Grande Prairie Natural Gas Retailers and Electricity Providers
Like most towns and cities in Alberta, Grand Prairie’s electricity companies and natural gas retailers include:
- AltaGas
- ATCOenergy
- Burst Energy
- Direct Energy
- Encor by EPCOR
- ENMAX Energy
- Hudson Energy
- Just Energy
- TransAlta
- Spot Power
Energy retailers serving Grande Prairie offer a variety of price structures, including fixed rate and floating rate plans. Some providers also offer business plans specially designed to fit the needs of commercial and industrial customers. To learn more about the plans and rates currently available in Grande Prairie, please try our convenient energy rate comparison form above.
Direct Energy Services is the Rate of Last Resort (ROLR) electricity and natural gas provider in Grand Prairie.
The History of Electricity and Natural Gas in Grande Prairie
Grande Prairie is a small city of roughly 55,000 people, making it the seventh most populous city in the province of Alberta.
Like the city of Calgary, Grande Prairie was originally settled by homesteaders. However, its relatively remote location resulted in slow growth until the arrival of railway lines in the mid-1910s. It was one of the few agricultural cities in Alberta that continued to be successful during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, as it was spared the severe drought that plagued much of Alberta and the other provinces. Grand Prairie continues to have a large agricultural economy to the present day.
Grande Prairie’s entrance into oil and natural gas production was relatively late compared to similar cities. Explorative drilling did not begin until after the oil strike at Leduc in 1947, and exploration and production did not begin on a large scale until the 1970s. Grand Prairie proved to have reservoirs of natural gas and oil — the Elmworth Deep Basin, to the west of the town, proved to be the second-largest gas field in North America when it was discovered in the 1970s — and its economy and population both expanded quickly as a consequence. Unfortunately, this period of growth was quickly tempered by the decline in oil prices in the early 1980s.
