‘Astonishing’ lack of interties blocks Canada’s climate goals

This article was published by The Energy Mix on Feb. 1, 2024.

Canadian power utilities will have to get better at sharing resources if the country is to meet its emission reduction and energy transition targets, according to a recent news analysis.

The “dearth of cross-provincial electricity transactions” was enough to cause astonishment for a visiting politician from the United Kingdom, columnist Kelly Cryderman wrote last month for the Globe and Mail.

Cryderman quotes Martin Callanan, a former Brexit minister who now holds the energy efficiency and green finance portfolio, speaking to an Alberta energy podcast during a recent visit to the province. “We’re not part of the EU,” but “I’ve lost count of the number of electricity interconnectors we now have with continental Europe,” he said. So “I was genuinely surprised to discover there isn’t even much electricity trading between the different provinces.”

But despite a conversation about east-west transmission grids that dates back at least to the early 2000s (and reads like it was a long-standing issue even then), Cryderman says provincial grids “stand apart from one another like islands: for the most part, each province has its own electricity system, with different quirks and characteristics. There are fewer electricity interconnections, or interties, east-west in this country than there is capacity to export to the United States.”

That’s a growing problem, she adds, “because everyone from environmentalists to the federal Liberals to conservative Prairie premiers want to make electricity a larger part of the national mix in order to green growing energy consumption, and meet climate goals. They are counting on the country’s bountiful, non-emitting hydro resources to help. But those resources aren’t spread evenly throughout Canada, and some sharing will be required.”

(Those resources are also under increasing strain as climate change-induced droughts become more frequent and severe.)

Cryderman points to a “long-simmering dispute” between Manitoba, which sells its surplus power to the U.S. Midwest, and SaskPower, which generates most of its power from coal and natural gas. In a recent complaint to the Canada Energy Regulator, Saskatchewan says Manitoba isn’t allowing domestic buyers into its electricity market, as its export permit stipulates.

“Manitoba Hydro is selling low-cost, low-emitting power to the United States to the exclusion of a Canadian jurisdiction, for no discernible benefit to Manitoba Hydro,” Saskatchewan asserts. Manitoba counters that its neighbouring province is looking for special treatment and could ultimately set itself up as a competitor in export markets.

However that dispute is eventually settled, “provinces will need—to the degree possible in our federation—to get past squabbles,” Cryderman writes, even if there are few living examples where that hope has worked out in practice. “This is not only for climate goals themselves but also to meet rising demand.” Without trading electricity as easily as the UK does with the EU, she warns, “Canada doesn’t stand a chance at electrifying as we want to in the decades ahead.”