ThinkEnergy

A major shift in electricity demand is coming, and Ontario's existing grid faces a pivotal moment. From new housing and industrial development to electrification and digital infrastructure, the province needs a distribution system that can keep pace with unprecedented change.
Teresa Sarkesian and John Avdoulos of the Electricity Distributors Association (EDA) join host Trevor Freeman in conversation about modernizing Ontario's electricity grid, investing ahead of demand, and rethinking the regulatory frameworks that shape utility investment. They also explore the importance of affordability, collaboration, and grid resilience, and what it will take to ensure electricity reaches customers reliably as Ontario works toward its 2050 net zero goals.
Related links 
Electricity Distributors Association (EDA): https://www.eda-on.ca/

Teresa Sarkesian on LinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/teresa-sarkesian-53898613

John Avdoulos on LinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/john-avdoulos-48a2117

Trevor Freeman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trevor-freeman-p-eng-8b612114

Hydro Ottawa: https://hydroottawa.com/en

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[00:00] Intro Voiceover: Welcome to Think Energy, a podcast that dives into the fast-changing world of energy through conversations with industry leaders, innovators, and people on the front lines of the energy transition. Join me, Trevor Freeman, as I explore the traditional, unconventional, and up-and-coming facets of the energy industry. If you have any thoughts, feedback, or ideas for topics we should cover, please reach out to us at thinkenergy@hydroottawa.com.
[00:30] Trevor Freeman: Hi everyone, and welcome back. If there's one thing you'd hear a lot on this show, it's that we are at a pretty unprecedented time in the energy sector. That is true on a global scale. It's definitely true here in Ontario. We are seeing change happening all around us from an increased adoption of EVs and electrification of home heating, greater interest and adoption in distributed energy resources—that's kind of at the household, in the business level, as well as kind of on the utility scale. And of course, you know, the thing that seems to be grabbing the most headlines lately, very large loads, data centers, etc., coming onto our grid or looking for space on grids.
[01:14] Trevor Freeman: There is only more change coming as we modernize and adapt our grid to leverage new technology, embrace two-way flow of power, and on and on and on. If you want to hear more about these things, just scroll back through our previous episodes over the past, you know, couple years or so. There is a lot to choose from where we talk about how things are changing.
[01:34] Trevor Freeman: In order to adapt to this changing environment, just here in Ontario, we are expecting an estimated 120 billion—and that's billion with a B—investment, dollars of investment in our grid over the next 25 years or so. And this investment is necessary for the grid to support, you know, not just economic growth, but also our changing day-to-day lives and how we interact with energy.
[02:00] Trevor Freeman: So, as a reminder, here in Ontario, our grid is made up of generation, transmission, and distribution. And it's these distribution companies, or LDCs—local distribution companies—that are on the front lines, the main interface with customers. And these local utilities are really helping to lead this transformation. They are tasked with building a modern, resilient grid while navigating legacy regulatory rules, municipal funding constraints—you know, a lot of these LDCs are municipally owned—and unprecedented technological change.
[02:37] Trevor Freeman: And so that's why today I'm happy to welcome back to the show Ontario's Electricity Distributors Association, or EDA. The EDA represents Ontario's local distribution companies. And I want to talk today to the EDA about their advocacy priorities, talk about, you know, what LDCs are really facing across the province when it comes to funding, grid modernization, and regulatory reform.
[03:03] Trevor Freeman: And most importantly, we'll talk a little bit about how we make sure we're moving forward. You know, what investments are needed urgently today in order to keep us moving forward, and are these, you know, the the kind of nation-building projects that we hear a lot about in Canada right now?
[03:20] Trevor Freeman: So to unpack all of this, I've got two guests joining me today. Teresa Sarkesian is the President and CEO of the Electricity Distributors Association, and she's back for her third time on the show. And as a first-time guest, we've also got the Chair of the EDA Board, John Avdoulos, who is also the President and CEO of Essex Power, which is an LDC not too far from where I grew up in southwestern Ontario. Always happy to give a shout-out to Essex County. Teresa and John, welcome to the show.
[03:52] Teresa Sarkesian: Thank you, Trevor.
[03:53] John Avdoulos: Thank you, nice to be here.
[03:54] Trevor Freeman: So, Teresa, let's kick things off. This is a pretty pivotal time in the electricity industry. We'll get into that today. But given where we are, what are the core strategic advocacy priorities for the Electricity Distributors Association right now?
[04:09] Teresa Sarkesian: Ah, thanks for the great question, Trevor. Our main priority is to ensure that our members have the appropriate funding to be able to get the grid ready for all the customers that are coming with the massive energy transformation that we're anticipating. So we sort of nickname it "pre-investing in the grid." Traditionally, the energy system has been funded through sort of this model of "growth funds growth." So you need to have verified evidence that the growth is going to be there. So when you go to the Ontario Energy Board for your approvals, they know that the investments you're making, there's customers that will be there ready to pay for it.
[04:54] Teresa Sarkesian: We're looking to alter that model a little bit simply because the pace of change is really quite ambitious over the next, you know, 10, 15, 25 years. And we're anticipating many new customers coming onto the grid with electrification. So as a result, we need to modernize our regulatory system, and it's something that we're advocating for. And frankly, I think we're seeing some steps, I think, going in that right direction. Our Energy Board has decided they're going to do a next-generation ratemaking framework, and that's going to start in earnest in Q1 of 2027. And we're hopeful that we'll be able to see that pre-investment in the grid is something that they're going to be looking at.
[05:43] Teresa Sarkesian: And I want to be clear about something. I don't want to sound like I'm picking on the Ontario Energy Board. Regulators around the world are grappling with this same issue, and we're starting to see that some other North American jurisdictions are looking at this. We just recently discovered that New York and New Jersey and Massachusetts are also looking at this issue as well. So this is going to be something that's going to be very important going forward.
[06:07] Teresa Sarkesian: I do want to mention a little bit about affordability because there's been obviously some very, very big numbers in terms of funding that's needed not just for the distribution grid, but for generation and transmission going forward to hit, you know, net-zero targets of 2050. And we want to make sure that there's all the options on the table for it to be more affordable for the customers. And that includes, as I always like to say, triple—you have to triple down on the availability of conservation programs. Utilities should be able to design and deliver the programs that their local customers and communities need. We want to be able to build out the business model of the utility where they can be using more behind-the-meter assets such as energy storage and renewable energies, other types of generation, that they should be able to create local markets, and customers can get paid an incentive for participating.
[07:07] Teresa Sarkesian: And we want to make sure that all of the government-related programs to support lower-income customers are fully optimized, and right now they're not. So we look at this in a very, very holistic way because we want to make sure that we can create an affordable system going forward, because there are a lot of challenges and pressures to make sure that we're grid-ready for the future.
[07:31] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, I mean, there's a lot there, a lot to unpack. I mean, you're talking about how do we change the way we invest, how do we set our rates in a way that supports this unprecedented pace of change. Affordability remains top of mind for customers, the ability to access DERs. So lots going on. And John, I wonder from your perspective as, you know, the Chair, what is so unique or so pivotal about this time—pivotal, sorry, about this time in Ontario's energy kind of process for our distribution companies?
[08:08] John Avdoulos: Yeah, I think for me, it starts off by building off of what Teresa said and recognizing that we are at the center of everything energy. And we've been in a situation where we've been static in terms of the support around the evolution of utilities and how we're transforming. And we're at a point now where we can no longer be static, meaning that it's an all-hands-on-deck approach, and utilities are the best entity to be geared up to deliver the value that can be unlocked and what can be brought for enabling economic development.
[08:44] John Avdoulos: So we're at a point now where we are shifting from a very flat demand to a sustained growth period, and we're seeing projections of 65% by 2050 in terms of growth. And I believe that's on the baseline projections. And if you look at the accelerated projections, they're even more aggressive. And we're looking at what the federal government and provincial governments are doing with their ambitions with energy policy to catalyze economic growth. And then you layer on the new housing developments, large industrial loads, EVs, fuel switching, digital infrastructure, and it all lands on the local grid. We are at the center of everything energy.
[09:27] John Avdoulos: And I think that's why it makes sense that LDCs are the tip of the spear. But they're going to need changes to public funding tools. I guess there's a saying that in my manufacturing days—I've been in this industry for 20 years now, and prior to that, I was in manufacturing—"If you always do what you always do, you'll always get what you always got," something like that. And I don't think we can operate like that anymore. We've got to make these changes. And so I think, to Teresa's point, on accessing public funding tools and having pre-investments is what's going to be necessary to achieve broader societal goals.
