Transforming Canada: Mapping A 100% Electrified Energy Economy

Canada stands at a crossroads in its energy future, and the path it chooses will define its economic resilience, environmental integrity, and quality of life for generations. As a Canadian who is involved in shaping Ireland’s 2050 energy roadmap through my work with Trifecta Ireland, I see an immense opportunity for Canada to follow a similarly ambitious trajectory toward comprehensive electrification and renewable energy integration.

This article has been triggered by a public call for key people who should be in a few days of workshops related to Canada’s energy transformation at this inflection point  by a Canadian PWC executive I worked with for years, Shelley Gilberg. While she and I met through our involvement with building the world’s most sophisticated public health surveillance system, Panorama, and continued working together on proposals and projects in Canada, we’ve stayed in touch as I’ve applied my global perspective to the challenges of decarbonization. I was one of the people she tagged in her LinkedIn post to request my suggestions for participants. Personally, I think I should be one of them, and this is my initial reflection on the subject. I’ll undoubtedly be able to suggest others as I understand more of the goals and scope Shelley has in mind.

Trifecta has been formed and is being led by an Irish executive I’ve been working with for a year, Lesley O’Connor. She had a global executive role with Mainstream Renewables, developing GW of renewables in Chile, for example. She now sits on the Board of the Mainstream and has established Trifecta as part of her goal to give back to her country.

The Trifecta approach, anchored in principles of clean, secure, and affordable energy for all, provides a clear framework adaptable to Canada’s unique energy landscape. While Canada and Ireland differ vastly in scale, both nations share common challenges and opportunities around decarbonizing their economies, securing energy independence, and maintaining affordability. Canada’s vast renewable resources and technological capabilities position it ideally to embrace this transformation fully.

Today, Canada’s energy system is deeply embedded in fossil fuels, heavily influenced by its role as a major supplier of oil and natural gas, almost entirely to the United States, although increasingly, if temporarily, to Asia. This reality shapes both domestic energy policy and international trade relationships, particularly with our currently fractious neighbor to the south. Canada’s energy exports are significant, but this trade dependence carries vulnerabilities tied to global market fluctuations and geopolitical uncertainty, and of course is going to decline over the coming decades as we stop burning hydrocarbons we dig out of the ground.

At home, the reliance on fossil fuels for heating, transportation, and industrial processes dominates Canada’s energy flows, characterized by substantial inefficiencies and resulting in high levels of wasted energy, mostly through heat loss in combustion-based systems. A detailed Sankey analysis highlights that, in the current system, Canada consumes roughly 2,500 terawatt-hours (TWh) of primary energy annually, but only about 1,009 TWh ends up as useful energy services. Nearly 1,500 TWh is effectively lost, predominantly as waste heat from inefficient internal combustion engines, furnaces, and conventional power plants.

Note that I pulled the Sankey diagram together quickly for this article, following the same process I’ve used for similar diagrams for Ireland, Pakistan, India, the Netherlands (in aid of 2050 scenario planning with TenneT this summer), Australia and an exemplar electrifying port. It may be imperfect as a result, but it is accurate enough for the purposes of this article. I’m compelled to create my own versions of these diagrams as the large majority of the ones that exist aren’t in the energy of the future, units of electricity, and usually exclude or deeply understate rejected energy.

Imagining a fully electrified Canadian economy presents a compelling vision. In this notional future, nearly all of Canada’s energy needs are met through renewable electricity generation from wind, solar, and existing hydroelectric and nuclear facilities. Wind energy, abundant across Canadian provinces, could provide just over 300 TWh annually, with solar adding around 180 TWh.

Existing hydroelectric infrastructure continues to deliver about 270 TWh per year, complemented by current nuclear generation at approximately 90 TWh. Crucially, biomass resources, sustainably harvested from Canadian forestry and agriculture sectors, supply about 143 TWh annually, converted into biofuels essential for long-haul aviation and maritime shipping. This strategic use of bioenergy resolves the challenge of electrifying energy-dense transportation sectors where battery technologies currently face limitations.

Electrification fundamentally alters Canada’s energy flows, significantly reducing overall energy input requirements due to enhanced efficiency. Electric vehicles replace gasoline and diesel cars, buses, trucks, and trains, dramatically cutting transportation-related energy use. Electric drivetrains convert about 77% of input energy directly to vehicle motion, compared to just 20–30% efficiency typical of internal combustion engines. Consequently, transportation’s total energy requirement shrinks substantially, with around 230 TWh of electricity supporting electric road and rail transport, alongside 100 TWh of biofuel used exclusively for long-distance aviation and shipping. This transition significantly diminishes rejected energy, resulting in only modest thermal losses from battery charging, electric motors, and biofuel combustion engines.

Residential and commercial heating similarly benefit from electrification through advanced heat pump technology. Canadian homes and commercial buildings leverage ambient heat from the environment, drawn by heat pumps that provide heating at approximately three times the efficiency of conventional electric resistance heaters. Heat pumps capture ambient heat from air and ground sources, supplying residential buildings with around 140 TWh and commercial buildings with about 57 TWh annually. This use of ambient heat reduces the need for electricity significantly; residential buildings require only about 205 TWh of electricity to meet heating, cooling, and appliance demands, while commercial buildings draw roughly 120 TWh. This combination sharply reduces wasted energy in heating systems, resulting in significantly lower thermal losses compared to traditional fossil fuel or resistance-based heating systems.

Industry, which accounts for the largest share of Canada’s current energy consumption, can also achieve substantial efficiencies through electrification. Industrial processes below 200°C are especially amenable to heat pump technology, leveraging about 70 TWh of ambient heat per year, thus significantly reducing electricity needs. Canada has already proven seasonal storage of heat in reservoirs, something exceedingly common in European countries, with cold being storable as well. Electric arc furnaces, electric plasmas, infrared, microwave and resistance heating methods handle higher-temperature requirements efficiently. In this scenario, industry would use approximately 320 TWh of electricity annually.

