Alberta Energy Market Report – Week of August 31 – September 6, 2026

Week in one line: Alberta’s wholesale power price averaged $44.83/MWh for August 31 – September 6 against $64.98/MWh the week before — down 31% — with the cost again concentrated in the first two days. The median hour rose 41% to $22.91/MWh. Get Energy’s variable electricity rate stepped up to 6.47¢/kWh as the calculation picked up late August’s expensive hours. Natural gas remains historically cheap.

Reporting week: August 31 – September 6, 2026. Published September 7, 2026. Wholesale data from AESO; gas reference pricing from the Government of Alberta; retail rates from Get Energy’s live rate sheet.

Wholesale power: the week in numbers

Metric	Aug 31 – Sep 6	Aug 24–30	Change
Average pool price	$44.83/MWh	$64.98/MWh	−31%
Median hour	$22.91/MWh	$16.30/MWh	+41%
Highest hour	$874.93/MWh (Sep 1, HE20)	$972.61/MWh (Aug 26, HE19)	—
Lowest hour	$0.00/MWh	$0.00/MWh	—
Hours above $100/MWh	8	14	−6
Hours at or near zero	26	32	−6
Average Alberta internal load	10,124 MW	10,448 MW	−324 MW
Peak load	11,267 MW	11,851 MW	−584 MW

The 30-day rolling average for the period ending September 6 sits at $48.26/MWh, up from $44.24/MWh a week earlier. The rolling average keeps climbing even as the weekly average falls, because the three expensive days of late August are still inside the 30-day window.

What actually happened

Same shape as the week before, smaller in scale. Daily averages: $89.83 Monday, $98.89 Tuesday, then $26.17 Wednesday, $16.52 Thursday, $25.30 Friday, $26.05 Saturday and $31.02 Sunday. Two days carried the week; the following five all averaged under $32/MWh.

The high hour was $874.93/MWh in hour ending 20 on Tuesday September 1 — the evening ramp for the third consecutive week, in the same 19:00–20:00 band. Only eight hours cleared $100/MWh across the seven days, six fewer than the prior week, and they clustered in those first two evenings.

Twenty-six hours settled at or near zero. Those hours track wind output: when the fleet runs hard against mild early-September demand, more energy is offered than the system needs and the price falls to the floor. The difference from last week is that the cheap hours were not as cheap — the median hour was $22.91/MWh versus $16.30 — while the expensive hours were less extreme. A narrower range in both directions.

Demand eased. Average internal load fell 324 MW to 10,124 MW and peak load dropped to 11,267 MW, consistent with the seasonal lull between summer cooling and winter heating. Supply availability, not demand, still set the shape of the week.

Natural gas

The Government of Alberta’s natural gas reference price has run $2.46/GJ in January, $1.95 in February, $1.69 in March, $1.28 in April, $1.16 in May and $1.37 in June — the most recent month published. The series remains well below the $2.71/GJ that closed 2025.

Alberta is at the end of the injection season, with heating load still effectively nil. Cheap gas continues to cap power prices in most hours, because gas-fired units set the marginal price the majority of the time; the hours that price above $100 are the ones where the cheap marginal unit is unavailable. For households, the number that matters is the winter strip, not the September print.

Where retail rates sit

Product	Rate (Sep 7, 2026)	Week over week
Electricity — variable (30-day avg, calculated Aug 31)	6.47¢/kWh	+1.23¢
Electricity — 1-year fixed	6.57¢/kWh	Unchanged
Electricity — 2-year fixed	7.97¢/kWh	Unchanged
Electricity — 3-year fixed	8.87¢/kWh	Unchanged
Natural gas — 30-day discount moving average (calculated Aug 25, includes transaction fee)	$3.90/GJ	+$0.03
Natural gas — 1-year fixed	$3.77/GJ	Unchanged
Rate of Last Resort (default)	12.01–12.06¢/kWh	Fixed to Dec 31, 2026

The variable electricity rate is now calculated as of August 31, so it captures the $164, $122 and $113 daily averages from the last week of August. That is the whole 1.23¢ step up, and it is a clean illustration of how the variable rate works: it follows the pool price with a lag of a few weeks in both directions. With the last week averaging $44.83/MWh, the pressure on the next calculation is downward.

