Powering Canadian Steel

Electricity Canada and the Canadian Steel Producer’s Association upcoming report, Powering Canadian Steel identifies how our two industries can work together to support economic growth, security and resilience. Current Affairs sat down with one of the report's authors, Jay Wilson, Director of Energy Security at Electricity Canada to learn more.

Hi Jay, thank you for joining us. How did this report come together?

We were approached last year by the Canadian Steel Producers Association (CSPA) to start thinking about electrification and growth in the industry. Their members produce steel and steel products in different ways across Canada, but they all expect their industry to grow significantly over the next 10 to 15 years. Steel is an energy-intensive sector, so one of the things that was clear to them was that their industry was going to be needing a lot more electricity – 430% more by 2050 – to power that growth.

The electricity sector has a similar outlook, expecting to massively increase the amount of building and investment in new infrastructure and modernizing the grid to meet demand. It’s not just the steel sector that is going to be using more electricity in the future. So, we decided to work together on this project to understand what is needed from the electricity sector to help build the infrastructure that the steel industry needs.

This was a fascinating project to work on, in part because these two industries are a lot more intertwined than people really think. So many of the physical components that generate and deliver electricity are made in steel plants that use electricity to melt and shape that steel into useful products. And because Canada has one of the cleanest electricity systems in the world, that means steel made with electricity here is cleaner than most other steel on the market. That lower environmental footprint matters to customers who buy steel.

What are the challenges and opportunities that are facing the steel industry when it comes to electrification?

To build some of the large-scale infrastructure in the electricity sector, it takes time, and it takes a lot of investment. Large projects like a major transmission line or a hydroelectric project might be in a permitting process for 10 years, which isn’t very attractive for investors.

Needing to wait up to a decade for permission to start a piece of infrastructure means important upgrades can be delayed. This means that the overall electricity system costs can be more expensive and the construction happens slower than it should.

For a steel plant that wants to produce more clean steel, they need to work with their local utility to upgrade their service to power the new equipment. But if it takes 5-10 years to permit to upgrade the transmission line to the plant, that’s not good for the people that need the power, or for anyone who needs their electricity to be reliable and affordable.

An opportunity here is that whatever happens, or in this case, doesn’t happen, in permitting electricity projects, affects all other industries. Any industry that is looking to expand and grow is going to use more power to serve their customers better. It's kind of universal. It’s a common cause, because everybody wants the same thing. Companies want more power, they want it to be as clean, reliable and affordable as possible, and that’s what the electricity sector wants to provide. We’re on the same page.

How will the current political situation with the U.S. affect electrifying the steel industry?

Hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of goods cross the border every year, including steel and electricity. A good trade relationship is important to everyone on both sides of the border, and the tariffs we’ve seen this year have been very disruptive and added a lot of uncertainty. There’s obviously a big challenge and making progress towards a resolution on the trade is going to be critical. There’s a place for governments to step in to mitigate some of the difficulties, and we’re encouraged by some of the early shows of support for the industries.

At the end of the day, whether or not there are trade challenges, steel is a necessity and electricity is a necessity and Canadian companies that are making steel need to have access to power and to be able to expand or to produce the kind of steel that customers need.

What was one thing you learned about the steel industry from working on this report?

Last fall, I got to visit the Algoma Steel plant in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. It was an eye-opening experience getting to see first-hand the different ways that steel can be made and turned into products.

We took a tour of the facility they were building where the new electric arc furnaces were to be housed. Seeing up close the scale and size of the facility, the equipment, and the infrastructure that brings the raw materials and the energy to where it’s needed was fascinating. There’s so much skill and expertise on display everywhere at a site like that, and watching these machines maneuver and transform a massive slab of red-hot metal into sheets and rods in a matter seconds is something I’ll never forget.

Tune in to episode 118 of the Flux Capacitor podcast for an exclusive interview with the Canadian Steel Producers Association’s President and CEO, Catherine Cobden.

