Will an electricity grid expansion mean lower bills? It could take decades to find out

Abigail Bimman takes a closer look at Ottawa’s plan to double Canada’s power grid by 2050, creating jobs and lowering consumer costs in the process.

The federal government says its newly announced National Electricity Strategy will lower energy costs for most Canadians, but specifics aren’t included in the document, with experts saying they are hard to pin down.

“With the right investments and electrification measures, seven in 10 Canadian households will pay less for their total energy by 2050 -- that’s $15 billion back in the pockets of Canadians,” Prime Minister Mark Carney said during his press conference in Ottawa on Thursday.

The strategy document says the cost decrease will be driven by the fact that electric machines are between two and four times more efficient than fuel-based ones.

Energy expert and lawyer Tom Timmins tells CTV News the specifics of monthly savings are hard to predict, and will depend on choices made by provinces, territories, and the federal government over the coming years in a complicated picture.

“We should be thinking in decades… Things don’t happen overnight, but when you do make choices, they stick around for a long time,” said Timmins, who leads Gowling WLG’s energy practice in Canada.

Timmins said globally, solar has become the cheapest form of electricity, with the vast majority of electricity projects built on earth in the past year utilizing the renewable resource.

“Anyone who’s building new projects has to compete directly with solar, also with wind, and also with battery,” Timmins said, noting prices are declining exponentially year over year.

That could, in turn, help Canadians’ energy costs, depending how provinces and territories move forward with decisions around supply.

“Every single province and every single territory has a slightly different supply mix, mixtures of hydro, nuclear, gas, coal, in some cases, wind, solar. And so they’re all competing, and we’re also competing, of course, with our American cousins to the South.”

Timmins says while these are complex planning issues, connecting the often siloed power grids across the country, and connecting different regions of the country as the Carney plan aims to do, will help solve things.

“That’s why transmission is so crucial. And the federal government definitely, definitely has a role to play there.”

Lack of focus on renewables a ‘missed opportunity’

Stephen Thomas with the David Suzuki Foundation was disappointed not to find more details on renewables like solar and wind within the government’s new strategy.

“They spend a lot of time in the strategy talking about natural gas and talking about all of the rules that they’re going to loosen to allow more natural gas on the grid, when I think it’s a wasted opportunity, we could instead be focusing on getting it right to build out those wind and solar resources ready for prime time,” Thomas told CTV News.

He says the clearest way to lower costs is to lean on wind and solar as much as possible.

There may be additional savings to find in the government’s promise of new “energy-saving retrofits to up to one million households.”

The strategy doesn’t provide many details, but offers heat pumps as one potential example, and says the retrofits will flow from a combination of “financing, grants, and complementary measures.”