Canada’s deepening trade war with the U.S. has energized thinking about a national electricity supergrid to bolster energy security with a clean power alternative to new oil and gas pipelines that would be much faster to build at a time when climate action is faltering.
Governments and industry have debated the economic and environmental virtues – and technological viability – of a trans-Canada electricity grid for decades. But the idea stalled because exporting energy to power-hungry U.S. customers has historically been more lucrative than selling to domestic markets, with US$3.2 billion worth of electricity flowing south in 2023.
Now, as U.S. President Donald Trump repeatedly threatens to annex Canada, there are growing calls to accelerate planning for a nationwide grid that capitalizes on the country’s clean energy and hydropower resources.
“The idea of a Canadian east-west grid has been out there for a long time, but I think now is definitely a good time to think about it afresh for the energy transition,” said Roger Rosenqvist, a senior executive at Hitachi Energy, the world’s largest power technology company, which has been involved in major grid projects around the globe.
Building a national electricity grid would reinforce Canada’s energy independence and economy by freeing the country from its decades-long over-reliance on U.S. power markets. It would also underpin climate action strategies to build scores of renewable-energy projects to meet an expected surge in demand for cleaner energy in each province and territory.
“It would provide energy security, pull the provinces together literally and politically, and create an optimized future-proofed power transmission system from coast to coast,” said Rosenqvist.
Today, most Canadian homes, industry and businesses get their power from 13 separate provincial and territorial electricity networks.
But these grids — designed to supply local markets rather than operate in a nationwide energy system — could be wired together with a coast-to-coast high voltage direct current (HVDC) line in under five years.
That’s less than half the time it would take to build a similar oil and gas transport infrastructure. Plus, it could be done at a price far below the recently completed $34 billion Trans Mountain oil pipeline expansion.
A Canada-wide power "backbone", according to a study by the David Suzuki Foundation, could be laid for roughly the same price as the canceled $24 billion Energy East bitumen pipeline – a project some analysts have estimated could have doubled in cost during construction due to inflation and higher interest rates on operating capital.
'It would provide energy security, pull the provinces together literally and politically, and create an optimized future-proofed power transmission system from coast to coast.' Hitachi Energy's Roger Rosenqvist
Building a national HVDC line at a price under $30 billion would “certainly be feasible,” said Rosenqvist, Hitachi’s vice president of HVDC business development.
HVDC is not a new technology: numerous lines have been built in China over the past 30 years and more recently in Europe and the Americas.
Its main advantage is a 40 per cent lower power loss over long distances compared to high-voltage alternating current, dramatically improving the economics of a trans-Canada line that needs 140-190 gigawatts of additional clean electricity capacity to meet projected demand by 2050.
“If you want to connect Canada west to east economically, the only feasible option is HVDC,” he said.
Five years a “reasonable timeframe”
Big HVDC projects are built around industrial towers and cables that are mature technologies, said Mikael Dahlgren, a senior project lead engineer at Hitachi Energy, which is delivering converter stations for the giant US$6 billion Champlain Hudson Power Express HVDC line being built to link Quebec and New York state.
“It doesn't take that long to build long-distance transmission lines — and, of course, each province could build its part of the line in parallel with its own crew to speed it up. In this case, five years seems a reasonable timeframe," he said.
Even if more than one national line was needed to cope with future power demand, the extra cost “should not be a deterrent,” he added, noting HVDC transmission links built between Scandinavia, the U.K. and Europe have recouped their capital investment within two to three years.
The investment payback could be high. Various studies show that under $2 billion in federal investment for interprovincial grids could immediately trigger triple that amount in private financing for nationwide transmission, plus 50 times more in capital spending on building renewable power plants over the next decade.
The Liberal government's Clean Electricity Strategy — published last December before U.S. tariffs were imposed on Canada — said a “thriving, low-carbon economy” depended on “building tomorrow’s grids at the pace and scale needed to drive clean growth, strengthen our competitiveness, and attract more major investments.”
Launching the federal election on Sunday, Prime Minister Mark Carney said his party would “unlock major infrastructure projects and get them moving rapidly”. The project list included clean power trunk lines, but Carney also left the door open to “conventional energy” pipelines too.