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Distribution Reliability

Electricity Canada’s Distribution Reliability Committee recently released their annual report breaking down the data of power interruptions in 2024. The report identifies the duration time of the average interruption, to the frequency of them happening and much more! Current Affairs sat down with Dan Gent, Director of Transmission and Reliability to learn how this affects customers.

Hi Dan, thanks for joining us! What does the reliability data in this report get used for?

When I think about it, it’s like it's a benchmarking report. Any utility can take a look at the report and identify how they're comparing in against all the participants in the Distribution Reliability Committee at Electricity Canada. Through this report you can identify the biggest contributors of an outage per company.

If you can identify what is causing the most outages (trees, weather, animals etc.), you can identify where you want to put your resources. The report provides proof of increasing trends, and it gives utilities justification to increase their investments in capital planning for their rate filing.

Describe the national indicators and what they mean?

There are many national indicators, but I will touch on the most popular ones, SAIDI and SAIFI. These are global industry standards so if you go to France, Brazil, Germany – they all measure system performance in this way. They’re also used by governments and regulators to determine how well the electricity system is preforming.

SAIDI stands for System Average Interruption Duration Index, which is the amount of time in minutes the average customer has been without power.

SAIFI stands for the System Average Interruption Frequency, so it measures the amount of times customers have been without power.

To get the whole picture we can calculate the Customer Average Interruption Duration Index which is CAIDI. This looks at on a national level, how many hours the average customer has been out individually.

What are some fun facts that have come out from this year’s report?

For the past several years, trees have been in the number one contributor for power interruptions. They are the biggest contributor in terms of outage duration at 33% in 2024.
If a tree falls on a line, it is an issue around safety because you have to shut off the power line and make sure the area is safe so the utility can remove it. You’re also taking into consideration debris from the tree, things the tree has hit on the way down and assess any trees that might have fallen or be on the verge of falling. And it’s not just big storms that cause this, branches can also fall on blue sky days. It’s a bit longer of a process to put that line back up and reconnect the power.

Also in 2024, 15% of outages were related to equipment failure. What's happening on a regular basis now is that high winds or ice storms are coming through more frequently, and that causes wear and tear on the infrastructure and equipment. I mean, how often can a distribution line or a pole withstand 120-kilometre winds until it breaks? How often can the power lines hold 2 tonnes of ice before it snaps? You could maybe survive the first time, but after three times, maybe not so much.

The data shows that we need to think about the age of some of the equipment and the wear and tear it is getting on a yearly basis.

If the reliability of the grid calculated as 99.9286%, how can some people be out of power for weeks and some minutes?

Well, the reliability index is a calculation based on the entire population. So you total up the amount of hours of outages and the amount of hours that people are connected to the grid.

You’re connected to the grid 8760 hours a year, but you might experience an outage for a month. Then you’re calculating the 720 hours in the month divided by 8760 which is actually less than 10%. When you flip it around, your availability or connected reliability to the grid is actually about 92%.

It’s the ENTIRE population and EVERY outage whether it’s a minute or a week out of 8760 hours. It’s a big impact to the individual customer obviously, but from the availability of the system perspective, it’s so small.

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Every Line is Important – Celebrate National Lineworker Appreciation Day!

Every year on July 10^th, Electricity Canada honours lineworkers across Canada who work tirelessly to keep electricity flowing into our homes, schools, hospitals, and businesses. These highly trained men and women install and maintain the electricity grid across the country, and repair essential infrastructure to keep the lights on. Current Affairs sat down with Fatima Khan, Graphic Designer at Electricity Canada for more details on the “Every line is important” social campaign.

Hi Fatima, thanks for joining us! Tell us a little but about National Lineworker Appreciation Day and why it’s important.

National Lineworker Appreciation Day is celebrated by Electricity Canada every year on July 10th. It recognizes the dedication and hard work of lineworkers across Canada who ensure that electricity continues to power our everyday life. These men and women often work in hazardous environments and in extreme weather conditions. Not only do they need to focus on restoring power, but also how to work safely and efficiently as a team. I believe it's important that we show our gratitude and respect for their central role in our electricity sector.

