How it started
History
ATCO was founded in 1947, by S. Don Southern who gave a minority stake to his son Ron Southern, under the name Alberta Trailer Hire, renting fifteen utility trailers in the Calgary area. As the company's operations grew, they also began to sell trailers, first becoming the Alberta Trailer Company, then ATCO. By the early 1960s, the company had operations across North America and in Australia.
ATCO Industries Ltd. became a public company in March 1968, with shares traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange. During the 1970s, the company expanded into the natural gas and petroleum industries, and into the electricity industry in the 1980s.
In 2004, with the deregulation of the retail energy industry in Alberta, ATCO sold the retail operations of ATCO Gas and ATCO Electric to Direct Energy Marketing Ltd. (DEML) while ATCO Gas and ATCO Electric still operated as "distributors" (owning and operating the infrastructure that delivers natural gas or electricity in its service territories). As part of the sale to DEML, DEML contracted call center and billing services from ATCO I-Tek. In 2016, ATCO re-entered the retail energy industry in Alberta as ATCO Energy and in 2025 added home services as a service offering.
In 2018, ATCO acquired 40% of the shares in Neltume Ports, a South American port terminal operator.
In 2022, ATCO agreed to pay a fine after overcharging for work on a new transmission line.
From Wikipedia’s article on Canadian Utilities, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2