By Mitchell Beer

With the federal government expected to release its long-awaited national electricity strategy this week, Canada could be in line to lose $110 to $220 billion in new investment and 40,000 to 80,000 direct jobs if it fails to deliver a clean power grid “at the scale and speed that industry and investors need,” a recent report concludes.

While senior executives across Canada’s finance, technology, heavy industry, mining, and clean energy sectors recognize that clean power is essential, it’s only worth pursuing “when it is predictable, cost-competitive, and available at scale,” states the report released earlier this month by the Shareholder Association for Research and Education (SHARE).

Canada enters the energy transition with an advantage over many other industrialized nations, with about 85% of its power coming from non-emitting sources, consultants at Dunsky Energy + Climate report. Clean economy sectors like electric vehicles, batteries, and the grid itself have received about $65 billion in new investment, producing at least 26,000 direct jobs and tens of thousands more across related supply chains.

That investment is taking place at a moment when access to electricity is central to site selection and capital allocation for new projects, adding asset value and enabling market access for new investments in tech, artificial intelligence, and mining.

But “Canada’s clean electricity edge is under threat,” Dunsky warns. “Grid constraints, permitting delays, and interconnection uncertainty are already slowing or cancelling investments.”

Canada faces those challenges in a moment of intensifying global competition, the report adds, with other jurisdictions “rapidly decarbonize their grids with the aim of attracting clean investment.”

The national electricity strategy has been in development for some time. Insiders say its release is now just days away, and it’s expected to focus on east-west transmission, Indigenous leadership, and better collaboration among provinces. Earlier this month, Ontario announced a “major nation-building milestone” when 10 provinces and territories—everyone but Quebec, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Nunavut—agreed to work together on new transmission infrastructure.

There was no official word on the national strategy’s release as this story went to virtual press. But The Energy Mix has learned that it may appear as soon as this Wednesday or Thursday and feature federal investment in grid interties between provinces, though the form of investment—through loans, grants, federal ownership, of investment tax credits—remains to be seen. The strategy is expected to remain silent on the fate of the federal Clean Electricity Regulations, and it isn’t clear whether it will address the role of gas-fired electricity or carbon capture and storage on the grid.

The Dunsky report calls for long-term coordination and policy certainty across federal, provincial, and territorial governments to make permitting and grid interconnections faster and more transparent, all with the goal of accelerating the buildout of clean generation, storage, and transmission. It points to Indigenous partnerships as an element that could “unlock project development”, and stresses the role of demand-side solutions to “lower system costs, defer infrastructure, and improve reliability—especially for fast-growing data centre and industrial loads.”

SHARE Public Affairs Director Jennifer Story said the consultants sought interviews with executives whose companies will need reliable supplies of green energy. “There’s a growing number of investors and companies that are hearing back from regulators, hearing back from provincial decision-makers, that they’re in the queue or that their needs can’t be met.,” she told The Energy Mix in an interview.

“If Canada is really serious about creating new opportunities in our economy to buffer the effects of the worsening relationship with the United States, this is a really obvious place to do it,” she added. “We’ll certainly be looking to see whether or not [the federal electricity strategy] goes the distance to meet this need.”

With net-zero commitments and carbon pricing systems in place in 10 of Canada’s 11 biggest trading partners—the U.S. is the outlier—Story said faster buildout of a clean electricity grid could be an essential nation-building project to protect Canadian sovereignty.

“It does tie in to trade strategy,” she told The Mix. “Some countries and regions are imposing carbon border adjustments, for example. Responding to that reality means again demonstrating clearly that we can supply our issuers, our publicly-traded and private companies, with the clean power they need to not have those border adjustments be a barrier to market access in other parts of the world.”

And to attract climate-aligned investment, “we also need to demonstrate to those investors that the companies they’re considering, the projects they’re considering, have not just green but also reliable, affordable, consistently available clean power.”

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The report highlights a rapidly evolving energy system, driven by rising electricity demand, continued reliance on natural gas, and the growing complexity of balancing affordability, reliability, and emissions reductions.

