The future of power: How can Canada build a bigger, better grid?

Experts say Canada’s power grid needs some serious investment — and reinvention — if it is to both expand massively to combat 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 camp again. You kind of get used to it. They understand that there are people out there who were far worse off than us. So we’re just waiting 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 over a week after Fiona’s entourage, many people in Atlantic Canada still have no power.

But Canada needs a new normal if it is to both significantly increase energy production and protect against potential disasters, two experts told CBC radio The house in an interview that will be broadcast on Saturday.

LISTEN: How Canada can build an electricity grid for the future:

Bruce Lourie, president of the environmental organization Ivey Foundation, said Canada will need to double or triple electricity capacity by around 2050 to keep up with growing demand – spurred in part by new pushes towards electrification for things like electric vehicles.

“Electric cars, electric heat pumps in homes, more electrification in industry. So there’s a big, big job ahead of us,” he told host Catherine Cullen.

Storms reveal network weaknesses

Canada has long had a relatively green electrical system, sourcing over 80 percent of its electricity from zero-emission sources. However, according to Lourie, Canada still faces the challenge of rapidly expanding the grid.

“In part I think that made us a little bit complacent,” he said. “As a result, I don’t know if we are really equipped for this great task that lies ahead of us.”

Part of that mission is also making the power grid more resilient to natural disasters of the kind that have left hundreds of thousands of people in post-Fiona Atlantic Canada in the dark.

“What storms really do is point out the weak points of the system. So the vulnerabilities are there. The storms just make it very real and make the impact felt on local people who are losing their power,” Lourie said.

He said Canada needs to invest in projects that “harden” transmission or create “microgrids” from smaller, independently operated systems.

Kristen van de Biezenbos, an associate professor at the University of Alberta specializing in energy law, said a focus for efforts to increase resilience is to bury power lines rather than attach them to poles.

But paying for those changes could be “a bit tricky,” she said, because private utilities in the province (like Maritime Electric in PEI or Nova Scotia Power) may have different incentives than those motivating Crown companies.

“Building more infrastructure will cost money, and making changes to the system to make it more resilient will also cost money,” she said.

Both experts said that while adding renewable, resilient power capacity comes with a high upfront cost, it would likely become cheaper over time.

Need for interprovincial cooperation

One factor to consider, van de Biezenbos said, is that the federal government has traditionally played a minor role in energy transmission infrastructure, leaving most of the work to the provinces.

The federal government has set goals to increase electricity production and improve the grid. National Resources Canada, for example, has a smart grid program to improve efficiency and reliability, and the government’s emissions reduction plan also includes a section on electricity.

Part of that plan calls for “accelerating the development of transformative, nation-building, inter-provincial transmission lines” – connecting provinces so electricity can be more easily transported within Canada.

That was a bleak prospect in the past, said van de Biezenbos.

“There was no pressure from the federal government to make this happen,” she said. “And the provinces … say they don’t really see the economic benefits and their own taxpayers aren’t interested in spending money to connect with other provinces.”

Lourie noted that Canada lags behind comparable countries in terms of the type of regional planning that would connect more areas across jurisdictions. National Resources Canada has created what it calls a Regional Energy and Resource Chart designed to encourage inter-provincial and Ottawa-provincial collaboration.

In a statement to CBC News, a spokesman for Natural Resources Secretary Jonathan Wilkinson said that in a future green economy, “a clean and affordable electricity grid – one that’s resilient to increasingly severe climate threats – is a massive competitive advantage.”

“Minister Wilkinson is focused on working with provinces, territories, Indigenous partners and others to secure this benefit for every region of Canada,” said Communications Director Ian Cameron.

The proposed Atlantic Loop, which would link four provinces, is an example of this type of collaboration, and prime ministers have urged the federal government to decide whether to fund the estimated $5 billion project.

“The greater the cross-system integration, the larger the territories, the greater the variety of offerings — ultimately, the greater the resilience,” Lourie said.

While regional integration has not been the norm in the past, there is hope that this could change now, van de Biezenbos said. Where there used to be a sense of “it wasn’t really going to happen,” she said, there seems to be some momentum lately.

“But it would be a big departure from the way things were traditionally done in Canada – and expensive.”