Fixed rates did not move. The variable rate at 6.47¢/kWh is now within 0.10¢ of the one-year fixed rate of 6.57¢/kWh — the narrowest that gap has been in these editions. The default Rate of Last Resort remains roughly double either, and it does not move with the pool price at all.

Regulatory and market news

• $14-per-panel solar recycling fee and landfill ban from October 1. Environment Minister Grant Hunter announced on September 3 that solar panels enter Alberta’s Electronics Recycling Program on October 1, 2026, with a $14 environmental fee per panel and a ban on landfill disposal. The fee applies to new panels purchased from that date and is administered by the Alberta Recycling Management Authority. For a typical residential rooftop system of 20 to 30 panels, that is $280 to $420 added to installed cost. Renewables-sector groups say it compounds recent regulatory changes; existing installations are unaffected.
• Court of Appeal dismisses the PBR 2 Reopener appeal. On September 4 Canadian Utilities confirmed the Alberta Court of Appeal dismissed its Alberta utilities’ appeal of earlier AUC decisions on the Performance-Based Regulation 2 Reopener. The case concerns distribution revenue for prior PBR terms, not energy rates, so there is no direct or immediate effect on what households pay per kilowatt-hour; it settles a long-running question on the distribution side of the bill.
• Restructured Energy Market: AESO InfoHub launches this month. The AESO is launching InfoHub in September as the primary platform for its market data and market-participant services, part of the IT work behind the REM transition. Market-participant systems soft-launch from January 2027. Nothing in the transition changes residential rates today.
• Rate of Last Resort. Unchanged at 12.01 to 12.06¢/kWh and fixed through December 31, 2026. Rates for the January 1, 2027 to December 31, 2028 term are set under the providers’ approved energy price setting plans and must be filed at least 30 days before January 1, 2027. That filing is still the item to watch this fall.

What this means if your contract is up

The gap between variable and one-year fixed has almost closed: 6.47¢/kWh against 6.57¢/kWh, a tenth of a cent. For most of this year variable has sat more than a cent below fixed, and that discount is what compensated for carrying the risk of weeks like late August. At today’s numbers there is very little discount left in the variable position, though the mechanism cuts both ways — last week’s $44.83/MWh average should pull the next variable calculation back down.

So the honest framing is timing, not direction. Variable follows the pool price with a lag; fixed removes the question. Whichever you pick, the default Rate of Last Resort at roughly double both is the one that is hard to justify.

We publish this report every Monday. The reasoning behind the fixed-or-variable decision is set out in fixed vs variable electricity rates in Alberta, and current rates are always on our rates page.

Sources

• AESO market and system reporting — hourly pool price and Alberta internal load, August 24 – September 6, 2026. Retrieved September 7, 2026.
• Government of Alberta — Alberta natural gas reference price — monthly $/GJ series through June 2026. Retrieved September 7, 2026.
• Alberta Recycling Management Authority — solar panel environmental fee — $14 per panel from October 1, 2026. Retrieved September 7, 2026.
• Canadian Utilities — Alberta Court of Appeal decision on the PBR 2 Reopener, September 4, 2026. Retrieved September 7, 2026.
• AESO — Restructured Energy Market IT systems — InfoHub and soft-launch timeline. Retrieved September 7, 2026.
• Utilities Consumer Advocate — default rates — Rate of Last Resort, 12.01–12.06¢/kWh to December 31, 2026. Retrieved September 7, 2026.

Get Energy is a competitive retailer in Alberta, a tradename of Utility Network & Partners Inc.