Why the tagline, “Every line is important” and how did you come up with it?

The tagline came about when I was brainstorming ideas to pitch for last year's social media campaign. I took an illustrative approach the previous year and wanted stick with that style. To change it up, I decided to include some animation rather than making a static post to make it more interactive and interesting.

One of my concepts was to create line art of lineworkers and as I looked through some ideas of different ways to illustrate these, I thought, why not create the illustration from one continuous line but then also animate it, so that our audience can see the visual from start to finish.

That’s where “Every line is important” came from. The message is, if any utility line is cut, it can mean people and important social services are without power and lineworkers do everything they can keep the lines together.

What type of content can people expect to see on our social media channels for the campaign this year, and how is Electricity Canada getting our members involved?

The type of content people can expect to see on our social media channels (LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram) for this year's campaign is the same beautiful line art and animations we created last year. Two out of four of the illustrations that we posted were photos provided by our member companies. Because of the positive feedback that we received, this year we reached out to our members and asked them to submit photos of their utility workers that they would like to see illustrated –whether it's lineworkers on a utility pole, bucket, trucks, transmission tower or a photo of a crew. We want to represent as many of our members as we can through this campaign and show our audience the people behind the scenes that make up the electricity sector.

We heard rumours about a lineworker activity book! Tell us about that!

Yes! Alongside the illustrations and animations, we wanted another creative idea on how we could use them. Julia, our Vice President of Communications, came up with the idea to present it as an activity book. Throughout the book, you'll have colouring pages, crossword puzzles, word searches, connect the dots…all relating to the theme of National Lineworker Appreciation Day. We’re going to print these booklets and send them to our members and provide them with the digital files that they can also share with colleagues, friends and family members. It's a creative project to connect with younger generations to get them inspired about the industry that powers their world.

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Faces of the Industry kicks off National Electricity Month

Electricity Canada is proud to announce the winners of the second annual Faces of the Industry award! This award highlights the work of six individuals from across the country who have shown outstanding achievement within the electricity sector in leadership and innovation. As part of June’s National Electricity Month campaign, Electricity Canada will be sharing their inspiring stories across all social media platforms. Current Affairs sits down with Graeme Burk, Director of Communications at Electricity Canada to learn more about what makes this year so special.

Hi Graeme, thank you for joining us. What is the Faces of the Industry award and why important for our sector?
The Faces of the Industry Award is a new award that we started last year to fill a need that we were finding in our association, which was that we tended to give awards to companies. The electricity sector is certainly made up of companies, but it's also made up of individuals. These individuals represent everything from people who do customer service accounts, to people who do line work, to executives.
We wanted an award that represented that breadth of everything in the electricity sector and the people that made the electricity sector. So that's why we came up with the Faces the Industry Award.

Who are this year’s Faces of the Industry?
We have a really amazing group of winners this year. We have winners that represent just about every single area of the electricity sector!

We have two engineers doing very, very similar but different work.

Mohamed from IESO is doing stuff in electromagnetic transients and is at the cutting edge of EMT mapping, which is a process that is going to help intermittent technology like renewables get on the grid with greater reliability.

We have Joy Brake from Nova Scotia Power who is working on the strategy to get Nova Scotia off coal by 2030. She’s all the tricks of the trade and the things she's picked up in her career in system planning to try and get that done.

From Saskatchewan, we have Dan Irvine who focuses on procurement. He is at the leading edge of ensuring supply chains are local and are impactful to local and Indigenous communities.

We have our live line engineer, Jeff, who did something I've just never thought of before. He saw the gaps that were there in safety and invented stuff to make things safer. He saw that lie lineworkers were using mountaineering ropes which are not great in an energized environment, and so he developed ropes that would work better with electricity, which is kind of incredible!

Sandra Haskins the CFO of Capital Power and she has been amazing at doing capital offering and raised $3 billion dollars for infrastructure projects.

And last but not least we have Jennifer Williams, who is the CEO at Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro. She managed to get a historic agreement signed that will basically change the face of hydroelectric development in both Labrador and Quebec.