[10:08] John Avdoulos: And at the same time, we're dealing with extreme weather issues, much more frequent and much more greater in magnitude, and then you layer on supply chain issues, and then these raise the bar for reliability. If we wait until every need is fully visible, communities will wait longer, and projects will cost more. We need the rules, the financing, the planning, and the coordination to change now while we continue to preserve our strong value for our customers and doing our part to encourage economic growth in our local communities.
[10:41] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, I mean, there's no question. And I think what's become clear over the conversation the last number of years that I've been kind of sitting here behind this microphone, at least, not to mention my day job, is the change is happening quicker than ever. And to your point, John, we can't just take the same approach. If we take the same approach, it's going to cost more, it's going to take too long. And so, yeah, great to see that we're focusing on how do we change, how do we look for different ways to do this.
[11:09] Trevor Freeman: Teresa, the EDA is really focused a lot in the last while on grid modernization, on how do we incorporate more distributed energy resources into our grid mix. You know, we've got extreme weather, rising adoption of electric vehicles, battery storage. I mean, the list goes on. There's quite a long list here, including, you know, AI data centers, other things like that. How is the EDA advocating for local distribution companies, that kind of front line, to use John's terminology, as we evolve from the old way of doing things, traditional poles and wires, to more enablers of this local energy transition, kind of looking at a different way moving forward?
[11:53] Teresa Sarkesian: Well, as you point out, Trevor, we have done a lot of advocacy over the years to better position the utilities to shape the future and to take advantage of all the opportunities with the energy transition. I'm kind of a glass-half-full type of girl, and that's the way I look at things.
[12:12] Teresa Sarkesian: But a few things I did want to mention, you know, the government issued its integrated energy plan back in 2025. And there was a whole chapter in there actually about distributors and the role they're going to play in the future. And they actually talk about the centrality of the LDCs to all things energy, which was an excellent recognition and recognition of what we've been advocating for.
[12:38] Teresa Sarkesian: And the other area is, you know, energy flows have been sort of one way, right? It goes from generation, transmission, distribution to the customer. And the integrated energy plan is the first time I saw the recognition that now there needs to be two-way flows of power, and a recognition that the LDC is going to be central in that two-way flow of power. So, you know, again, that is looking at optimizing all the behind-the-meter, you know, battery storage, the generation. These are going to be important pieces.
[13:10] Teresa Sarkesian: Our utilities are also going to be becoming more digital in terms of how they serve their customers. We're looking at more investment in our sector around automation, advanced distribution management systems, obviously cyber security as well. So I think what we're trying to do is just position our sector that we're up for the task.
[13:33] Teresa Sarkesian: We also want to move just beyond pilot projects. We want to sort of pull off the Band-Aid and allow things to evolve and develop to scale. And so those are some of the things that we, you know, continue to lobby on and actively engage with government, the Ontario Energy Board, our IESO as well. So it's very, very active time.
[13:54] Teresa Sarkesian: And that's the other thing I guess I want to point out with the IEP, you know, I think we're all in this together, and now there needs to be far more massive collaboration than ever before. And we all have to be around the table to find solutions because there's a lot of jurisdictions out there that want to move faster than we're moving, and whoever can, like, move the fastest is going to get the best rewards for their communities and their local economies.
[14:21] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, and I mean, listeners to the show will know whether you're in Ontario or not, Ontario's got a pretty complex regulatory environment. We've got a lot of different stakeholders and players. We're not vertically integrated, so there's lots of people around that table. And you know, John, you are in the position both kind of in your, again, day job leading Essex Power, as well as as the Chair of the EDA currently, to talk to a lot of distribution company leaders across the province. I'm wondering, you know, what are you hearing? We've got ambitious housing and economic growth development targets. What are some of the big challenges on the ground for distribution companies as they try to meet that need and avoid being a bottleneck, avoid the electricity kind of side of things being a bottleneck to that growth? What are you hearing from from distribution companies?
[15:18] John Avdoulos: Well, I think one of the biggest contributors is our timing. The distribution system doesn't just turn on overnight. It takes years of planning. We're tied to our communities. We're moving as quick as we can on housing and industrial expansion and connecting large new loads, but the infrastructure itself takes years to plan, approve, procure, and build. So a transformer delay is just not a procurement problem. It can be a subdivision that can't connect, or an employer that has to wait to open their manufacturing plant.
[15:52] John Avdoulos: So these delays connecting the grid can be a problem if we're not brought in soon enough. And if we also have the regulatory barriers that prohibit us from expending capital to where it's needed when it's needed, these contribute to that timing issues. It's a compounding effect because, again, we're not going to Home Depot and just purchasing something off the shelf. We're ordering in some cases 18, 24 months in advance. And what we need is a level of certainty on understanding how we can make these investments.
[16:29] John Avdoulos: And again, this goes back to having access to additional public funds that do serve the greater good and regulatory model that supports prudent pre-investment ahead of the grid. We also need practical supply chain measures to ensure that we have access to whether it be planned inventory or emergency inventory. And this is also being done through shared services and collaboration amongst local distribution companies. So bringing that knowledge into planning early is how we can get the grid from a constraint to an economic advantage. But there are contributing factors that need to evolve to allow that to happen.
[17:15] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, I mean, both of you have mentioned funding and affordability, and cost is a big aspect of this. You know, it's kind of foundational to what we're doing. The expansion of our grid, modernizing our grid, kind of meeting this growing need requires capital investment. You know, there are estimates that are looking at around $120 billion investments into our grid over the next 25 years. That's here in Ontario.
[17:42] Trevor Freeman: So, Teresa, there's a lot of conversation around the cost of investing, but you know, maybe let's look at it from the other perspective. What's the cost of not investing? You know, when our regulators are rightfully looking out for customers and making sure affordability is top of mind, are we putting it in perspective of what would it cost if we don't invest or don't make this shift?
[18:05] Teresa Sarkesian: That's a great question, Trevor. I think we do need to discuss the risk of not investing. If the local grid is not ready, as John had mentioned, I mean, housing gets delayed, you know, we can't necessarily get the talent pool, we'll have nowhere to house them for the future. If businesses have to wait too long to connect, they're going to move to other jurisdictions.
[18:31] Teresa Sarkesian: And I think, to some extent, the government got this right about a year ago. They told the Ontario Energy Board and the IESO—didn't just tell them, actually legislatively changed their mandate—that their kind of decision-making, their policies, their planning, all needs to start taking economic growth into consideration. Now, this is a new legislative mandate for both of them, so I think it still needs some, you know, some time to fully test it because we're only one year in. But I think it's to make our decision-makers very mindful that growth is a priority, so we do have to change the way that we've been doing things.
[19:16] Teresa Sarkesian: The other, you know, risks—and I don't want to sound like I'm a scaremonger here—but, you know, if we don't have a grid that's up and running and properly invested, you know, you do run risks longer term. I think about potential for, you know, outages where we can't get customers connected as fast with a fully electrified economy. That is very, very frightening if we don't have the resources to make sure we have the proper investments to get the lights back on after some sort of outage.
[19:48] Teresa Sarkesian: Mentioned that affordability needs to be critical, and everyone says, "Well, how much is the monthly increase on a bill? Is it going to be 50 cents, $2, $5, $10, whatever the case may be?" And I appreciate that everyone has a budget and there's different affordability standards for everybody. But we have to talk about, you know, what is this going to do for the broader quality of life and our economic success as local communities and as a province, and frankly, our whole country going forward? So we really need to have better discussion amongst all of us to really clearly demonstrate the value of investments in the electricity grid to all Ontarians.
[20:34] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, I think, you know, you touched on some great points there. This is something we talk about often of this this change is happening whether we're ready for it or not, right? People are interested in EVs, and we're not going to stop them from buying EVs. People are trying to expand their business, large loads are coming, and so it's not a matter of do we or don't we, it's how quickly and effectively can we pivot to this, how do we do this in a way that is cost-effective, economical, makes sense, supports growth, etc.
[21:05] Trevor Freeman: You know, that that big table of people that we talked about, making sure we've got everyone around the table, John, one of those stakeholders are our municipalities. A lot of utilities in Ontario are municipally owned. And you know, what's the role for municipalities in supporting this? We we know there's a big cost coming. We we know that putting that squarely on the shoulders of of ratepayers is, you know, challenging. Is there a role for municipalities or other levels of government to kind of help fund some of that growth to meet their own objectives as well? Lots of municipalities have targets and objectives as well.
