Alberta’s grid operator, like every other grid operator, keeps a waiting list known as a queue. As of February, the data-centre projects sitting in Alberta’s queue wanted about 20.7 gigawatts of power. For scale, Alberta’s entire electricity system, on the coldest evening in its history, has never demanded much more than 12.0 gigawatts. How much […]

In 1957, on the terrace above the Niagara Gorge, Ontario Hydro switched on a machine unlike anything else in the country. At night, when the province slept and its generators ran into slack demand, the machine pumped water out of the hydro canal and up into a 750-acre reservoir whose walls had been piled up […]

I found my way to this week’s topic by an unexpected route. A Sydney tabloid recently ran a story questioning why an Australian content creator named Sarah Aubrey had visited Snowy 2.0, the enormous pumped hydro project under construction in the Snowy Mountains, and produced a series of videos about it. The implication was that […]

The technology has existed for sixty years. The thirteen governments that would have to share it are the holdup. Correction (July 2026): An earlier version of this article, following a March 2026 Energy Regulation Quarterly analysis, attributed Alberta’s September 19–28, 2025 zero import capability to deliberate AESO reliability deratings. Market Surveillance Administrator data show that […]

For most of my career, the smart thing to do with any electrical load you could move was to run it overnight, in the quiet hours when demand was low and power was cheap. When electric vehicles came along, the advice was no different. It is advice almost everyone in this industry has given at […]

My first instinct was that Calgary doesn’t need more solar. If someone proposed building another utility-scale solar farm here, the conventional read would stop the conversation quickly. We don’t need the incremental power, and the price is too low to justify it. Alberta’s own market makes the case. The average pool price fell roughly 53 […]

The gas isn’t going to Germany. SEFE (Securing Energy for Europe), the German federal government’s energy company, just signed a twenty-year, one-million-tonne-per-year deal to buy LNG from the Ksi Lisims project on the BC north coast, and the plan is to ship those cargoes to Asia, freeing other supplies elsewhere in its system for redirection […]

Last year, the federal government called its electricity plan the Clean Electricity Strategy. In May 2026, it returned as Powering Canada Strong: A National Strategy for an Electrified Canadian Economy. That name change tells the real story. For nearly two decades, Canada has focused on making our relatively flat electricity system cleaner. We succeeded. At […]

There’s a term gaining traction among the people building and financing the digital economy, and it has nothing to do with semiconductors or AI algorithms. It’s called the “electron gap” and it’s meant to convey the widening distance between how much electricity an electrifying world is about to demand and how much we are actually […]

Long before reaching a store shelf or factory floor, most of the things we rely on every day begin their lives far upstream. The phone in your pocket, the clothes you wear, the medicines in your cabinet, the fertilizer that grows food, even the foam and fabrics in the seat beneath you all trace their […]