Ottawa just funded 17 clean energy projects across Alberta and Saskatchewan. Most of the Indigenous money pays for the stage before construction. Here is what that stage involves.
On July 4, 2026, on the margins of the Calgary Stampede, Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Tim Hodgson announced more than $26 million in federal funding for 17 projects across Alberta and Saskatchewan. Most of the awards flow through the Smart Renewables and Electrification Pathways Program, better known as SREPs, with the rest spread across three other federal programs. The project list shows what Ottawa will pay for on the prairies right now. The answer is the stage most communities struggle to fund on their own.
The 17 awards span four federal programs. Most flow through SREPs, which covers renewable generation, storage, and capacity building. The rest come through the Energy Innovation Program for emerging technology, the Clean Fuels Fund for fuel production studies, and the Codes Acceleration Fund for building energy codes. Roughly $9 million of the total, nine of the seventeen awards, went to Indigenous-led projects or to programs serving Indigenous communities. The largest of those, taken from the official backgrounder:
Two details deserve attention. First, several awards combine Natural Resources Canada and Indigenous Services Canada money on the same project, a normal stacking the government models here. Second, almost every Indigenous award pays for work before construction: studies, assessments, plans, and training.
SREPs is a $4.5 billion federal program launched in 2021 and currently expected to run to March 2036. It supports renewable energy, energy storage, grid modernization, and transmission and distribution infrastructure. It has become one of the most significant sources of federal capital for Indigenous clean energy. By the program's own February 2026 numbers, half of its 124 approved deployment projects have Indigenous ownership, with over $970 million approved for those projects, plus $139 million across 92 capacity-building awards.
The honest caveat: both of the program's competitive streams, the Indigenous-Led Clean Energy Stream and the Utility Support Stream, are listed as not accepting proposals as of this writing. The awards announced in July came out of earlier intakes. That does not make the program irrelevant. It means the communities that win the next round will be the ones with a project case already built when a window opens. SREPs also coordinates with the Canada Infrastructure Bank, which has committed $10 billion in clean power financing. A project that proves itself at the study stage has a visible path to construction capital.
Look past the program names and the July list is a catalogue of pre-development work. Community energy plans establish what the community wants. Pre-feasibility and feasibility studies test the idea and prove the economics. Interconnection assessments establish whether the grid can take the power and what it costs to connect. Environmental studies, permitting, and geotechnical work clear the ground. Training keeps the jobs local.
Governments fund this stage because it is where good projects die. A 300 MW wind farm or a 112 MW solar plant is financeable once the studies exist. Before they exist, the project is an idea and few communities carry the budget to spend a year of consultant, engineering, and legal time proving one. Pre-development funding moves that cost off the community's own books. It is the same logic behind the readiness streams we cover in our Wah-ila-toos guide, which remains the anchor program for off-grid and diesel-reliant communities.
The stage after pre-development has its own new tools. Once the studies prove the project, ownership capital can come through the loan guarantee layer, which we walked through in our guide to Indigenous loan guarantee programs. The two layers are designed to meet in the middle: grants prove the project and guarantees finance it.
If your community or business has a project idea and no studies yet, the sequence matters more than the program. Start with a community energy plan, because funders like to see a project sitting inside one. Scope a pre-feasibility study next. Then match the full feasibility and interconnection work to the programs open at the time, designing the scope so each study feeds the next instead of repeating it.
If your community holds one of these awards, the money comes with a quieter challenge: spending it well. A pre-development budget disappears fast when the scope is loose or a single vendor defines both the question and the answer. The study should be owned by the community, structured so its results are bankable, and run by advisors with no equipment to sell. If you are choosing that advisor now, our guide on how to choose a feasibility consultant covers the questions worth asking.
Start with one page: the project idea, the land or site if known, and what the community wants from it. From there the path is a short readiness conversation, a funding match against the programs open this cycle, and a scoped pre-development plan. Doing that work now, while the big streams are between intakes, is what separates the communities on the next announcement list from the ones still waiting. Tell us about the project and we will map the path with you.
Related reading: Indigenous loan guarantee programs, explained and the complete guide to funding a First Nations project.
Program names, amounts, cost-share rates, and intake windows change between funding cycles. Confirm current requirements before you build a plan around any figure here, or ask us and we will check.
Tell us where the project stands and we will map the pre-development path, from the first study to construction financing. No obligation, just a conversation.
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