[21:49] John Avdoulos: Yeah, I think municipalities play a key role, and and they're partners with utilities and distribution companies. We work very closely in the planning process. We work together with the ec dev folks to attract new investments into the area. And municipal shareholders, they understand both sides of of the issue. They want utilities to enable housing, jobs, community growth, but they also know that there's pressure to fund a lot of these capital programs. And ultimately, right now, a lot of the pressure gets placed on the customers as either on the tax base or the rate base.
[22:29] John Avdoulos: And there has to be a fundamental change to how we access funds and recognize that there are broader public benefits that are created when local infrastructure unlocks a new community, a new hospital, a new manufacturing facility, a new industrial investment. Local infrastructure has a a a role to play. And and that means that you need to tie the funding sources and mechanisms to be commensurate with what those benefits are. So it doesn't mean stepping away from from the utility discipline or or protecting customers. It means that you need to recognize that some investments create benefits well beyond today's ratepayers.
[23:18] John Avdoulos: There's there's existing federal and provincial tools that largely favor generation and transmission and projects above a larger tip level that we don't have access to. If if there's a fundamental change to being able to access that that funding, then then that unlocks some additional capacity that, again, doesn't fall on the the ratepayer or tax base.
[23:42] John Avdoulos: There's also fairer access to money that's already been committed. For example, to invest into smart grids or two-way power flow technology, digitalizing your system, we should have access to tax credits. That's a that's an easy way to inject new capital into investments that are very much needed that are sometimes considered gold plating the system. They're not gold plating the system. Those are mandatory requirements to managing and evolving a more complex multidirectional flow system.
[24:19] John Avdoulos: So support for the distribution system can help reduce to also reduce some of the more expensive bulk system investments that are needed. I think the the recent Dunsky report or or the IESO report shows that any investment into the distribution system has a direct benefit to the bulk system. And and I think we got to start looking at it from that perspective. And and these are the the the things that I'm hearing from our municipal shareholders and and at the the AMO conference that just passed is is that you need to look beyond just the ratepayer or the tax base to fund these projects because they do have a broader benefit to the public good.
[25:06] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, I mean, I think in years past, you could look at utility space as almost separate from what else is happening. But clearly, and part of this conversation, is this stuff is so intertwined that we're all trying to accomplish the same goals. What's the most efficient or the best way to kind of spread that around and avoid overburdening one part of the system or not?
[25:31] Trevor Freeman: Something else I want to touch back on, Teresa, that you said earlier was, you know, the regulatory side of things and the the evolution that's happening in order to support this growth. So Ontario is often looked at as a very highly regulated jurisdiction, at least in terms of North America. We've got the Ontario Energy Board, our Independent Electricity System Operator is involved. You know, we've had relatively flat demand over the previous number of decades. We're in a very different environment now. We've all been talking in the last, you know, a couple minutes here of how much things are changing. We're talking about rapid growth, electrification.
[26:11] Trevor Freeman: Is our current regulatory system set up for that? Is, you know, are there changes that need to happen, and if so, what reforms would the EDA be kind of recommending to allow LDCs to pivot and innovate without putting undue pressure or burden on our customers?
[26:30] Teresa Sarkesian: Well, my short answer is no. It is a regulatory regime that was fit for purpose for that flat and declining demand situation. So now we're in a situation of a lot of uncertainty, potentially a lot of rapid growth, certain areas of the province growing faster than others, so it's not a one-size-fits-all approach. I think the good news, as I mentioned before, is that I think that the Energy Board realizes that, and they've set up their new next-generation ratemaking framework. It's going to start, it'll be a three-year process. The scope of that, though, is a bit unknown, so we're going to work to hopefully shape some of the priorities going forward, and one of those priorities is to look at pre-investment in the grid.
[27:26] Teresa Sarkesian: And we appreciate that what we have to bring to the table and the reforms that we have to put forward, they have to be evidence-based, and they're going to have to be predictable. And we think that the OEB must collaborate with the distributors, obviously, in creating that framework going forward. Obviously, we want to ensure that we can build ahead our investment. There should be room to test solutions and then scale any successful solutions quickly.
[27:57] Teresa Sarkesian: We've been in some situations—and and my Chair, John, will be able to even speak to that—where we've had pilot projects, and then no one makes a decision on whether we can scale those or not. And I don't think we have the luxury of time going forward anymore to spend a lot of time noodling on whether something is, you know, perfect or not. What is that old expression, you know, "perfection's the enemy of the good"? So we have to make sure that we're able to make prudent investments and that the OEB can offer financing pathways that can reflect the diversity of Ontario's utilities.
[28:40] Teresa Sarkesian: And we're not asking for any less regulation. We don't want to not be responsible and not be accountable not only to the regulator, but to our ratepayers. But we are asking for a flexible, agile system that can meet the moment and can take us into the future for appropriate funding for the utilities, because any kind of lack of certainty of funding is going to create, you know, challenges going forward.
[29:10] Teresa Sarkesian: I just don't see the same complexities around generation in particular. Maybe transmission experiences a bit of what we do in the distribution sector, but we need a lot more certainty and clarity, and you know, we're going to need to move faster. So maybe 3 years is too long for the next-generation ratemaking framework, I don't really know, because I don't know the full scale and scope of it, and it does also embed a lot of other, you know, funding approaches that the OEB is taking a look at. But I'm going to say I'm happy that this is starting.
[29:48] Teresa Sarkesian: The other comment I will make, more recently we've had quite a few members go through their cost-of-service application process at the Ontario Energy Board, and they've done pretty well. They don't get everything they want, that's sort of the usual drill, but I think now we're seeing the utilities have done an excellent job putting forward evidence to justify the investments that they need for the future. And the commissioners are looking at that very seriously, ensuring that they're prudent investments. But we definitely have seen a shift, we've seen decisions, unlike decisions we've seen in the past, you know, where there are more significant increases, because there's a recognition that the grid needs to be ready and needs to be built up for for the customers.
[30:37] Teresa Sarkesian: And the customers are coming. Like this isn't like something that's down the road in 5 years, they've already started coming, and a lot of our members have been living that day-to-day. So I'm seeing progress. Is the progress going to be fast enough, I think is going to be the question.
[30:54] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, I mean, that's that's always sort of the crux of it. And and I can totally echo and support your statement of we're already seeing this. You know, it's something that I've said on this show a number of times, in my day-to-day job here at Hydro Ottawa, I talk to a lot of our large customers, and and we're seeing those requests and those that change coming in.
[31:15] Trevor Freeman: And and I like how you outlined that the role of change at the regulator level, also the role of utilities to adjust how we justify and demonstrate the need and make sure that we're telling that story appropriately. You know, John, the other player that I want to talk about here, as as our listeners know, energy is a provincial jurisdiction, so here in Ontario, that's the provincial government. They are also looking at what needs to happen in the sector in order to enable a future-ready grid. So so what are some of the practical outcomes that you and and the other members are hoping to see from kind of that review?
[31:54] John Avdoulos: Yeah, so at a fundamental level, I think the way we operate has has changed and and is changing dramatically. We no longer operate a a single-directional flow system. It's a multidirectional flow system. And in order to do that, you're going to have to change the way you operate, but you're going to need to be able to invest into your system to allow a multidirectional flow system to be enabled. That means you're going to have you're going to require visibility, you're going to have to implement some automation and some technology.
[32:27] John Avdoulos: And right now, there is no clear path on how to invest into your system without it being considered gold plated or excess. I think the the fundamental role of protecting ratepayers cannot be synonymous with "you can't spend money" or "you need to keep rates low," because that's antithetical to what's needed. And that's going to actually mortgage the future and cost more in the future. So a clear path on how to invest in your system, but then also again, the expansion, the pre-investment that we've touched on many times earlier in in the discussion, there has to be a pathway for regulatory incentives that support growth, innovation, and modernization earlier in the process.
[33:17] John Avdoulos: Aside from that, I think we have to work closer with with other LDCs and figure out how we can collaborate and share services, standardize, unify standards on on equipment that we utilize. So these are all beneficial to how we can operate in the future and and operate a a future-ready grid.
[33:40] John Avdoulos: But then the other part is also the planning process and and how it's currently a cycle-based process that I would call more top-down. I think we are connected to our municipalities at the ground level, and we know when when a new load is is coming in, and we can react fairly quickly. But if some of these load requests, these connection requests, are greater in magnitude, which is something a small LDC like us is experiencing—we're no longer getting 1- and 2-megawatt connections, we're getting 5, 10, 15, and in one case, an 80-megawatt connection—and we need to be ready to react to the the new environment that we're operating in. So, again, it's not your traditional "I need a 1-megawatt connection, and you can get them connected in a year." We need to be able to operate at that pace.