The Conservatives have not formally espoused a plan for a countrywide energy corridor since 2019, when Andrew Scheer was leading the party. A request by Canada’s National Observer for an update on its current strategy was not answered.
Canada’s Green Party argues a national clean power corridor would fix two decades of bad Liberal and Conservative policies “that have led to our provincial grids being much better connected to the U.S. than to each other.”
“This crisis we are currently facing is in many ways the result of a failure of imagination and planning by successive governments to build an energy grid of the future,” said Green Party deputy leader Jonathan Pedneault.
'This crisis we are currently facing is in many ways the result of a failure of imagination and planning by successive governments to build an energy grid of the future.' Green Party deputy leader Jonathan Pedneault
“We have instead been locked into a dependency on U.S. markets and in turn into situations like nationalizing the Trans Mountain pipeline — which was supposed to be a few billion dollars and came into operation having cost almost $35 billion.”
Federal minister of natural resources Jonathan Wilkinson’s recent call for a discussion on how to make Canada more resilient to U.S. trade shocks — including the construction of additional oil and gas pipelines — was “archaic, short-sighted, and economically reckless,” Pedneault said.
The Greens have said the government should invest in “true energy independence” by developing a nationwide clean power grid, “instead of doubling down on outdated, polluting oil and gas transport infrastructure.”
A renewables-powered national HDVC grid has plenty going for it. The price-tag is low for a "nation-building" industrial project - compared, for instance, with the $52 billion Ottawa earmarked for tax breaks and other incentives for auto and battery makers in a troubled bid to build a Canadian EV supply chain.
Once online, a nationwide grid would reorient Canada’s electricity flow from north-south to west-east to bolster energy sovereignty. Provincial grids could plug in and be balanced by power supply from across the country, time-zone to time-zone, preventing black-outs and backing-up local and regional networks.
“This would be not only good for our climate action targets but also for Canadian-owned industry — including the aluminum and steel being tariffed by Trump — and, of course, good for the next generations of Canadians, from Vancouver, B.C. to St. John’s, Newfoundland,” said Pedneault.
Comparing costs between new pipelines and a clean power grid “misses the point”, he argues. Continued investment in fossil fuel infrastructure will worsen the impacts from climate-driven extreme weather that cost Canadians a record $8 billion in insured damages in 2024.
“Canada has everything it needs to be a global clean energy superpower except the national transmission infrastructure,” he said. "The past is oil. The past is reliance on the U.S. We think it is time that we start banking on the future, on ourselves and our resources. Let’s invest in that.”
The ‘electro-shock’ Canada needs
The energy transition has galvanized governments and industry to think about the shape of the national grid 50 years from now, said Frédéric Côté, general manager of Nergica, a research consultancy in Quebec. But he believes the economic upheaval caused by the U.S.-Canada trade turmoil might be a “crisis-into-opportunity” moment.
“This feels like the electro-shock we need to start navigating all the different forces at work today,” he said.
“We need much more transmission infrastructure to support rapidly growing power demand across our country, to take advantage of the great potential we have to bring wind and other renewable energy into our system in an integrated way,” he said.
Côté sees a coast-to-coast clean power network with stations in each province that could inject or draw down power as needed to support their generation levels.
Canada will need to move faster than past mega-projects if it is to build a national supergrid, said Zach Parston, a partner in the global infrastructure advisory division of consultancy KPMG.
“We have to act with urgency and intent,” he said, pointing to how Germany passed legislation to quickly build several LNG terminals after losing Russian gas supplies following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
“We can’t control U.S. trade policy, but we can take steps to support our economy." KPMG's Zach Parston
A national clean power grid would be an immense undertaking, he said, but also could usher in sizable benefits and opportunities at this point in Canada's history.
“We can’t control U.S. trade policy, but we can take steps to support our economy. We will have to think differently and act differently if we are going to seize the moment that changes in our macroeconomic environment have created for us,” Parston said.