The CER’s Energy Futures analysis is not a prediction, but rather a series of scenarios exploring how Canada’s energy mix could evolve under different economic, technological, and policy conditions.

Still, one conclusion is clear: electricity demand is expected to surge, while natural gas remains a key part of the energy system—even as the country works toward lower emissions.

That finding aligns with a growing body of industry and policy analysis pointing to the same dual trend.

Electricity demand in Canada is rising quickly, driven by electrification of transportation, industry, and buildings. A recent industry report described the situation as requiring Canada to “build big again,” warning that the country may need to dramatically expand its grid to keep pace with demand growth.

At the same time, reliability concerns are emerging. A North American reliability assessment cited by Global News found Canada’s power grid is under increasing strain, with demand expected to outpace new supply in several regions later this decade.

Against that backdrop, natural gas is expected to continue playing a significant role, particularly as a flexible source of power generation that can support intermittent renewables like wind and solar.

Canada’s broader energy landscape is already moving in that direction. Federal data shows renewable electricity is growing, but oil and natural gas remain foundational to the economy and energy system.

The CER report suggests this dual-track evolution—more electricity, but continued natural gas use—will define Canada’s energy transition over the coming decades.

That reflects a broader shift in how policymakers and industry are framing the transition: not as a simple replacement of fossil fuels, but as a more complex transformation of the entire energy system.

Recent federal policy signals point the same way. Ottawa has emphasized the need to invest in grid infrastructure and energy systems to maintain affordability and reliability while transitioning to lower-carbon sources.

The challenge, analysts say, is scale.

Electrification alone could require doubling or even tripling parts of Canada’s electricity system, while maintaining reliability during extreme weather events and peak demand periods. At the same time, natural gas infrastructure continues to expand in some regions to meet growing demand and support economic activity.

This creates a tension at the heart of Canada’s energy future.

On one hand, electricity—particularly from low-emission sources—is expected to do much of the heavy lifting in reducing emissions. On the other, natural gas remains critical for reliability, industrial use, and export opportunities.

The CER’s outlook underscores that both trends are likely to unfold simultaneously.

It also reinforces a key message for policymakers: the transition will require significant investment, regulatory reform, and coordination across provinces and sectors.

Canada’s energy system is already diverse and regionally fragmented, with provinces relying on different mixes of hydro, nuclear, fossil fuels, and renewables. Integrating these systems—while expanding capacity and reducing emissions—will be a major undertaking.

The CER’s modelling highlights the uncertainty involved. Long-term energy forecasts depend on assumptions about technology costs, climate policy, global markets, and consumer behaviour, all of which can change rapidly.

Even so, the direction of travel is becoming clearer.

Electricity is poised to become the backbone of a lower-emissions economy. Natural gas, meanwhile, is expected to remain an important—if evolving—part of the mix.

For Canada, the question is no longer whether the energy system will change, but how quickly—and whether the country can build the infrastructure needed to support that transformation.

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Battery storage improves cost and energy density by about 3% annually – Tim Grejtak, Lux

As the global economy electrifies and intermittent renewables gain marketshare, power utilities are increasingly turning to battery storage to stabilize their grids. But which battery storage technologies hold the most promise? A new study from Lux Research says lithium-ion will dominate in the short-term, but new chemistries are being developed that hold promise for the future.

“Utilities are beholden to their customers to provide electricity in the most reliable and cost-effective manner possible. Unfortunately, as renewables [like wind and solar] start to permeate the grid, reliability can degrade,” says Tim Grejtak, analyst and lead author of Future Costs of Stationary Energy Storage: Evaluating Li-ion and Flow Battery Cost Reductions and Application Fit.

“Utilities are totally changing their 150-year-old way of doing business in order to bring about higher penetrations of renewables as quickly as they can manage. If you talk to any utility engineer or business development person or grid scientist, it’s pretty much all hands-on deck.”

Gretjak calls modern power grids “one of the largest synchronized manmade machines in history” and emphasizes that slow change is the best change, that as energy technologies change, all the components need to evolve together.

Including storage technology.

While start ups introduce innovative new ways to store electricity when the wind blows and the sun shines so it can be fed into the grid when needed, batteries are still the most reliable and cost-effective storage option for utilities, according to Gretjak.