[34:36] John Avdoulos: So the other part of it is is that we also have our resiliency measures, our climate resiliency investments, can also not be deemed to be excess. We're getting hit in greater magnitude and in greater frequency, and we have to be able to invest into climate resiliency and not have that be seen as an excess.
[35:01] John Avdoulos: And then cyber security, one of the biggest threats that that can can cripple the industry, is also something that should be looked at as a core investment, not an ancillary investment. So when you when you couple all of these together, what it boils down to is that we're going to need a sector that can rely on predictability in the rules and the outcomes, and that we can plan and finance major programs more effectively with a framework that is stable, and the expectations are clear.
[35:34] John Avdoulos: And I and I think that we're in the process of getting there right now, but again, I think the 3-, 6-year timeframe is misaligned right now. And I think we have to figure out how we can expedite, because the the system is not going to wait for us. It's out of our control right now, and and we need to be as proactive as we can be in the current environment.
[36:01] Trevor Freeman: Teresa, you know, listening to some of the the things that John brings up, it strikes me as there's a lot of, you know, realities on the ground for LDCs that that John's touching on. And as the voice of the distribution companies in Ontario—that's one of the roles that the EDA plays—is there something that you think, you know, policymakers, our our large business leaders, and the general public still doesn't quite understand about the role that local utilities will play in the future? Like what's kind of the the message, the big education piece that comes to mind for you?
[36:38] Teresa Sarkesian: Well, I'm going to find it hard to believe I'm going to say this, but you know, back in 2018, we launched our Power of Local Hydro campaign. And it was to showcase the great things our utilities do, that they're on the front lines of power with the customers. They know what customers like and don't like about bigger-picture electricity policy. And I certainly know from years back when I was doing a lot of lobbying in the the mid the mid-teens of the 2000s, people didn't get it, right? We'd say, "Well, customers don't like X, Y, and Z," and the government said, "No, our policies are great. We're going to keep, you know, keep calm and carry on basically."
[37:25] Teresa Sarkesian: And I I constantly remind decision-makers that they have a lot of ambitions, right? They've got the housing, we've got now new electricity heat pumps, you know, from the federal government. And it's like these are all great initiatives, and totally believe in them, but in a lot of these cases, it does require the local utility to be able to provide some sort of support, whether that's helping with marketing the programs, or you're making investments in your grid to accommodate, or you're looking at fuel switching, suddenly if they're electricity heat pumps, there's going to be more load and demand on the grid, we have to make sure there's more capacity.
[38:05] Teresa Sarkesian: And I think people get very excited about big generation and big trans- transmission. Those are the big sexy things you can stand in front of, you know, you know, big infrastructure and take big photo ops. And that's great, but again, it's a three-legged stool: it's generation, transmission, and distribution. And so if you're looking at all those big major projects, you also have to carve out time to look at the distribution piece.
[38:31] Teresa Sarkesian: And I think because we are a little different in our structure in Ontario where we have a lot of utilities in Ontario because over 100 years ago, our provincial government decided the rollout of electricity would be done by the local municipalities, they'd be able to electrify the province faster. And I think that was a great decision in its day, and frankly, it's it's held well. Like we've been connecting customers for over 100 years, and we're going to be on the front lines connecting them for for the next 100.
[39:03] Teresa Sarkesian: So I I just encourage, particularly the federal decision-makers, because they're into major projects, they talk a lot about generation and transmission going east-west across the country, and you know, they're all ears, which is great, but I do remind them that if you're looking at providing funding or maybe lower-cost loans and and and credit, etc., to all these entities, you have to remember there's three pieces of that announcement: there should be generation, transmission, and distribution. And all we're seeking is some parity around eligibility, you know, going forward.
[39:40] Teresa Sarkesian: But we are getting a good ear from people. People are listening, particularly at the federal government. I'm just waiting to see how we're going to fit into those, you know, big public announcements going forward.
[39:53] Trevor Freeman: Great, yeah. And you know, John, we're kind of getting to that the tail end of our conversation here. So what are some of the specific, kind of concrete infrastructure investments that you would consider, the EDA would consider, as kind of non-negotiable? I mean, what are the things that have to happen in order to realize this future we're talking about, and and maybe help people understand what's happening behind the scenes when we talk about connecting a large new load, for example, determining how we service the capacity requests that we're getting? So kind of, you know, take maybe a two-pronged approach to that. What are the things that you really need to see, and and what's happening behind the scenes that our customers don't necessarily have line of sight to?
[40:42] John Avdoulos: Yeah, so I'll start off. Fundamentally, we're asset managers, and and and I would say that we are excellent asset managers. We do a phenomenal job in maintaining and responding to our system. But the reality is is the system is getting older.
[40:57] John Avdoulos: So I think some of the non-negotiables is that we have to continue to invest into the current system to ensure that it is resilient, that it can meet the additional new loads and and capacity that's required. And sometimes that means additional investments in stronger poles, wires, additional vegetation management, and also then the automation, sensors, isolation devices, fault isolation devices, and and the cybersecurity systems and digital systems needed for a for a two-way power flow and and being able to unlock distributed energy resources. So this is kind of the fundamental non-negotiable. This is what we have to do and continue to do, but it is at an increased level because, again, the the assets are becoming a little bit more aged, the weather impacts are a bit more severe, and the connected loads are much larger.
[41:59] John Avdoulos: So that puts a stress and strain on the system, which then means that how do you plan for the for the the next steps? And that's a pretty dynamic process. And this is all the stuff the public typically doesn't see, is that all the stuff that goes on behind the scenes to ensure that we understand how is the current system operating, how can we optimize the current system, but then how do we plan for these new loads?
[42:24] John Avdoulos: And in some cases, this takes years of forecasting, engineering, municipal coordination, land and permitting work, procurements. In in some cases, we're we're in the 18 to 24 months, if not longer, for some of the long-lead items. And then workforce planning.
[42:43] John Avdoulos: So our workforce is is highly skilled. It's it's not someone coming in off the street. We require years of of training to achieve a competency level, or a level of competency that allows our our workforce to be able to make decisions and work on the equipment sometimes in very dangerous situations. And and that's another aspect that we're always trying to assess for, like our human capital planning, our resource planning. It's it's a 10-year window that we're always looking at what new requirements do we have for expansion and load, plus who are we losing as our our workforce is aging.
[43:29] John Avdoulos: And and this is something that comes out of Electricity Human Resources Canada where where there's a projection of a requirement for 130,000 job openings across Canada between 2028 and 2050. And and this includes engineers, powerline technicians, skilled trades. So workforce planning has to has to happen at the same time as all of our capital planning and and existing asset management.
[43:57] John Avdoulos: And the other part, I think, that is is something that a lot of people don't see is is the amount of effort we put into safety: assessing potential unsafe conditions, planning for unsafe conditions. And this all goes into how we ready ourselves to expand the capacity and understand the system impacts that upgrades do have.
[44:26] John Avdoulos: So there's it's not a static system, it's a it's a very complex system. And there are multiple variables, again, whether age of assets, expansion of of new capacity requirements, plus workforce readiness, and the evolving way we operate the system going from a a unidirectional to a multidirectional flow system. These are all the things that that are are happening behind the scenes. And and these are all non-negotiable. None of these are areas that a utility can skimp on or defer. These are all fundamental and requirements on a day-to-day basis.
[45:12] John Avdoulos: And for us, you know, this is a this is a the way we live on a daily basis. And making sure that we are engaged early, whether it's the municipalities or or with the system planners at that at the IESO level, and having a regulatory path for prudent pre-investment are very important to support the the investments that are needed, or or what the people don't see happening as well.
[45:48] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, I I think, you know, in my role, I get to talk to a lot of folks, a lot of customers, help people understand, you know, how the system works. And I think one of the the most important pieces or or or understandings or concepts for those not familiar is just how complex and how many moving parts, both literally and figuratively, there there are in the system. And that's before we get into grid modernization, that's before we kind of look ahead in what we need to change and grow. And and so all these things you're identifying are are leveling up what's already a really complex system. And I I echo your thoughts on how how the LDCs and other our stakeholders in this system are are managing that today and and just kind of wanting to take it to that next step.
