May 31, 2026 – Two-thirds of Albertans say they want more wind and solar developed in or near their communities, concludes a new poll released in late May by the Business Renewables Centre-Canada.

Nearly identical numbers of respondents agreed or strongly agreed on two points: that they wanted to see more wind or solar projects developed “in or near the community where I live,” and that the Alberta government “should be doing more to encourage the development of emission free sources, such as wind and solar, in the province,” BRC-C reports.

Support for renewables projects rises to 75% among 18- to 34-year-olds, the poll found. “Even in rural Alberta, where most renewable projects are actually built, a majority, 59%, say they want to see more wind and solar developed near where they live,” BRC-C writes.

The poll by Winnipeg-based Probe Research talked to a representative sample of 1,484 Alberta adults between April 27 and May 6. It has a margin for error of ±2.5%, 19 times out of 20.

“The story that Albertans don’t want renewable energy, especially in rural communities, just doesn’t hold up against this data,” BRC-C Director Jorden Dye said in a release. “A majority of rural Albertans say they want more wind and solar developed near where they live. These are the communities that would actually host renewable projects, and they’re excited to see more.”

Across Canada, corporate buyers “are actively looking for places to source clean power, and Alberta has enormous potential to meet that demand,” Dye added. “Polling like this matters because it tells developers, investors, and the companies looking to sign long-term renewable energy agreements that the communities they’d be working with are onboard. Public support is one piece of the puzzle. Now we need the policy to match it.”

In a blog post accompanying the release, Dye and BRC-C Senior Communications Lead Jean Todea say majority support in rural communities is particularly important. “Grid-scale wind and solar projects, like the ones Alberta urgently needs, are not built in city centres,” they write. “They’re built in and close to rural and small-town Alberta—where the sun and the wind resources are most plentiful.”

And “contrary to some outdated presumptions about rural attitudes, those communities are, for the most part, open to hosting more! The NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) narrative that often gets attached to rural Alberta simply doesn’t hold up against the data.”

The polling data land almost three years after Alberta introduced a punishing renewable energy moratorium and subsequent series of restrictive regulations that had the province almost completely stalling out on new project development by 2025, even though Alberta led the country in renewables deployment before the moratorium took effect. By August last year, the restrictions had cost the province 10.7 gigawatts of new renewable capacity, equivalent to 109% of its average power demand 89% of its peak demand.

In 2024, BRC-C calculated the lost municipal tax revenue due to solar and wind cancellations at $91 million per year spread across 53 cancelled projects, some of them in cash-starved rural communities where fossil companies have steadfastly refused to pay their taxes.

Alberta Technology & Innovation Minister Nate Glubish tried to challenge the numbers in his private Substack newsletter, contending that “the cancelled projects opponents are mourning were never real investments. They were speculative queue positions. Press releases and pipe dreams, not financed, shovel-ready developments.”

But BRC-C’s parent organization, the Calgary-based Pembina Institute, told a different story in a report that called for Alberta and Canada to unwind the province’s restrictions on renewables as part of negotiations around the federal-provincial memorandum of understanding (MOU) signed last fall by Prime Minister Mark Carney and Premier Danielle Smith.

“As ever when assessing queue data, some level of cancellations is to be expected—not all projects make it all the way from joining the queue to being built, and this naturally happens for a host of reasons in all jurisdictions,” the Pembina report stated. “However, Alberta is unique in that its renewables project development queue continues to empty faster than it is filling, leading to a net reduction in size for the second year in a row. As highlighted in our 2025 analysis, this is not something we are seeing in leading jurisdictions, such as in Texas and South Australia.”