Alberta has set a goal to restore the Montana-Alberta intertie to full capacity, whenever reasonable, potentially providing some relief to a trade irritant cited by U.S. President Donald Trump’s top trade representative last year.

It’s a “really positive step in the right direction,” in the view of Daniel Zolnikov, a Republican state senator from Billings who chairs a Montana legislative committee studying technology and energy. 

“It could remove a lot of physical barriers, preventing Montana generators from accessing the Alberta electricity market. So that’s a huge thing,” Zolnikov told CBC News.

Alberta and Montana lawmakers have been at loggerheads over electricity policy for months. 

In the view of Montana legislators, Alberta’s electricity rules sometimes blocked Montana electricity from being sold into Alberta, which hurt state power producers. 

In December, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told Congress that Alberta must revisit its “unfair treatment of electrical power distribution providers in Montana” in advance of a mandatory review of the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA). 

Alberta, for its part, rejected claims that it was treating Montana unfairly.

Alberta Utilities Minister Nathan Neudorf noted the province’s open market means private companies work and invest within the electricity sector, a different arrangement compared to British Columbia and Saskatchewan, which have publicly-owned utilities. 

He added that in 2024, Alberta became a net exporter of electricity, instead of a net importer. The province has also added thousands of megawatts of renewable power in just a few years and fully phased out coal power.

“I’ve been across the line into Montana on quite a number of occasions over the past year to, again, predominantly just discuss with them the realities of our difference in our market structure,” Neudorf told CBC News. “This isn’t some sort of trade-related issue. It is not at all.”

The new regulation directs Alberta’s independent system operator to make “all reasonable efforts” to support import flows at or near 300 megawatts on the Alberta-Montana tie line as soon as possible.

That flow must be maintained at all times, unless the transmission system is experiencing “abnormal operating conditions.”

The independent system operator must also publish milestone reports on the progress of restoring the line’s available transfer capability. 

Those reports must be made public quarterly throughout 2026, and annually starting in 2027, continuing every year until the restoration is completely finished.

Zolnikov, the U.S. state senator from Montana, said while he couldn’t speak for the Office of the United States Trade Representative, he’d say they “should be pretty happy with the progress of where this is going.”

“This is really good progress. I’m happy, and hopefully they are too,” he said. 

Work still to come

Jason Wang, program manager for the Business Renewables Centre-Canada, said the development was notable and started to address ongoing issues tied to Alberta’s “insufficient modernization and upkeep of the transmission system.”

“Overall, it gives me hope that this government is realizing there are many areas of transmission modernization that need to happen, and it’s starting to look at those seriously,” Wang said.

The Alberta Electricity System Operator is currently undertaking a procurement of new services, including fast frequency response, which helps maintain stability when power supply fluctuates. There have also been changes put in place that are more favourable to energy storage, Wang said.

“Those are great first steps, but the journey is quite long and even in just matching what other provinces like Ontario and even Montana, actually, in modernizing our transmission systems to use the latest technologies,” he said.

Neudorf said he’s been focused on making sure that the independent system operator can do all it can to fully restore intertie capacity since he was first sworn in.

“A lot of work has gone into this. We’ve taken many steps. We made a lot of accommodation and changes within our market structure, to make sure we’re addressing these issues that have been raised in a fair and transparent way,” he said.

CBC News has requested comment from the Office of the United States Trade Representative.