Francis Bradley, CEO of Electricity Canada, an industry advocacy body, said there are clear advantages in removing regional barriers and promoting cross-country power transmission. But project impact reviews and permitting processes remain a serious challenge.
“There are a multitude of regulatory authorities that come into play, each of which needs to be satisfied for a project to move forward,” he said.
Nevertheless, he sees a “much greater openness in provincial capitals and indeed Ottawa” to move quickly with industry on a national clean energy grid.
“Electrification is where we as a country are going — where the world is going — and it is only a question of how fast the transition happens,” he said.
In 2014, the Canadian Academy of Engineering produced a report that concluded: "Energy may be Canada’s last chance to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage, something we have not succeeded in building in other key sectors of the economy. The national will and leadership that built our railways, pipelines, and the St. Lawrence Seaway is urgently needed for the Canadian electric power sector."
KPMG’s Parston believes circumstances a decade on are making a virtue of this necessity. “What a way to rally Canadians together in the face of adversity, to show to the U.S. and the world what we as a country can do. Imagine the positive impact — beyond the economics and the energy security — on our culture and national unity.”
Comments
Yeah!!! Finally. Make it a public asset. And while we're at it, let's partner the grid with fibre cable and have a national public telecomms grid.
I see a lot of benefits from a cross-country electricity backbone, not only to provide reliability but also to take advantage of the differential timing in peak demand because, unlike oil or gas, electricity can move almost instantly from sea to sea.
Decentralised Electrical Grids
The model that seems to be begging to be proposed is to build mini-grids that have inter-ties with each other. These can be planned to work across distances enabling power generation in rural and remote areas as well power usage for rural and remote users. In this case as in the South Australia case, the quality of life needs of relatively inexpensive electricity tied to secure supply of electricity are being met, while offering much wider security of supply of low cost electricity. Of course this will also work in urban settings and with industrial applications.
There may be an added benefit of motivation for citizen consumers to press for the governmental policy changes required to enable this initiative, drive the transition to alternative energy faster.
Now, is it technically feasible to tie mini-grids together to make a country wide grid capable of carrying some 1 000's of megawatts?
Is it technically feasible to add home to grid, vehicle to grid and other such adaptations to existing infrastructure?
Is it possible to apply the sharing technology to make all this work seamlessly?
Does this model offer the electricity supply security we all need to achieve the quality of life we expect?
Does this model afford us the security we need in cases of catastrophic disruption events?
What would the multiplier effect of added efficiencies in uses of energy do for the effectiveness of the overall grid both locally and country wide?
Yes to all of the above. The industry is capable of executing the building of such a grid - they just need a) the go-ahead, b) short-turn funding assistance c) a National project manager and engineering team for coordination
And YES again: South Australia provides the proof of concept. It is also the perfect model (solution) for local generation complexes like roof-top solar in single-family home zones in cities. Add in storage nodes and tie lines from different time zones (and demand regimes) and away we go!
The timing has never been more auspicious for a truly cross-country national project in all respects, but particularly our primal, overarching need for some real, precious hope in the face of TWO massive, overwhelming, and unprecedented forces--climate change and the Trump "administration."
In this context, the five weeks of having to endure another mindless, stupid election "campaign" is pure torture. As usual, it's made worse by "polls" and pervasive, ubiquitous social media's relentlessly toxic scrutiny of whether or not Carney will be sufficiently "likable" and whether or not he's "peaked" too soon.
And then there's the regular media STILL acting like it's all business as usual, like there's ANY SANE CHOICE other than the serious, highly qualified guy who we've been lucky enough to still have a political party able to ATTRACT who also happens to be a world-class leader at a time when truly, "the world is too much with us."
His other important qualification is NOT being a politician when "liberal democracy" is also under existential threat for being TOO liberal, i.e. inviting a bunch of foxes into the henhouse who hate hens.
I'd have to see a larger business case for cross-country; but "Western Canada" is so blindingly obvious I'm at al loss for why it isn't a big discussion.
As you look across the four western provinces, you see two huge hydro-powers on either side, where MB and BC are basically 100% hydro. Then the two inner provinces have basically no hydro.