It’s a really great group that represents all the levels of the sector, all the geographic sectors of Canada and shows the breadth of talent that we have in the electricity sector.

This is the second year Electricity Canada has done the Faces of the Industry award. How has this year differed from 2024?

There's been less panicking, I think is the simplest answer! I think it's always interesting to invent something and then figure out, well, how do we judge this and how do we bring these people together, and how do we put together the social media content for national Electricity Month and all those sorts of questions. This year we didn't have those questions quite so much and as a result, we were able to just kind of get on with doing it.

This year we had an award reception in the lobby of Electricity Canada's head office and in Ottawa, and it was beautiful and meaningful. I think all the winners felt really, really appreciated from it and that was really great.

I think we've also gotten very good at understanding that this all builds towards a social media campaign for National Electricity Month. We just want to make National Electricity Month the best month for the electricity sector possible. We were able to go at it this year with that as our starting point, and it's going to be a great time as a result.

What should we be expecting during this year’s National Electricity Month?

You should be expecting a lot of really great content! We have Instagram posts, we have LinkedIn posts, we have YouTube postings, we have some media postings happening as well.
We have content of a lot of really great people, who all have really interesting insights on things, so please stop by our social channels and see what’s there. I think you're going to be surprised and delighted throughout the month.

Find out more about our Faces of the Industry winners on our website.

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Mitigating Investment Risk in Electricity Regulation

Electricity Canada’s Annual Regulatory Forum brings together experts from across the electricity sector to discuss best practices and key issues in electricity regulation. This year’s theme, “Managing and Mitigating Investment Risk for our Energy Future” will tackle the challenges and opportunities in expanding our grid. Current Affairs sits down with Electricity Canada’s Joe McKinnon, Manager of Economic Regulations and Standards to learn more.

Hi Joe, thanks for joining us. Tell us about the Annual Regulatory Forum and what the attendees can expect for this year?

The forum comes at the tail end of a CAMPUT’s annual conference which highlights key regulatory concerns in the utility industry, and gives Electricity Canada an opportunity to showcase our own solutions around economic regulation in the energy sector.

Our goal is to illustrate a cohesive message with relevant strategies around economic regulation reforms and what we need to do to ensure the strength of our sector in the future. This year we have some great panels which will address three areas of focus within our broader theme: electrification and load growth, climate adaptation, and resiliency. We want to bring together insights from our utility members, but also our vendors and other industry participants.

At the forum we also launch our yearly regulatory report which focuses on the issue of risk and uncertainty around investing in our energy future.

Why is this year’s theme so important?

This year's theme is important because there is so much uncertainty regarding politics and policy at the international, federal, and provincial level for markets and supply chains.

At the moment, load growth projections are increasing in certain jurisdictions and changing at a rapid pace. To accommodate for future electrification and load growth we need a lot of capital investment. As the grid grows and changes, customer preferences change, and grid modernization is an essential part of that. To do that, we need both operational and capital expenditure and some of our current regulatory structures aren't set up to optimally incentivize this.

On the climate adaptation and resiliency front, we have storms, wildfires – our general climate risk is increasing. To ensure long term affordability for customers, resiliency, reliability, security and sustainability of the grid, you need to invest especially to secure that over the coming decades.

What are the three biggest challenges to investment?

So, challenge number one is the disconnect between policymakers, regulators and utilities on what is required to ensure long term resource adequacy, resiliency of the grid, reliability and security. At the same time, we need to maintain affordability for customers. We need to figure out the balance there.

Challenge number two is that regulators need to provide more guidance, flexibility and incentives regarding investment to meet industry and policy goals. Overall, there's a lot of uncertainty regarding general load growth projections. While we know the trend is there, exactly how that unfolds and where the investment needs to go are still important questions. In the meantime, policy impacts are changing. As governance changes, new policy comes in, old policy goes out – this also shapes that overarching uncertainty.

Lastly, there is market uncertainty. And we have been working on this report long before our current topical trade problems! There are general investment challenges in the industry broadly.

