FortisAlberta Inc., headquartered in the City of Calgary, is a regulated utility and wires services provider that owns and operates facilities for the distribution and transmission of electricity throughout the province of Alberta. The company is not an energy producer or retailer, but rather serves to distribute electricity from energy generation facilities and transmission substations to regulated and retail service end users. Currently operating more than 118,000 km of power lines in an area of 225,000 square km — comprising 60 percent of Alberta’s low-voltage distribution system — FortisAlberta distributes electrical power to more than half a million residential, farm, industrial and commercial customers in Alberta.
FortisAlberta’s services as a regulated wire service include emergency repair of power lines and networks to restore outages, the maintenance and expansion of power lines, installing and reading electric meters, and providing energy consumption data to retailers for billing purposes.
In 2012, FortisAlberta transmitted more than 24,000 gigawatt hours of electricity to customers throughout the province.
FortisAlberta History
The physical infrastructure of FortisAlberta is an electrical transmission system in the province of Alberta that was acquired by American company Aquila in 2000 and is operated by their subsidiary, Aquila Alberta. This infrastructure had been previously owned by TransAlta, an electricity generation company.
Due to financial losses incurred in part by an energy crisis in the United States, Aquila sold its assets in Alberta and British Columbia to Fortis Inc. in 2003 for $1.36 billion. These assets were reincorporated by Fortis as FortisAlberta Inc. and FortisBC Inc. in June 2004. The acquisition more than doubled Fortis’s Canadian customer base to over 900,000 customers in five provinces.
In 2011, Fortis began operating FortisBC and Terasen Gas — the largest distributor of natural gas in the province of British Columbia — under the shared name of FortisBC.
