Experts say Canada’s electricity grid needs serious investment and reinvention if it is to expand massively in an attempt to fight climate change and become more resilient to natural disasters.
Post-Tropical Storm Fiona, which left hundreds of thousands of people without power in Atlantic Canada, is just the latest in a long line of natural disasters that have left Canadians without power.
“I learned how to go camping again. You get used to it. You realize there are people out there who have had it a lot worse than us. So we just wait our turn for the power to come back. and get back to some semblance of normalcy ” said Lee Fleury, a PEI resident who was without power for more than a week after Fiona. Many people in Atlantic Canada are still without electricity.
But Canada needs a new normal if it wants to significantly increase energy production and protect against potential disasters, two experts told CBC Radio’s The House in an interview broadcast Saturday.
LISTEN: How Canada can build an electricity grid for the future:
CBC News: The House13:15 How stable is Canada’s electricity grid?
Canada’s electricity grids are facing more extreme weather events and a massive expansion in demand in the coming decades. Energy experts Kristen van de Biezenbos and Bruce Lourie discuss how to make the system bigger and more resilient.
Bruce Lourie, president of the environmental organization Ivey Foundation, said Canada will need to double or triple its electricity capacity by about 2050 to keep up with growing demand, spurred in part by new pressures of electrification for things like electric vehicles.
“Electric cars, electric heat pumps in homes, more electrification in industry. So we have a big, big job,” he told host Catherine Cullen.
Storms highlight network vulnerabilities
Canada has long enjoyed a relatively green electricity system that derives more than 80% of its power from non-emitting sources. But Lourie said Canada still has a challenge to quickly expand the network.
“In part, I think that has made us a little complacent,” he said. “So I don’t know if we’re really ready for this big task ahead of us.”
Part of that task also involves making sure the grid is more resilient against natural disasters of the kind that left hundreds of thousands of people in the dark in Atlantic Canada after Fiona.
“What the storms really do is point out the vulnerabilities in the system. So the vulnerabilities are there. The storms just make it very real and make the impact felt by local people losing their power,” Lourie said.
He said Canada needs to invest in projects that “harden” transmission or create “microgrids” of smaller, self-powered systems.
Kristen van de Biezenbos, an associate professor at the University of Alberta who specializes in energy law, said one effort to increase resilience would be to bury power lines instead of having them strung on poles.
But paying for those changes could be “a bit tricky,” he said, since private provincial utilities (like Maritime Electric in PEI or Nova Scotia Power) may have different incentives than what motivates Crown corporations.
“Building more infrastructure will cost money, and making changes to the system to make it more resilient will also cost money,” he said.
Both experts said that while adding resilient renewable energy capacity has a large upfront cost, it would likely be cheaper over time.
Need for interprovincial collaboration
One factor to consider, van de Biezenbos said, is that the federal government has traditionally played a smaller role in power transmission infrastructure, leaving most of the work to the provinces.
The federal government has set targets to boost electricity production and improve the grid. National Resources Canada has a smart grid program to improve efficiency and reliability, for example, and the government’s emissions reduction plan also includes a section on electricity.
Part of that plan calls for “accelerating the development of transformative, nationally built interprovincial transmission lines” — connecting provinces so electricity can move more easily within Canada.
This has been a dim prospect in the past, van de Biezenbos said.
“There has been no pressure from the federal government to make this happen,” he said. “And the provinces … say they don’t really see the economic benefits and that their own taxpayers are not interested in spending money to connect with other provinces.”
Lourie noted that Canada lags behind peer countries in the kind of regional planning that would connect more areas between jurisdictions. National Resources Canada has established what it calls Regional Energy and Resource Tables, which are intended to promote collaboration between provinces and between Ottawa and the provinces.
In a statement to CBC News, a spokesperson for Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said that in a future green economy, “a clean and affordable electricity grid, one that is resilient to increasingly severe climate hazards, is a plus massively competitive.”
“Minister Wilkinson is focused on working with provinces, territories, Indigenous partners and others to secure this advantage for all regions of Canada,” said Director of Communications Ian Cameron.
The Atlantic Loop would extend the power grid connections between Quebec and New Brunswick, and New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, to provide greater access to renewable electricity, such as Quebec hydropower. (CBC)
The proposed Atlantic Loop, which would connect four provinces, is an example of such collaboration, and premiers have asked the federal government to decide whether to fund the estimated $5 billion project.
“The greater the integration between systems, the greater the areas, the greater the diversity of supply — ultimately, the greater the resilience,” Lourie said.
While regional integration has not been the norm in the past, van de Biezenbos said there are reasons to hope that may be changing now. Where once the feeling was “it wasn’t really going to happen,” he said, there seems to have been a recent boost.
“But it would be a big break from the way things have traditionally been done in Canada, and it’s expensive.”