Although all these things are not generally controlled by the regulator, electricity regulation can work to minimize those impacts in the overarching risk landscape.

This year’s forum will also launch the new report “Regulation and risk: overcoming uncertainty”. What do you want people to take away from the report after reading it?

There doesn't need to be a massive upheaval of the regulatory framework a utility exists. Reforms can be done within what we have, without any legal intervention from policy makers or government. They are essential to reduce uncertainty, reduce risk and allow for investing to ensure reliability, security, sustainability through the coming decades.

There is a suite of tools and improvements that regulators can use. Some may be more or less applicable depending on who you are, but the goal is to reduce hesitation and uncertainty. While not every single tool might be adopted by every regulator, there is something for everyone in this report. The small changes can make a big impact in the future.

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Increasing Generation

Electricity Canada’s Generation Council met in Ottawa on March 18-19 to discuss best practices, challenges and opportunities in creating a reliable electricity grid for all Canadians. The first step? Building more of it! Current Affairs sits down with Brittany Botting, Director of Generation at Electricity Canada to learn more.

Hi Brittany, thanks for joining us! How can Canada prepare for future load growth? 

With a growing population, increasing housing supply, electrification of industry, AI, electric vehicles and so much more! Meeting this load growth will require building out more electrical infrastructure faster than we ever have before. Estimates peg the annual investments into our grids needed to keep up with demand at $55 billion and growing.  

To move at the pace and scale that is needed, investors need more certainty. Canadian governments need to systematically remove the barriers to building and ensure the rules are clear, predictable and practical. Governments should be looking for ways to invest in the grid through things like the Investment Tax Credits or low-cost, repayable loans. And there needs to be an understanding of the opportunity that comes with investing in our electricity grids today to build a cleaner, more resilient and more secure energy system that will be the backbone of our future economy.  

What are the biggest obstacles to increasing electricity generation in Canada? 

 When it comes to increasing electricity generation members must strike the appropriate balance between affordability, reliability and sustainability. There are many factors that go into making an investment decision and each decision point can be met with obstacles. To get the point where there are shovels in the ground there a few hoops to jump through:

• Capital – generation projects can have long lead times and are incredibly expensive. Companies must be able to secure the necessary capital to move forward with an investment. 

• Regulatory – new generation projects must go through a number of assessments and obtain a number of permits to move forward.

• Technological – while some generation technologies have been around for a while, some are still emerging. This comes with a whole host of technical and logistical questions that must be solved before implementation.

• Community support – new generation projects are significant infrastructure projects that require support from local communities and Indigenous groups to be successful.  

• Logistical – supply chain delays and labour shortages are widely seen across the sector and must be factored in as well.

How are Electricity Canada Members tackling these issues? 

At our last Generation Council meeting I was really struck by the degree of collaboration that is occurring between our members to solve some of these problems. For example, our member from the Yukon Energy Corporation shared how they are were able to piggyback on a purchasing order ATCO had made for some critical components in order to move up the supply chain queue. Or, on a much larger scale, the new MOU for Churchill Falls is spurring all sorts of collaborations between Hydro Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro that will expand capacity in both those provinces. 

Why is energy security so important, and what do we need to do get Canada closer to achieving it? 

Electricity underpins everything we do and Canadians so often take for granted that when you flip a switch, the lights will go on. Preserving this feeling for families and businesses under any circumstance is, in my opinion, what it means to have energy security.  

The integrated North American grid has enhanced our collective energy security for decades, but with the threats coming from U.S. could possibly disrupt the two-way flow of electricity trade between our two countries. Canadians have had to pause and re-evaluate the state of our energy systems.

With this system being challenged, there is a need to shore up our domestic energy capacity to ensure we are resilient today and into the future. As a start, we need to get building to meet the demand for electricity we already know is coming. This may also be the time to think big and creatively about some of the industry’s sticky problems. For example, are there things that can be done to support the domestic manufacturing of critical electricity components? Are there opportunities for more east-west connections?  

Fill in the blank - The electricity sector needs to _____________ in the next 10 years. 

Build more electrical infrastructure .

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