Boreal Energy Solutions

06/09/2026

Four consecutive emergency grid alerts in January 2024. The first firm load shed in Alberta since 2013. Thirteen alerts last winter. The cause was not renewables. It was gas generators failing in extreme cold.
That pressure is the real reason to understand battery storage, and our new Boreal Dispatch piece breaks it down without the sales gloss. We lay out the three storage tiers and what they actually cost: critical loads backup around $35,000, whole-home solar-plus-storage at $54,000, and full off-grid at $177,000. We show real billing from two of our Solar Club customers. One finished 2025 with a $1,335 credit and paid nothing for power from April on. The other received a direct deposit from his retailer.
And we are honest about the limits. On a flat rate the battery alone only saves a few hundred dollars a year. The financial case is the integrated system, not the battery on its own. That is the part worth understanding before anyone spends a dollar.
Full article in the comments.

05/27/2026

Jordan Forsythe published a new piece on Boreal Dispatch this week.

Peak Shaving Is Like S*x in High School: Lots of People Are Talking About It But Very Few Are Actually Doing It Well.

The article lays out the gap between what commercial solar proposals deliver and what Alberta commercial rate structures actually charge for. Most installers sell against the energy charge, the kilowatt-hours. The larger line on a commercial bill is the demand charge, billed against the single highest fifteen-minute interval each month. Solar on its own does not address that.

The piece walks through what a complete commercial system actually looks like: a correctly sized battery installed at the main service, governed by a forecasting controller that runs load displacement and peak shaving as a combined strategy, designed against the specific equipment driving the customer's peak. The real economic prize, for the right site, is migrating into the small-commercial tier by holding metered peak under 35 kW reliably. That requires hardware most installers do not deploy and controls most installers do not understand.

For any commercial or industrial customer in Alberta currently looking at a solar proposal, this article is the framework for asking the questions that proposal probably does not answer.

Link in the comments.

05/06/2026

Alberta could be leading in solar.
Instead, we’re letting the opportunity slip.

Policy, incentives, and who they’re really designed for. Jordan breaks it down.

Link in bio under Substack

04/29/2026

The people pushing a policy…
and the people benefiting from it…
aren’t always the same.

Jordan breaks it down.

Link in bio under Boreal Dispatch.

04/29/2026

No gas lines. No fuel bills. ☀️⚡
Just a zero-carbon facility powered by solar + geothermal.

Come take a tour and see how it all works in real life. It’s simple, smart, and honestly pretty cool to see up close.

📍 Limited spots. Link in bio to register.

https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/tour-of-zero-carbon-building-that-uses-solar-and-geothermal-tickets-1987559151927?aff=oddtdtcreator

04/10/2026

Jordan Forsythe published Part Two of the Bootleggers and Baptists series today on Boreal Dispatch.

I Install Solar for a Living. I Oppose Solar Farms.

Every claim in this article is sourced to audited financial statements, public regulatory filings, and government data.

Key findings from Vulcan County's 2023 audited financials: Canada's largest solar installation generates approximately $4 million per year in municipal tax on a $700 million asset. It pays zero education tax. It supports up to ten permanent positions. The developer sold 100 percent ownership to a Montreal fund manager two months after commissioning.

For ratepayers: solar has the lowest levelized cost of any new generation in Alberta. Retail electricity prices have not declined as solar capacity has grown. The price benefit of cheap solar generation is absorbed at the institutional contract level before it reaches consumers.

The article also proposes specific policy changes: education tax reform, provincial equity requirements, foreign ownership premiums, and distribution feeder protection for residential and agricultural generators.

Four utility-scale solar farms are proposed for Sturgeon County. AUC applications are expected later this year. The time to read the Vulcan County financial statements is now.

Link in comments.

04/07/2026

Jordan Forsythe published Part One of a new Boreal Dispatch series today.

Bootleggers and Baptists: Nobody in power actually wants carbon pricing to work.

The headline industrial carbon rate is $95 per tonne. The secondary credit market trades at $18. From 2026 onward, companies can satisfy 90 percent of compliance through credit purchases. The money does not go to government. It goes to credit brokers and renewable energy developers.

Boreal Energy Solutions participated in this market. We packaged offset credits from residential solar customers and sold them through carbon brokers into the TIER compliance system. We stopped. Our customers' credits are still sitting with a broker waiting for a price improvement that the oversupplied market shows no sign of delivering.

Part Two publishes in seven days: a concrete Alberta example with audited municipal financial statements.

Part One: Nobody in power actually wants carbon pricing to work In 1983, economist Bruce Yandle published a paper about regulatory politics that has never stopped being relevant. [1] He noticed that Prohibition had two enthusiastic supporter groups with nothing else in common.

03/27/2026

Part Two of the Boreal Dispatch REA series is live. Part One covered the history of how Alberta farmers built their own power grid. This one covers the regulatory mechanism that has been quietly transferring the cost of every subsequent ownership change onto ratepayer bills through something called the Y-factor.

If you have ever looked at the delivery portion of your power bill and wondered why it keeps climbing regardless of what you use, this article is part of the answer. It also covers why community-owned distribution infrastructure matters for solar customers specifically, and what is at stake as the last 32 Rural Electrification Associations face ongoing pressure to sell. Link in comments.

03/24/2026

Boreal Dispatch published Part One of a two-part series on Alberta's Rural Electrification Associations today. This is a story about how Alberta farmers built their own power grid from nothing in the late 1940s because the utilities would not do it and the government would not create a public utility to do it. They organized into co-operatives, built the infrastructure with their own capital and their own labour, and electrified 90 percent of Alberta farms within a decade.

It is also a story about what collective market power actually looks like in practice, and why the men who built this system were not socialists. They were farmers who understood that when concentrated capital holds a monopoly over something you need, organizing is not a political statement. It is the only rational move you have. Part Two will cover what happened to that system after 1996, and the regulatory mechanism that most Albertans have never had explained to them. Link in comments.

Alberta's farmers built their own power grid from nothing. This is what it took, and what it meant when they let it go.