For this analysis, it’s important to understand that Canada’s fossil fuel industry consumes 24% of industrial energy demand today. That will drop radically as our oil, gas and coal sectors decline to being only used as feedstocks for petrochemicals, likely in the 10% to 20% of current levels. However, as our economy continues to diversify and our advantages related to critical minerals and other future industries including data centers grow, I’ve chosen to leave industrial energy demands untouched.

As such, energy service provision remains constant at today’s levels, around 360 TWh of useful industrial output, yet achieves this with far less input energy and reduced waste. This streamlined electrification results in modest industrial rejected energy, limited primarily to inevitable process heat losses and minor inefficiencies.

Due to the massive efficiency gains of an electrified economy that leverages ambient heat, primary energy requirements plummet. Excluding the ambient heat, we only need to generate around the same amount of energy in the form of electricity and biofuels as our entire energy services, about 1,000 TWh. That’s only 40% of the primary energy we consume today. We don’t have to replace the 2,500 TWh we use currently, just the energy services. This is a very achievable goal, not one that is out of Canada’s reach.

Implementing such an electrified vision demands significant upgrades to Canada’s electrical grid. Modernization of transmission infrastructure is essential to distribute power reliably from wind-rich regions in the Prairies and coastal areas to population centers in Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia. Enhanced grid capacity, coupled with energy storage solutions such as battery systems and pumped hydro storage, ensures stability despite the intermittent nature of renewable resources. Investment in smart grid technology and demand-response systems allows flexible, real-time energy management, optimizing electricity distribution and consumption. Such improvements position Canada not only to handle increased electricity loads efficiently but also to improve overall system resilience and flexibility.

Economically, transitioning to a fully electrified and renewable-based system presents multiple benefits. Job creation in renewable energy sectors, from wind turbine manufacturing to solar installation and grid upgrades, can significantly boost employment, particularly in regions historically reliant on fossil fuel industries. Over the long term, renewable electricity generation provides greater price stability compared to volatile fossil fuel markets, benefiting consumers and businesses alike.

Policy initiatives to phase out fossil fuel subsidies, incentivize renewable energy adoption, and support research and development into innovative electrification technologies are vital steps in realizing this transition. Canada can look to international experiences, including the policy frameworks considered in Europe and China, to shape effective national strategies.

Ireland’s 2050 energy roadmap process has provided valuable lessons, particularly around stakeholder engagement, interim target setting, and balancing ambitious national objectives with practical, local realities. The goal of the effort is to deliver five-year incremental visions of the country’s energy flows as an evolving series of Sankey diagrams, with each five-year increment accompanied by actions organized by a five-factor framework synthesized from global leading practices:

• Policy & Regulation
• Technology & Innovation
• Infrastructure & System Integration
• Market Mechanisms & Finance
• Organization & Workforce (Institutions)

Trifecta will be bringing stakeholders from industry, academics, the government and community-oriented NGOs together during the process to arrive at a common vision for the end state and the increments to getting there, and to flesh out the key things that must be accomplished within each element of the framework in order to succeed.

We’ve been identifying the key organizations and individuals required to bring to the table to create this vision, among other key strategic goals, over the course of many hours of strategy sessions focused on Richard Rumelt’s kernel of good strategy: diagnosis, policies, plans. That involved a lot of stakeholder analysis, including a Latourian actor-network theory assessment of Ireland’s energy environment. It included a good deal of work on those who might be opposed to a transformative vision for Ireland’s energy future, and how they could be engaged positively in the process.

Canada’s diversity — geographical, economic, and cultural — means a similar stakeholder-driven approach is critical for successful implementation. Collaborative planning involving governments at all levels, industry leaders, Indigenous communities, and citizen stakeholders will be essential to craft policies that are both effective and inclusive. As Canada’s challenge with carbon pricing on home heating oil in the east show, whatever comes out of this must be affordable for all. How that is achieved is open to discussion, and there are multiple levers that can be pulled in the framework at the right time. Incremental yet ambitious interim goals ensure progress remains measurable and achievable, helping maintain momentum toward full decarbonization by mid-century.

However, Canada’s conditions are different from Ireland’s in key ways. Ireland doesn’t have unifying governmental bodies below the level of the Prime Minister, something Trifecta is hoping to bridge by being a focused convener of stakeholders who don’t have formal reasons to talk presently. Canada does have those governance layers. Ireland doesn’t have a major fossil fuel extraction and processing industry, or heavy industry at all, in fact leaping from agriculture directly into the knowledge and service economies without industrializing. Ireland doesn’t have the internal trade barriers Canada does, the removal of which are now thankfully at the top of political agendas federally and provincially.

Like Canada, Ireland does have very close ties to the United States historically and tight economic ties with 30% of trans-Atlantic data cables terminating in the country and major US internet firms including Google, Microsoft and Amazon have data centers in the country and are planning to build more.

Notably, Ireland doesn’t have a roadmap to decarbonized energy yet, and Trifecta is filling a clear gap that emerged in our strategic assessments. As a result, an energy roadmap exercise for Canada is necessarily a different beast with different expected impacts than the one for Ireland. I’m engaging with Shelley to understand more about her vision, with this article being part of my thinking process.

The path to Canada’s electrified future is clear and achievable. It offers a chance not only to radically reduce greenhouse gas emissions but also to build a stronger, more resilient economy, foster innovation, and secure sustainable energy independence. Leveraging insights gained from Ireland’s process, Canada can confidently embark on its energy transition journey, transforming its abundant renewable resources into lasting prosperity and environmental stewardship for generations to come.