“Li-ion has a lower levellized cost of storage (LCOS) at most durations and system sizes, but the amount of space required starts to drive up costs at larger scales,” he said in an interview.

“As a result, there’s an opportunity for emerging flow battery technology, which can change this landscape by driving down costs.”

Summary of the report:

• Li-ion retains cost edge. Li-ion beats the most popular vanadium-based flow battery technology on LCOS due to higher round-trip efficiency (83% vs. 65%). Li-ion also dominates the application space from 75 kW to 100 MW, and from 15 minutes of storage to eight hours, with costs above $0.37/kWh.
• New technology will change economics. New chemistries like Lockheed Martin’s metal complex chemistry, planned to debut in 2018, could make flow batteries competitive vs. Li-ion batteries in the highly competitive 4-hour duration market, driving down costs of energy storage and opening up new markets. Current technology won’t get lower than $0.35/kWh.
• Diversification is key as price falls. Application stacking and multiple value streams will gain importance as energy storage costs fall to about $0.30/kWh by 2036. The lower cost will mean no single application market can bring enough revenue to make energy storage economically compelling.

Markham: Please give me an overview of your study on stationary battery storage for power grids.

Grejtak: We’ve seen a great deal of growth in stationary energy storage in the last year or two. It’s mostly been with Li-ion batteries. They’ve been more for short duration applications, but are starting to venture a bit more to longer duration, four hours or so.

The question I wanted to ask is, Will this always be the case? Is it always going to be Li-ion batteries because of their declining cost-curve, their wide-spread availability and supply chains? Or will other alternatives like flow batteries be able to make inroads for different applications?

The answer is, by and large, Li-ion will continue to dominate a large portion of sort of the utilities space, but there are some important and valuable applications that flow batteries can achieve and make inroads toward, especially if you consider new chemistries that re being worked on in the lab today.

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Markham: I interviewed Prof. Yi Cui of Stanford a few months ago and he said that over the next decade, lithium ion electric vehicle batteries are likely to drop in cost by 50% and go up 50% in energy density. Does that sound reasonable for stationary battery storage as well?

Grejtak: I definitely think those numbers are accurate. We’ve seen about 3% or so year-on-year improvement in cost and energy density. Those two things to be highly correlated in the sense that for every increment of energy density you can get, that’s one less increment of material that you need to put into a battery.

The nice things is that that ends up working in the consumers’ [both electric vehicles and power utilities] favour in the sense that you now have something that costs less and performs better.

Markham: Are we going to see big “technical disruptions” in battery science or will the improvements be more incremental?

Grejtak: “Step changes” will occur that will definitely advance things. For instance, the move to solid anodes like lithium metal is a great leap forward. But you can also inch there closer with increasingly higher loadings of silicon, which is what Tesla has done. They’ve introduced I think about 3% or 5% silicon loadings into their anodes, which can start to increase the specific energy density of their batteries.

On the cathode, on the lithium metal oxide side, those are sort of established chemistries like MCA or NMC. Those are being worked on, and NMC specifically, to provide increasing energy density without compromising the lifetime or durability of these batteries.

Those are materials science problems that aren’t going away. They won’t just suddenly disappear overnight, unfortunately. I thought that was how science worked, but seven years in the lab taught me otherwise.

Markham: Is it fair to say that 20 to 25 years from now that the battery chemistries in the laboratory today will finally make it to market?

Grejtak: Relative to where we are today? Definitely.  but I don’t think it’ll just be suddenly something that we’ve never heard of before. Looking back 25 years from now new batteries will look like a great leap forward, but over time it’ll just be steady incremental improvements with a punctuation mark here or there. 

Energy electro-chemistry is a little bit conservative. There are some novel approaches. Stanford is using big data to finding battery materials that electric chemists haven’t quite come up with before. Berkeley has the materials genome. Those approaches can open the aperture a little bit, but by in large the structures and the fundamentals won’t change. The materials might, though.

Bottom line, over time the incremental approach will steadily increase energy density and decrease battery cell costs. 

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