Canada aims to double electricity grid capacity by 2050 as demand soars

Prime Minister Mark Carney on Thursday unveiled Canada’s new clean electricity strategy as electricity demand in Canada grows.

The plan aims to double the capacity of Canada’s grid by 2050, Carney said, adding that the federal government is launching consultations with provinces, territories, Indigenous groups, utility companies and unions.

“Over the coming decades, Canadians will use more electricity because many of the things we use every day, the cars we drive, the heaters in our home, the machines in our factories, are switching to electric power. Doubling our grid to meet that demand won’t be easy,” Carney said.

The clean electricity strategy includes spending on building infrastructure for Canada’s electricity generation, transmission, distribution, storage, and grid modernization.

It will also connect Canada’s “fragmented” electricity grids in the east, west and north through “new and expanded transmission lines,” Carney said.

“Our system is already 80 per cent non-emitting. Doubling generation in the next few decades will require those massive investments. It will require the linking of provincial systems,” he added.

However, connecting Canada’s disjointed energy grid is easier said than done, said Bryan Karney, civil engineering professor at the University of Toronto.

“There are provincial pairs that have real potential for mutual benefit. Solar and wind in Saskatchewan coupled with hydroelectric developments in Manitoba is a really attractive alternative. But Winnipeg’s a long way from Toronto,” he said.

“The land acquisition, the land access, the expenses, the challenges, the traditional cost overruns on larger transmission lanes – all of those things are good reasons to say, are we sure we can’t do this locally?” he added.

Doubling the electricity grid capacity will also require the 130,000 high-skilled workers to be hired by 2050, Carney said, with 30,000 of those new jobs created by 2028.

Demand for electricity in Canada is soaring, with increasing demands that include electric vehicles, data centres and defence industrial production.

Some remote communities, including all of Nunavut, still rely on diesel generation for power.

Electricity costs have risen for Canadians across the board, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said.

“Promises of doubling production and cutting costs are the opposite of what these Liberal policies have done. With Mark Carney, it’s more cost, more delays, more talk, more promises,” Poilievre said in a statement.

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The clean electricity strategy points to “rapidly growing electricity demand” from energy-intensive industries such as “critical minerals, battery manufacturing, and other rapidly emerging drivers such as AI data centres.”

“High-growth sectors such as AI data centres will serve as the digital backbone of the modern economy, enabling productivity gains and enhancing business competitiveness. They will also drive significant new electricity demand,” it says.

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Data centres also have a cooling requirement, Karney said, to prevent them from overheating.

“Canada being a rather cool place, we are an attractive place for putting down a data center,” he said.

The North American electricity grid, including Canada’s, has come under tremendous strain from the mushrooming of AI data centres and cryptocurrency mining centres, an alert by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) — an electricity watchdog for Canada, the U.S. and Mexico —warned last week.

Canada is “closely monitoring” a new warning about the strain on North American electricity grids driven by artificial intelligence data centres, Natural Resources Canada says.

NERC issued a Level 3 alert, which is the agency’s highest alert rating, on Monday, warning that electricity grids “did not have sufficient processes, procedures, or methods to address risks associated with computational loads.”

“Examples of this load include artificial intelligence training, cryptocurrency mining, and traditional data center uses,” the alert said.

A 2025 Cornell University study said a single AI query on Google’s Gemini AI costs around 0.24 watt hours of energy.

A simpler way to understand it is how many seconds that amount of electricity would power a microwave for, said Mike Welland, associate professor engineering physics at McMaster University.

“A simple factual question is about one to 1.5 microwave seconds – on par with a Google search. If you’re having a conversational query, where the AI has to reread the script every time, you’re looking at two to five microwave seconds. If you give it a short document and you’re asking it to summarize, it’s about 10 seconds,” Welland said.

The more you ask of an AI, the more energy it starts to consume. If you ask an AI to produce a long text, with complex reasoning, it could cost around 20 to 120 microwave seconds, he said.

“Now your food in the microwave is actually starting to get hot.  If you’re asking it to generate an image, now you’re looking at two minutes, enough to boil a cup of water.

“And then short video generation becomes massive. That becomes five to nine minutes, even for video that is a few seconds long,” he said.

Compounded over billions of queries, the energy strain can be tremendous, he said.

The strategy document cites a 2025 study by the Canadian Nuclear Association that projects that Canada could need 150 gigawatts of additional firm electricity generation by mid-century, including 115 gigawatts of new non-emitting baseload.

“To put this into perspective, the requirement for new baseload alone represents more than twice Canada’s existing combined nuclear and hydro baseload capacity,” the study said.

Ontario alone is expected to see electricity demand grow by 75 per cent by 2050, another report said.

While 60 per cent of all of Canada’s electricity is hydroelectric power, wind and solar energy represent a growing share. Generation from wind farms and solar panels grew from 1.5 per cent of total electricity generation to seven per cent in 2021.

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The electricity strategy also aims to reduce Canada’s emissions, Carney said, but he didn’t say whether Canada still plans to meet its 2030 emissions reductions targets.

“We are putting in place a series of initiatives that will make material emission reductions. We’ll update our climate plans and emission reduction targets, in due course,” he said.

In 2023, seven per cent of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions came from the electricity sector, according to Canada’s official national greenhouse gas inventory

As Canada switches its transport, space heating, and industrial processes from fossil fuels to electricity, the country’s energy needs will rise.

Canada will have to “use a wide range of energy, including hydro, nuclear, wind, solar, some gas, carbon capture, geothermal and beyond,” he added.

The strategy document points to natural gas as a central pillar for Canada’s electricity strategy.

“Natural gas will also continue to play an essential role in maintaining affordability, reliability, and system flexibility,” the document said.

The strategy also lays out plans to spend “tens of billions” of dollars on “clean technology,” including on carbon capture, utilization, and storage.

Research has shown that most carbon capture projects fail to get off the ground because of high costs. In the 50 years since the first ever carbon project, the technology has captured just 0.001 per cent of global emissions, according to the David Suzuki Foundation.

“Seventy per cent of carbon captured through CCS in Canada is used to help extract more oil,” the David Suzuki Foundation says on its website.

–with files from Canadian Press