the gross is growing) because on the generation side I’m paying interest on upfront installation costs, but it isn’t generated any income yet. I’ve also started to see some advertising costs, further bringing the net income down. Finally, I’ve excluded some one-off items that happened this month.

Review of Last Month’s Plans

• resolve first tranche generation loan paperwork issue — functionally decided, but not the way I wanted it to go
• launch my second marketing campaign — launched; no sales yet
• secure financing for my first third tranche site — still in-progress

Plans for the Coming Month

• get my first tranche generator (physically) installed
• get some traction from my marketing campaign
• continue with securing financing for my first third tranche site, ideally for both the site itself and the generator.

How You Can Help

I’m grateful for your help in growing the Strathcona Power. If you live in Alberta, please sign up for electricity and natural gas, or send me your bill (to William@StrathconaPower.ca) and I can run a bill comparison. But to spoil the surprise, you want to be on our floating rates! If you’ve already signed up, tell a friend!

Till next month,
— William, El Presidente of Strathcona Power