[46:37] Trevor Freeman: You know, Teresa, thinking about that, and and thinking about the the sheer scale of the transition ahead of us from electrification to grid modernization, there's a lot of talk in in Canada, at least, about nation-building projects, right? We hear that all the time. We we usually hear it in the context of large, massive energy projects. Does investment in local distribution count as nation-building projects? Like what what's the the EDA's stance on that? You know, how does how should the public look at these investments that we're talking about here today?
[47:15] Teresa Sarkesian: I think the distribution sector is part of those nation-building projects, whether I think people are thinking about it consciously or not. If you are building generation and transmission, where does it go without the distribution sector? You would not be able to deliver that electricity that's being generated and transmitted unless you have the distribution companies to distribute it to the customers.
[47:44] Teresa Sarkesian: And I think what's sort of exciting when I think about it is that you can have one big mega project, and it has all these spinoff elements to the customer and to the distribution system. So it's not just one project, you could be looking at hundreds or thousands of coordinated local projects. You could have substations, and feeders, and transformers, and digital controls, and all these customer connections, and all these customer conversations. And that's what's going to make the provincial-wide growth possible.
[48:19] Teresa Sarkesian: You know, we already own $35 billion in distribution infrastructure in Ontario, and we're already making over $3 billion a year in capital upgrades and and modernization. And so I think when you think about that, and then you think about the future where you had mentioned the EDA has indicated that there'd be another $120 billion needed to fund the distribution grid up to 2050, people should view the scale of all that with both kind of urgency and confidence.
[48:54] Teresa Sarkesian: Obviously urgency that the assets have to be kind of ready before the demand arrives, and confidence because LDCs are so well trusted in their local communities to be able to deliver reliable service, you know, under obviously strong oversight. So I think the opportunity is to pair all of that discipline with a modern framework, and obviously fair access to capital as well.
[49:26] Trevor Freeman: So I know as we kind of close here, you know, lots of great conversation, lots of great points. This is maybe going to be one of those like, "Hey, sum it all up in one statement" type questions, but I'm I'm going to look to both of you to kind of look ahead. And and I tend to be a a fairly optimistic, you know, maybe rose-colored glasses type of guy. Assuming we get there, assuming we're able to make this change, that we're able to pivot and and kind of meet the the task ahead of us, what do you think will be key for that, or the key for that? You know, what what will the local hydro utility look like for for our customers in, let's say, 25 years, you know, in 2050, when we've all got our lives electrified and and we're kind of in that new reality? Teresa, what does that local hydro utility look like to you?
[50:23] Teresa Sarkesian: Well, I'm just going to set the table a little bit, and then I'd like John to talk about where he'd like the hydro utility of 2050 to look like. But I think the biggest challenge going forward is someone look back in 2050 like, "Oh, what did these people do back in 2026?" I think they'll say, was Ontario able to shift quickly enough from simply maintaining a system built for flat demand to build one that was ready for growth? So the task is not really just to produce more electricity, but it has to make sure it reaches the customers reliably, affordably, and at a pace that the communities need.
[51:06] Teresa Sarkesian: So the decisions that matter the most are the ones that are going to allow us to plan ahead rather than react after constraints appeared. And I think this is so important to make sure that we get it right, that we can rise up to the challenge of moving faster with, you know, a collaboration going forward. And I think I'm going to leave it with John to wrap up with what does that utility look like in 2050, because it's very exciting.
[51:39] Trevor Freeman: Mhm.
[51:40] John Avdoulos: I think you you really hit on the the important things that that a future utility needs to needs to deliver. So I'm going to give a little bit of a kind of a non-sexy answer. The utility of the future, if we do everything we're supposed to do, it's out of the headlines. It means that we've done what we were supposed to do. We've delivered power on time at an affordable, reliable, high-value aspect to our customers. The power is there when people need it, we didn't hold up growth, and the customers benefit from a system that they can use every day that is efficient, sustainable, and reliable.
[52:33] John Avdoulos: So, not a sexy answer, but we're typically in the headlines when things go wrong or when delays occur. And for me, I think that if we can do everything that we're talking about that's needed to be done today, then in 2050, we shouldn't have these challenges, we we should just be invisible. We would have met and achieved the outcomes that Teresa just mentioned in terms of what the expectations are. And that all depends on the choices we make now.
[53:05] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, I mean, it's I totally hear what you're saying. It's I kind of forget off the top of my head who who has this quote, but, you know, it's related to climate change, and people don't really care so much about electrification or what technology goes in. I mean, maybe nerds like me care about that, but really what most people care about is cold beer and hot showers. They want the things in their lives to work the way they want them to work. They want their businesses to be able to run. They don't want to have to spend a lot of brain power thinking about the utility. That's our job, that's what we do. And so I totally kind of hear what you're saying and and echo that.
[53:46] Trevor Freeman: Thanks to both of you for the conversation here today. This is this is really great to kind of get your perspective and and touch base. And I know, Teresa, you've been on the show a number of times here, and it's always good to check in with where the kind of the voice or the the pulse of the the industry is.
[54:02] Trevor Freeman: We always end our interviews with a series of questions here. And Teresa, I truncated the list slightly because you've already been on and answered these, although maybe we should have done a side-by-side comparison, but regardless. So I'm gonna I'm gonna dive into those and I'll ask each of you these questions. So, Teresa, we'll start with you. What's a book that you've read recently that you think everybody should read?
[54:26] Teresa Sarkesian: Well, I gotta be honest with you, Trevor, I think my answers on this sound far more intelligent than what I'm going to say to you today. I've been so busy the last couple of years with work. Most of my work-related things that I read about come from smaller articles, whether it's in Utility Dive or Harvard Business Review, even through my association affiliations, there's a lot of things I read.
[54:50] Teresa Sarkesian: So I'm into escapism. And because I have a master's degree in criminology, I'm interested in crime stuff. So on the book—and I think this was on the London Times bestseller list—it's called "London Falling."
[55:04] Trevor Freeman: Okay.
[55:04] Teresa Sarkesian: And the story is about a young man who unfortunately fell to his death, and he was 19 years old, but for about three or four years, he'd been masquerading as the son of a Russian oligarch. And the people he connected with in the world of organized crime is absolutely extraordinary. So I found it a fascinating read. So anyone who's interested in true stories like that, I'd encourage you to read it because it's very, very well written, and it was a fascinating true story.
[55:38] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, and I I swear this is true, that's actually sitting on my bedside table right now. It's next up. It's like the top of my pile. I always have like a bit of a pile.
[55:46] Teresa Sarkesian: No way! Oh, that's cool.
[55:48] Trevor Freeman: Patrick Radden Keefe, his other book, "Say Nothing," is also fantastic about the Troubles in in Ireland.
[55:54] Teresa Sarkesian: Yeah, I want to read that. Mhm.
[55:55] Trevor Freeman: John, over to you. What's a book that you've read that you think everyone should read?
[55:59] John Avdoulos: So the the book that I want to bring forward is a book called "Scary Smart." It's a book written by Mo Gawdat, who he has a few few different books, but he's a he's an ex-Google executive that in in 2020, he left Google as they were really pushing forward with their AI strategy and and large language models and trying to achieve agentic AI. And and and he wrote a a book not for engineers, not for scientists, it's for the regular person, and I think that everyone should read this book.
[56:40] John Avdoulos: And essentially, it's a three-part book. The first one talks about AI and the implications of AI. And and then the second part of the book is the scary part. The scary part is what can go wrong, what are the risks. But then it evolves into the third part, which is the smart side and the benefits that AI can can potentially bring, whether on solving some of these chronic health diseases that that people suffer with.
[57:12] John Avdoulos: And it's a really enlightening perspective. And again, it's for the regular reader, so it's not an overly complex book. But the one stat that continues to—and it was written in 2021, which in retrospect now 5 years later, a lot of the stuff that he has said is like it's coming to it's it's coming, and it's and he's not off. And and there is a fine line between scary and smart.
[57:39] John Avdoulos: And one of the the the stats that I I use to keep it into context is, is in today's world, an average person is 1 billion times more intelligent than a housefly. If AI continues to evolve as it is at today's pace, by 2040, AI will be 1 billion times smarter than our smartest person. And I just try to fathom that and put it into context to say that is not normal.
[58:24] John Avdoulos: And I think that it's a it's a it's a really important book for people just to to understand what the implications of AI are and and how fine a line it is between the scary and the smart.
