Etzikom, Alberta, population 27, a ghost of a once-thriving farming community, is home to Canada's only windmill museum.

Inside the fence of the museum, which is attached to a former school building, windmills that once dredged up needed water from underground aquifers have been collected from local farms that allowed settlement of the region over the span of a century are displayed. The winds that enabled farming of much of the prairie surrounding Etzikom also played a part in its demise. The region was parched by drought and crops were ravaged by hordes of grasshoppers and rabbits in the 1920s. Winds that created the Dust Bowl of the 1930s in the U.S. and Canadian West prompted small farmers to give up on the area, decimating towns that relied on their trade to survive.

While southeastern Alberta's agricultural economy was revived in the middle part of the 20th century by government-sponsored irrigation, the small farms have been replaced by large-scale operations that can profit from the massive tracts of cheap land. That low-cost land, coupled with depopulation and what is seen as some of the best onshore wind and solar power resources in the world, has attracted a new generation of wind and solar farmers.

Outside the museum's barbed-wire fences, a multibillion-dollar wind turbine and solar panel boom that the former residents of Etzikom could never have imagined is underway, as companies like Amazon.com Inc., Royal Dutch Shell PLC and Suncor Energy Inc. make investments and pair up with developers to harness some of North America's strongest onshore wind and solar resources.

The region's natural advantages, a unique provincial power-sales regime, and Canada's surging carbon levy — which is slated to jump from C$40/tonne in 2021 to C$170/tonne by 2030 — are feeding an appetite for corporate power purchase agreements that is driving new project developments across a handful of counties that cover an area more than one-and-a-half times the size of Massachusetts and have a population density of just over one person per square mile.

"It's really well known that Alberta has phenomenal fossil fuel resources, but what's not as well [known] is we also have phenomenal renewable energy resources," said Dan Balaban, CEO and executive chair of Greengate Power Corp., a Calgary, Alberta-headquartered developer. "We have some of the best onshore wind resources in the world; we have the best solar resources in Canada."

Oil sands to renewables

Alberta is the biggest foreign supplier of oil to the U.S., and the province has battled environmental groups over its exploitation of the tar-like oil sands and calls for expansion of crude pipelines. Alberta officials fought the federal carbon levy all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada and lost — a ruling that in combination with the province's distaste for heavy regulation has created a uniquely appealing regime for renewables developers. The anticipated impact of the carbon tax has spurred the province's oil refiners and petrochemicals companies to seek partners in renewables projects to help generate offsets as well as electricity.

Suncor, Canada's largest oil sands miner, plans to construct its 400-MW Forty Mile Wind Power Project (Granlea and Maleb) on 50,000 acres within an hour's drive of Etzikom. The project, planned in two phases, has an estimated cost of C$721 million. The first phase will consist of 45 4.5-MW turbines.

A few hours north in Starland County, Royal Dutch Shell staked its claim with BluEarth Renewables Inc. when the Netherlands-headquartered oil major signed a long-term agreement to support construction of the 130-MW Hand Hills Wind Power Project. Once a major natural gas producer in many of the counties that are seeing clean-energy development, Shell has liquidated most of its petroleum-producing assets in the country but remains one of Canada's largest refiners and fuel sellers.

Wide-open market

Alberta's wide-open power generation market allows producers to bid power into an hourly auction run by a government agency, sign private power-supply agreements or do both to generate revenue. Transmission resources are abundant and accessible, and the province has a "technology innovation and emissions reduction" trading system, known as TIER. A mandate to shutter coal-fired plants by 2030, which a decade ago provided the bulk of baseload power in the province, has also bolstered the renewables sector, which has seen a sharp decline in production costs that has opened the door to new development, Greengate's Balaban said in a May 31 interview.

"You put all of those ingredients together and it creates massive opportunity for renewable energy growth in the province," Balaban said. The developer has had a hand in some of southeastern Alberta's largest projects, including the genesis of the 299-MW Blackspring Ridge Wind project, one of Canada's largest operating wind facilities, which Greengate sold in 2013 to a consortium led by France's EDF Group.

Blackspring Ridge is located in Vulcan County, an emerging clean energy hotspot. Not far from Blackspring Ridge, Greengate is nearing completion of its approximately C$500 million Travers Solar Project, a 465-MW installation of panels that covers just over five square miles. Those projects are expected to be joined by another one, ABO Wind AG's Buffalo Plains Wind Farm, which is awaiting provincial approval. If it goes ahead, Buffalo Plains would have 83 turbines spread over 17,0000 acres with a structure height of approximately 656 feet and combined output of more than 500 MW.

With more than C$1.5 billion in projects planned or already in the ground that will be capable of generating more than 1,000 MW, Vulcan County is the epicenter of clean-energy development in Alberta. Its namesake county seat, Vulcan, Alberta, has added a community solar farm next to its iconic Starship Enterprise-styled tourism office and is becoming as well known to green project developers as it is to fans of Star Trek, who congregate there each summer for the Spock Days celebration.

Just under half of the approximately 4,000 residents spread over the county's 2,100 square miles live in the town, which once relied on the oil and gas industry to bring in tax revenue and high-paying jobs. Vulcan was hit not only by the downturn in commodities prices but also a shift in activity as production from the region's shallow gas and oil wells dwindled. With each renewables project bringing 300 or more jobs, the county has been working hard to train former oilfield workers to meet the needs of the developers.

The projects are "diversifying our economy and it's exceptionally good for transitioning out of the oil and gas impact on revenues," Vulcan County Economic Development Officer Sherry Poole said. "Definitely it's bringing jobs and it's helping the oil and gas sector to transition from unemployment in that sector into the renewables."

Greengate has a project portfolio of more than 1,000 MW that it plans to advance and bring online in the next several years, Balaban said. Among the bigger prizes is a long-term power purchase agreement announced in April with Amazon, a large corporate user of renewable energy. The contract would see the e-commerce giant take 80 MW of capacity from Greengate's planned 120-MW Lathom Solar Project in rural Newell County, which is just north of Vulcan County.

In addition to cheap electricity for off-takers, Alberta's deregulated market for surplus power sales and its established market for emissions credit valuation and trade have created "a perfect storm for the popularity and investability of both wind and solar," said Evan Wilson, senior director for Western Canada at the Canadian Renewable Energy Association. "It is in a large part driven, especially recently, by the corporate power purchase agreements."

The renewables boom is unlikely to revive the fortunes of Etzikom, although project developers have been generous with community contributions like ABO's commitment to direct C$1.6 million to its neighbors over the course of 25 years. The change will add one more chapter to the region's evolving history.

"As advanced as we are in renewable energy we're still very new — we are late adopters of these technologies," Poole said. "They are born in Europe and heavily adopted in the U.S., and we're transitioning."