Those two are so blinded by gas that they can't see the obvious: if you regard all four provinces as one power grid, it has all the hydro it needs to balance out intermittent power from wind and solar, again across all four.
With 100% overbuild on wind and 200% on solar, plus all their hydro, they'd have clean firm, right through dunkelflautes and droughts.
Maybe I'm missing something, but it looks like all that capacity is just sitting there.
Nope. It is Danielle Smith and Slow Moe that are missing both the forest and the trees. It is hard for them to see the obvious through the blizzard of $$$ the oil and gas companies are throwing at them.
Blinded by gas in the form of political donations. Danielle Smith virtually cancelled renewables in her province, and therein that province has no Plan B when the world peak in fossil fuels occurs in a few short years. As the result, the competitive edge wind and solar gave to ratepayers in the form of reasonable charges disappeared, and low and behold the gas-fired grid players jacked up their rates very quickly to the highest in the land. Of course, that was only a coincidence, right?
"larger business case" - Indeed. I would like to see future-oriented planning. WE have a large housing shortage now, for instance. Let's look at a future of an additional 25 000 000 housing units, for instance. How far into the future is that? Hopefully at least 20 years. Now where do we put all that housing, not simply adding to existing population centres which has already led to some issues of overload on existing infrastructure, water shortages such as Calgary and the entire watershed it is part of. And on.
Having the ability to share cheap variable renewable electricity across the country would be amazing. The Atlantic provinces would be able to quickly develop their huge wind power potential for everyone's benefit.
Indeed! Their wind potential is phenomenal, and that power could be exported to central Canada's industrial heartland in milliseconds and at reasonable rates given the size of the potential wind power buildout. BC could export to Ontario too, but at very cheap nighttime rates being three hours behind in Pacific time. A 7-9 a.m. Ontario rush hour peak would require power sent there from BC between 4-6 a.m.
The time zones can really be played with here between jurisdictions, and variable time-of-day rates could benefit mass battery and hydro storage if charged during low nighttime rates and discharged to peak load locations at higher peak rates. A million solar roofs back by batteries across a couple of provinces could contribute stable base load power to industrial sites and within cities and provide profit or accumulated credit for homeowners and businesses.
The possibilities are truly magnificent.
Yes! National transmission could be built in 5 years and tie in distributed renewable energy sources from communities throughout Canada. It could create electricity democracy where benefits flow to communities instead of a few oil and gas giants whose return-on-investment is climate breakdown.
An exemplary post with exemplary comments!
Mark Carney talked about the provincial interties. But a national vision is really needed, one that separates out and really emphasizes renewables and clean energy grids and corridors from oil and gas. You can only give so much appeasement and largesse to Alberta and the oil industry, which to date have been remarkably ungrateful for federal contributions. The Age of Oil and Gas is very close to its world peak. We have to move on sometime.
The feds have extraordinary powers to build projects in the national interest. Federal energy corridors are immune to provincial legal challenges, as demonstrated by TMX, which was confirmed in two unanimous decisions, one by the BC Court of Appeal, the other by the Supreme Court of Canada, both of whom focussed exclusively on project jurisdiction only.
The feds should get on with a national smart grid and HVDC transmission corridors to all three coasts, starting with those provincial interties. Consultation with First Nations would be very beneficial if the feds (or their hired private consortiums) approached First Nations bands and offered to connect them to a national grid should they supply their own wind and solar power generation. In addition, the federal corridors could be brought close to or even onto Indigenous land under long term leases, therein making the corridors even more immune from provincial challenges. Economic reconciliation is becoming a thing nation wide, primarily through First Nations' renewable power projects, urban development and resource development.
I am impressed with the federal Green Party's leader's knowledge on this topic. Liberal Party of Canada, are you paying attention?
Mini grids can be established on indigenous lands, along with rural and remote communities - indigenous and non-indigenous. The mini grids themselves also act as conduit lines especially as they are inter tied. They will all need to met performance standards for availability, safety, efficiency and extensibility.
Manitoba Hydro has been using HVDC for decades and apparently was an innovator with the tech