[58:40] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, I'll have to check that out. I would say about a third of my podcast feed right now that I listen to is rather disconcerting takes on AI and where we're at, and the pace, and and how things are changing, and sometimes I have to pull myself out of that. But yeah, great, thanks for the recommendation, John.
[58:57] Trevor Freeman: So a similar question again to both of you, and and John, maybe we'll stick with you, and and you can give your answer: a movie or a show that you've watched that you think everyone should have a look at.
[59:08] John Avdoulos: So the last movie I've seen was a Ryan Gosling movie, and it's called "Project Hail Mary." And it it was an easy watch, I loved the movie. It was an existential threat to the Earth that needed him to travel to the other side of the universe and and connected with an additional life form, and they worked together to solve a problem. And it was just a it was a feel-good movie. And I I think Ryan Gosling's just a great actor. And I believe it's it's gotten some good Rotten Tomatoes reviews too, so that's always nice to watch a movie that isn't a bust. But for me, it was "Project Hail Mary."
[59:58] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, that's a great one. And and also a great book that's somewhere here behind me on my bookshelves. It's a it's a great read as well, really a nice read. It's a good beach read. Teresa, what about you? Movie or show?
[1:00:10] Teresa Sarkesian: Well, I continue with my crime and thriller experiences. So right now, I'm watching "Slow Horses," and I love Gary Oldman as an actor. He's an absolute genius, he's brilliant. I think I've seen almost everything in his—oh, must be getting close to a 50-year career. And you know, it's uh it's British.
[1:00:32] Teresa Sarkesian: And the other show I finished watching, my husband and I binged it, we loved it, was "The Gentlemen." So it's a Guy Ritchie production. So you have to tolerate a lot of violence in these shows, and sometimes I wonder what's wrong with me. I have a stressful job in the electricity sector, I keep really busy, and and this is this is how I cut loose. So there you go.
[1:00:54] Trevor Freeman: It's great to have these. I mean, I love these this part of the interview because I it's how I build my list of books to read, things to watch, this is great. Okay, to wrap it all up, what's something about the energy sector or its future that gets you really excited? And John, we'll start with you.
[1:01:13] John Avdoulos: I think it's it's the opportunity that's in front of us to really achieve what I know we're capable of achieving and getting to that 2050 point where we are just invisible, which means we've been successful in modernizing our grid, connecting large loads, impacting economic development, ensuring that people's daily lives are not interrupted. And we're doing it in a way where we're incorporating high-value assets and resources to the supply mix that allow for a flexible and adaptive power system to deliver that enhanced customer experience.
[1:01:59] John Avdoulos: And and that's it's really exciting. I know we can do it. You know, I on my daily chats that I have with everyone, everyone's really pumped to be in this industry. It's an exciting industry, and that for me is what energizes me.
[1:02:18] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, great. Well said. Teresa, final word to you. What's something that that you're particularly excited about?
[1:02:24] Teresa Sarkesian: Well, I'm going to pick up on the comment that John made about people. I think the opportunities ahead over the next 25 years, our sector is going to be a really exciting place to work. It already is, but it's even to be more fascinating. And I'm excited for young people, that they should seriously look at the distribution sector for careers. You can have lifelong careers here and do so many different things with the massive evolution that's coming forward.
[1:02:54] Teresa Sarkesian: When I look back, I was at the launch of the Electricity Human Resources Canada labor market study 2, 3 years ago. And I asked the economist at the time when they talked about all the transformation and all the new jobs that were going to be created, I said, "Well, what other sectors are on par with electricity and distribution?" And he said, "There aren't any others." He said, "Your sector is going to go through the biggest economic restructuring and change and opportunities for jobs bigger than any other sector in the country." And I just said, "What a great place for young people to look ahead and build their careers in our industry." So that's what I'm excited about.
[1:03:38] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, that's a great way to kind of round out this conversation. Thanks for that, and I totally agree. Teresa and John, thanks so much for your time today. This is a great conversation, I really appreciate it.
[1:03:47] Teresa Sarkesian: Thank you, Trevor.
[1:03:48] John Avdoulos: Appreciate you guys having us.
[1:03:49] Trevor Freeman: Take care.
[1:03:51] Outro Voiceover: Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Think Energy podcast. Don't forget to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and it would be great if you could leave us a review. It really helps to spread the word. As always, we would love to hear from you, whether it's feedback, comments, or an idea for a show or a guest. You can always reach us at thinkenergy@hydroottawa.com.

As energy demands continue to grow, and the global fuel market's volatility increases, hydropower—or water power—becomes more and more valuable. 
Lorena Patterson, President and CEO of WaterPower Canada, joins host Trevor Freeman in conversation about energy bleeding together with security, incorporating hydropower into Canada's plans to double the grid by 2050, and the importance of Indigenous consultation when looking to do so. They also explore how Canada is in a unique position with its hydropower abilities, and why it's hard to draw international comparisons. 
Related links 
Lorena Patterson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lorenaapatterson/

WaterPower Canada: https://waterpowercanada.ca/


Hydropower Sustainability Standard: https://www.hs-alliance.org/hs-standard
Trevor Freeman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trevor-freeman-p-eng-8b612114 

Hydro Ottawa: https://hydroottawa.com/en  

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[00:00] Intro Voiceover: Welcome to Think Energy, a podcast that dives into the fast-changing world of energy through conversations with industry leaders, innovators, and people on the front lines of the energy transition. Join me, Trevor Freeman, as I explore the traditional, unconventional, and up-and-coming facets of the energy industry. If you have any thoughts, feedback, or ideas for topics we should cover, please reach out to us at thinkenergy@hydroottawa.com.
[00:30] Trevor Freeman: Hi everyone, and welcome back to Think Energy. I'm excited to be back behind the microphone after our summer hiatus. I hope everyone out there was able to find some time to relax or, if not, at least do something exciting. Um, it was a busy summer for me. I don't know if I'd call it relaxing, but uh had a lot of fun. I was able to visit the west coast of Canada with my family, and we had a really amazing time enjoying the ocean, the forests, the mountains, and really all the natural beauty that uh the West Coast has to offer. Uh, it's not an area that I'd spent a lot of time in, so it was really fun to be able to do that with my family.
[01:05] Trevor Freeman: But here we are in September. Back to school, the final push of the year, it seems like. This always seems like a bit of a hectic time of year. Um, the days are getting shorter. But, you know, one thing that hasn't changed is that this is a pretty pivotal time in the energy sector. Um, and that really shows no signs of changing at all. Demand for energy, and electricity in particular, is at an all-time high and growing. In so many ways, the way that we've always done things is is being upended. I think you see that kind of everywhere, and and that is true in the energy sector as well.
[01:37] Trevor Freeman: From an electricity demand perspective, here in Canada, we're still looking at a potential doubling of our national demand by about 2050 to power everything from electric vehicles, AI data centers, critical mining. And as a result, you know, the energy sector and energy security is getting more and more closely linked to national security than ever before, which kind of is a good step into today's conversation.
[02:08] Trevor Freeman: While we're often talking about a new way of doing things, new technology, new processes, and I even kind of talked about things being upended, sometimes it's also good to remind ourselves of what homegrown assets, you know, domestic assets we already have. Something that has brought this to light recently is the announcement just this past August of a historic $70 billion agreement to redevelop Churchill Falls and Gull Island. It's a big hydro generating station.
[02:35] Trevor Freeman: And, of course, today we're talking about hydropower. So, if you will, forgive the very basic explainer, but just to be sure we're all on the same page, hydropower refers to using the flow of water—so downhill or from a raised reservoir, run of river, for example—to turn turbines to generate electricity. Now, it's worth pointing out the obvious that here in Canada, hydropower is so foundational to our national electricity story that the word "hydro" is often used to refer to electricity. People talk about getting their hydro bill, or the hydro is on, or the hydro's out. And that's why the distribution company that I work for is called Hydro Ottawa, even though we distribute electricity, not water. And you can find similar examples all across the country.
[03:22] Trevor Freeman: Canada is blessed with a multitude of natural resources, including an abundance of opportunities for hydroelectric generation, many of which we've taken advantage of, but there are more opportunities out there. So, to help launch our new season, we're joined today by Lorena Patterson, the President and CEO of WaterPower Canada. With a rather dynamic career spanning international trade, executive leadership in natural gas, and key posts across North America, Lorena brings a unique global perspective to the renewable energy landscape.
[03:52] Trevor Freeman: In today's conversation, we're going to talk about how her background in traditional energy helps influence and inform her views on renewables, um you know, what major regional deals could mean for grid reliability, household bills, how do we kind of evolve a big resource without putting the burden solely on our end customers, on sort of the ratepayers, um and what does it truly take to get strategic waterpower projects built in the future. Lorena, welcome to Think Energy.
