Ghost Hydroelectric Dam

Clovis phase spear points used in present-day Alberta.

Clovis phase spear points represent the oldest hunting technology in Alberta, and indeed all of North America. These fluted, jagged stone points would be attached to a bone or wooden shaft and used to hunt enormous prey such as mammoths and mastodons.
Source: Historical Resources Management Branch, Archaeological Survey

Bow and arrow technology reaches present-day Alberta.

Bow and arrow technology in North America appears to have developed first in the Arctic before spreading south throughout the continent. The bow and arrow was ideally suited for use in the wide open spaces of the Great Plains, and was widely adopted across the region.
Source: Courtesy of Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump

The ‘Horse Revolution’ begins in present-day Alberta.

Horses were brought to North America by Spanish colonists in the sixteenth century. From the Spanish colony of New Mexico, horses spread across North America, reaching present-day Alberta in the 1730s. The adoption of the horse had a significant impact on the hunting/transportation patterns of Plains First Nations peoples.
Source: Royal Alberta Museum

Rocky Mountains National Park is established by the Canadian government.

One of the main attractions of the new park was the site’s natural hot springs. The luxurious Banff Springs Hotel, built by the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1888, pumped water from the hot springs into its swimming pools and treatment rooms. Tourists flocked to the site to take advantage of the water’s supposed therapeutic healing powers.
Source: Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, v263-na-3562

The Calgary Power Company is formed.

The founder of the company, Max Aitken, was initially drawn to the region by its vast hydroelectricity potential. The company would develop into Canada’s largest investor-owned utility. In 1981, the company changed its name to TransAlta Utilities Corporation, in order to better reflect its provincial reach.
Source: Photo courtesy of TransAlta

Voters of Alberta narrowly reject proposal for public ownership of electricity utilities.

The 1948 provincial election included a plebiscite concerning ownership of electricity utilities in Alberta. Rural areas largely voted in favour of public ownership, while urban voters (particularly in southern Alberta) supported a continuation of private ownership. In the end, the vote was extremely close, with public ownership defeated by a mere 151 votes.
Source: Image courtesy of Peel’ Prairie Provinces, a digital initiative of the University of Alberta Libraries

After a short economic downturn following the First World War, Alberta’s economy returned to the booming prosperity that had characterized the pre-war years. By 1925, electricity consumption was surging, with Calgary’s requirements almost doubling in only a few years. New sources of energy had to be found, and the answer was in hydroelectricity. At that time, hydro was still considerably cheaper than coal-power generation and would remain so for another quarter century.

Calgary Power was the province’s main energy supplier, already operating the Horseshoe and Kananaskis Falls plants west of Calgary along the Bow River. Further expansion within Banff National Park was complicated by issues of jurisdiction, so the company turned to the confluence of the Bow and Ghost Rivers as the location for its next project. After finalizing a lease on the territory in 1929, Calgary Power began construction of the Ghost Dam and Reservoir. The project was significantly larger than both Horseshoe and Kananaskis, and when it was brought online, the Ghost facility had an output of 28 MW, nearly doubling the

company’s total capacity and providing a significant boost to provincial power generation. Once completed, high voltage transmission lines were stretched out to Edmonton, and for years this line was the backbone of Alberta’s electrical system.

The timing of this project was nearly disastrous. While demand and prices had been high in the booming 1920s, Ghost Dam came online just as the Great Depression was wreaking havoc with the provincial and global economies. The depression slowed economic activity in every sector of Alberta’s economy, and soon power demand leveled off and began to drop. It was expected that the heavy borrowing needed to build the dam would be paid off with high usage and prices, but the economic slowdown had created a risky debt load with rapidly falling demand for power. Ultimately, it would take the company years to pay off the expenses it had incurred and to find new markets for all the excess power it now had. Today, the Ghost Hydroelectric Dam has nearly doubled its generating capacity to 51 MW.