[04:22] Lorena Patterson: Thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here.
[04:24] Trevor Freeman: So, Lorena, I wonder if you could just start by telling us a little bit about WaterPower Canada, and ultimately, you know, what drew you to the sector and to this specific organization?
[04:32] Lorena Patterson: Yeah, absolutely. So, uh WaterPower Canada represents Canada's hydroelectricity industry. So we have about 95% of the companies that produce hydroelectricity across the country, as well as the companies that support them, so engineering firms, environmental firms, etc. Um, we produce about uh well, just over half of Canada's electricity, and together with wind and solar, um the industry actually is powered 85% by clean energy. So Canada already has a very very clean grid thanks to our large history with with hydroelectricity.
[05:14] Lorena Patterson: Um, so I I was drawn to the industry because I am from the energy um industry. I worked for about 20 years in pipelines, uh mostly out of Mexico City. Um, I have that international perspective on what it's like when you don't have enough energy, and um and I'd like to to remind Canadians just how fortunate they are to have such tremendous resources. Um, so coming to this industry was really a perfect fit. Uh, the the hydro industry in Canada is very well accepted. It's very clean. It's part of our future. It's it's very part very much part of our history, and that's really what drew me to the to the organization. It's a it's a really great association.
[05:59] Trevor Freeman: Great. And I think timing-wise, as you and I record this conversation, there's a lot going on in the world of energy, electricity generation, electricity transmission. You know, we're we're talking during a time of frayed international relations, if I might say so, on a time of where, you know, Canada's looking to build out sort of east-west interconnections when it comes to electricity. But we're also talking at a time where um demand for electricity is is growing at an unprecedented rate, and this is, you know, from electrification as a result of climate change and the energy transition, but also, you know, major loads that we're looking for now.
[06:40] Trevor Freeman: So all of that sort of sets the stage for a pretty pivotal time in the energy industry. So what is your top priority or what is your organization's top priority during this time? And are you seeing sort of the national conversation evolve to include hydropower in a bigger way, or or just tell us a little bit about how uh how you see things fitting right now given all that context?
[07:05] Lorena Patterson: Absolutely. I think hydropower has some great opportunities going forward. The Prime Minister has correctly identified uh that we need to have more energy, um and we need it as quickly as possible. Just this morning, there was an announcement that uh some energy projects will be um subjected to a a less lengthy review. Uh, this this is just brand-new breaking news this morning uh that we're reading this the uh with regards to major projects. Those are fossil fuel projects, um so the next question is, well, do we want our clean energy projects to be subject to a longer review as well, and you know, that might not make um as much sense. But we understand that they're trying to get everything underway and and building again as as soon as possible. But I think we would argue that we would need similar, or we would like to have similar, uh processes for our projects, given how they are clean and and they are supporting our objectives of meeting uh the doubling of our grid by 2050.
[08:14] Lorena Patterson: So it is uh it it's becoming much more critical, I would say, than it ever has, given the geopolitical situation with the United States. We absolutely need to have greater connectivity from east to west and also from south to north, because we need to bring in all of those isolated communities that are still relying very heavily on diesel. Um, run-of-river projects in those communities work really well. They're clean. Um, we have a couple of examples where there's been a large equity piece for the um Indigenous communities, and sometimes they've been actually even led by the communities themselves. And it just It It It makes a lot of sense. So So where hydro fits, where there's a geological um the the geological situation favors it, and hydrological situation favors it, it really makes a lot of sense, and there is room for more large hydro. So you probably saw the recent announcement of Churchill Falls. They're also analyzing one in BC. So Canada is not done with hydro yet. There's still a lot more to do, and it's just a question of building that into our build-out, our very aggressive build-out for 2050.
[09:28] Trevor Freeman: Great. Uh and you recently released a blog post where you made the argument that, you know, energy security and national security go hand in hand. When we're talking about our national security, which again kind of seems to be top of mind in a lot of conversations lately, energy security is important. And we hear this from our customers. You know, there's a squeeze on There's an affordability crisis or or people are feeling that there's an affordability crisis, and energy is not immune to that. So you talked a little bit about our domestic waterpower, or the potential for even more waterpower. How does that play a role in protecting us from some of the price swings that we might be seeing from some of the sort of volatility in the global fuel market?
[10:14] Lorena Patterson: Absolutely. Um, in the areas of Canada where they don't have access to hydro, or they're high highly dependent on um propane, or fuel oil, or these or diesel, which is even worse, they're subject to all of these swings that we're seeing in the market with gas prices. Gas prices are now over $100 a barrel. All of that flows through into their fuel costs and the cost of heating their homes and businesses, and that ultimately means higher prices. In areas where you rely very heavily on hydro, you don't have those sorts of swings, because there's essentially no fuel cost. The It's just the flow of the water, and the operating costs tend to be very, very low for hydro. So it makes a lot of sense, particularly for those areas where we have strong historical connections with the industry, and and they've relied very heavily on on hydro for um for their grids.
[11:08] Trevor Freeman: Mhm. Uh now, when we talk about, and you've you've touched on this a couple times, you know, clean energy, and and obviously Canada has um sort of emissions reduction targets, including in the energy sector, um when we think about renewable electricity, I think a lot of folks, their mind goes to wind and solar, but hydro generation is really kind of like the original clean energy. It's been around for over a century. In fact, here in in Ottawa where I am, we've got Canada's oldest surviving hydroelectric facility that's still in operation uh since, you know, 1890s uh roughly. And so what's the role of hydropower as kind of a a key foundational backbone of building out that grid, getting more access to more clean electricity, and and maybe if you could touch on some of the innovative ideas like pumped storage um that can also play a role in that?
[12:05] Lorena Patterson: Yeah, absolutely. So I I think this is a really critical piece what you mentioned. So the the oldest hydro facility here in Ottawa, what it came along with the lumber boom. So hydro developments typically happen in conjunction with other industries. It's an enabler of economic growth. So the other really close industry um that works uh with hydro is is mining. So a lot of the mines have have historically used hydro um to power their facilities, and and still do today. So I think it enables this growth uh of other industries in a in a very healthy way. It's a very healthy synergy between industry development and power supply.
[12:47] Lorena Patterson: And then pumped storage is a great opportunity for Canada. We haven't really done much here, but it it will provide um there are a couple of projects that are under development now. It will give us uh the ability to store the power um in a in a new way that we really haven't been taking advantage of. So, as an example, when uh you have a pumped storage project, you have two So you've got a reserve on the top of of typically of some sort of escarpment, and then you can pull on it any time you need it. So it works like a battery. It's a big big We call it a big blue battery, and it's used around the world in in many places. It can give up to 8 hours of storage. A lot of the large battery facilities that you're seeing that are being developed now are about half that, and they're quite expensive to develop as well.
[13:42] Lorena Patterson: So we we see a lot of future for pumped storage here. The United States has a few more facilities for and and um projects for for hydro uh pumped hydro than we do, and I'll give you an example that in in Ludington, um in the United States, they they have a um pumped storage plant that mitigated the Northeast energy collapse in 2003.
[14:05] Trevor Freeman: Mhm.
[14:06] Lorena Patterson: So, if you remember, in 2003, there was this massive blackout that impacted Ontario, Quebec, and the northeast United States, and it was rolling out across the system. And it got to Ludington, which was built in the '70s and is not digital, it's it's analog, and so the it stopped there. And then when the start-up happened again, because they had this pumped storage facility, they were able to dispatch energy and start getting it going the other way. They call that a black start. So so it it they can serve as a very um important backup to systems. And, obviously, um anything that you build today will be connected digitally, but I think that that lesson um is is certainly something the industry is taking into account, that it it is good to have those facilities in order to help mitigate some Sometimes you have emergency situations that uh that need a different kind of attention. Pumped storage is really a great technology that we should be doing a lot more of.
[15:06] Trevor Freeman: Mhm. Yeah, and I think storage in general, I mean, we've talked on the the show before about battery storage and the the importance of creating that flexibility on the grid, letting us sort of flatten out those peaks. Traditionally, we've always just built to kind of the worst-case scenario, if you will, the worst hour, the highest peak. More storage lets us flatten that out, and and I think all the different storage options are helpful here. And so where there are opportunities for pumped storage, um I think it's a it's a great tool on the grid to help us sort of as grid managers uh maximize uh the utilization of of our grid assets.
[15:47] Lorena Patterson: And the other piece that it gives us the possibility to do is hedging in the market a little bit more. So you It just gives you an extra edge to take take advantage of some of those swings in power supply so you can actually maximize the economic value of your of your grid as well.
[16:04] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, absolutely. So exciting to kind of see that that's part on your radar and something that I assume you're kind of advocating for, your organization is advocating for.
[16:13] Lorena Patterson: Absolutely.
[16:14] Trevor Freeman: So you mentioned just a little bit ago kind of the big news from um about a month ago, or a couple weeks ago, this historic $70 billion agreement between Hydro-Québec, Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro, and the federal government to uh replace or update the 1969 Churchill Falls contract. So this is a a a major uh agreement, the biggest kind of of its kind. Uh talk us a little bit through kind of your reaction, how that aligns with what your organization is advocating for, and um you know, yeah, just your initial thoughts on that.
[16:47] Lorena Patterson: Absolutely. Uh I would say relief. Uh we were waiting for that MOU uh to to be signed and go forward after some uncertainty last year. Super happy to see this go forward. Um it represents a a great partnership between Newfoundland and Labrador, Quebec, and the federal government to make sure that the project can go forward. Um I'm pretty sure those uh negotiations are are going, you know, pretty much uh with very very full intensity for the next little while, um so we'll see what the final deal is.
[17:21] Lorena Patterson: But it will bring Newfoundland and Labrador a much better economic value for having those assets there in their province. It's going to enable them to export for the first time, and it's going to power um about 2 and 1/2 million homes uh when it's finally built, and and we've got the Gull Island project as well, so it's a it's a significant project. It will also help to diversify the grid in the Northeast, it's going to give us a lot more reliability, and allow us to electrify um homes and businesses in accordance with uh the 2050 plan. So it's a great project, and we're really happy to see it going forward.
[17:59] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, I think, I mean, you kind of already answered a little bit about the next thing I was going to ask, this Gull Island project, which, you know, for for our listeners, is 2,700 megawatts of of generation,'s been talked about for decades and it's kind of been given the green light finally, looks like it's moving forward. So, um expand a little bit on what you were just talking about, you know, unlocking the potential of um hydro generation in this area and what that means for really all of eastern Canada for the grid in in that part of our country.
[18:31] Lorena Patterson: It's um well, it's not just eastern Canada, it's also the northeast United States. We've got some very strong interties into the United States, and um current tensions aside, we have a very integrated and diverse grid thanks to the cooperation between this entire region. So it's really one of those examples of Canadian-US partnerships that have benefited everyone that lives in the area. Um and it's also going to enable a lot of people to get off propane, to get off fuel oil, and and all of those sorts of um products that are that have a lot of disadvantages to them.
[19:08] Lorena Patterson: Um one of the big things that we've seen in uh Indigenous communities, for example, that have substituted uh diesel with hydro is the lack of noise. They talk about the lack of noise, because you're used to those generators, and I think people maybe don't realize just how noisy those are, and and you've always got this noise pollution. So when you bring in electricity that's clean and it's it's it's coming in from another area, and you can substitute those sorts of generator generators, it does make a big impact on the community. So um that's, I think, what we're hoping to see from this project. Um there's obviously a long way to go. They have to obviously consult with the local Innu people that are in the area, but I'm I'm quite confident that they're they're going to um they're going to get there, and uh it will ultimately benefit everyone in the in that region.
[20:00] Trevor Freeman: So, I mean, we've we've both mentioned a few times, these have been, you know, years or decades in the making these projects. You know, major projects like this often get stuck in a little bit of a a regulatory or political, you know, standstill, whirlwind, if you will. Um any insider thought into what finally tipped this one into moving forward? You know, what what lined up at sort of the federal, provincial, and uh even local level to make this actually happen? Is there any sort of secret sauce here?
[20:30] Lorena Patterson: Well, I think, given the pressure that we're feeling right now as a country in terms of the the commercial disputes with with our neighbor to the south, it's actually allowed us to kind of galvanize our attention on where it should be, which is making sure that Canadians have enough energy for for the next generations to come without depending on other regions. You know, and it's it's a difficult balance, because on the one hand, yes, the the integration with the United States and the um certainly helps all of us, and it does help with our overall global um intention to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. Uh Hydro-Québec, for example, powers nearly 20% of New York City's energy, um electricity, so I don't uh It is extremely important to have those those links.
[21:28] Lorena Patterson: But Canada also, I think, is realizing now we need to do more together, and we need to get past some of the historical conflicts that we've had, particularly between provinces, and make sure that we're doing things that will benefit our regions from east to west. So I think, you know, while things are difficult now, it has served us as a country to actually focus on how do we do things ourselves and how do we rely on ourselves. And I think this is a big part of that for for the northeastern uh part of Canada.
[22:00] Trevor Freeman: Mhm, absolutely. So one interesting piece of this is the kind of direct tie between clean power and the Labrador Trough, which is sort of critical mineral mining. Um everybody's heard of critical minerals, I think, I hope, uh our listeners certainly uh would have. Um this is an area that's growing and is resource intensive. It uses energy. And so being able to sort of directly tie clean uh hydropower to um to an industry like that that's so important is great. Um how is this connection really opening the door to the next generation of, let's call it sustainable mining or cleaner mining?
[22:42] Lorena Patterson: Absolutely. And again, as I as I mentioned earlier, historically, we that was how hydropower went across the country was when when mines were developed, and they brought in hydro to to facilitate the movement of those materials. Um Canada's first hydro mining uh alliance was the Lower Bonnington Dam uh on the Kootenay River in BC, and that was completed in 1898. So this is uh a synergy that's been going on for more than 100 years, and it makes a lot of sense. It helps the critical minerals companies keep their carbon footprint down. It rely it they can rely on this clean, dispatchable energy that's right there. Um it it just makes a lot of sense from from many for many, many reasons.
[23:31] Lorena Patterson: The other interesting thing about it is when the hydro facilities are developed by the mining companies, it isn't a demand on the ratepayer, for example. So So they develop that as part of the project, and then that resource will be there for pretty much perpetuity. So um it is an important aspect of the project, and it will help facilitate other things. As I mentioned, the synergy between industry and hydro um is very close, and it it's an a an enabling uh synergy that will bring more economic development to the to the country as a whole.
[24:06] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, and I think we're seeing more now. I mean, large industry has existed, you know, for a long time, as you point out, and and it's always just been kind of assumed that the power's going to be there when we need it, and whether that's mining or or some other sector. I think we're seeing more and more these large um large loads are starting to think about their power more than just assuming the utilities are have the power to connect it, and they're starting to think of where does that come from, and what's the sort of generation source. And so seeing an example like this of of large-scale coordination, I think, is is a great example for other sectors as well, not just mining.
[24:43] Lorena Patterson: Absolutely.
[24:44] Trevor Freeman: Um something you've been a strong advocate for, and you touched on this a little bit ago, is that kind of concept of one project, one review. So speeding up the approval process, you mentioned that this has got some traction in Canada just recently, as of today, um on sort of the fossil fuel side of things. Um so how and in kind of in your mind, how can Canada modernize its regulatory process to, you know, build faster without sacrificing the environmental standards or that community engagement and and kind of the things that are important in that process? How can we sort of both get speed and and maintain some of those things?
[25:24] Lorena Patterson: So what we have now is the most Canadian uh regulatory process possible, because we ask everybody what their opinion is on things, and it's complicated for large infrastructure. There are many, many steps along the along the way. There's a lot of opportunity for community engagement right now, and this is this is wonderful that, you know, the communities are able to do that, but the reality is it's a very, very long process. Um we don't want to not consult with the public, and we don't want to not inform the communities what we're doing, but I would argue Canadian companies have typically done that quite well, and Canada has always had very strong environmental laws. So it it is, in some cases, it creates a lot of duplication that isn't necessary, that just adds to the length of the process.
[26:14] Lorena Patterson: So I think modernizing um the regulatory process, ironically, means kind of going back in time, um because regulatory certainty from an industry perspective comes when you have a series of things that you have to meet, you tick all of those boxes, and if you tick all of those boxes, your project goes forward. We don't have that right now. Um one of the biggest issues is in 2012, uh a political decision came into the process. So for a large project, you had to have GIC approval. Um this makes it complicated, because when a developer's starting a project, they don't know what kind of government or what color of government will be in place when they actually are in a position to present it. So you create a lot of uncertainty in terms of the the amount of investment you have to make to get to that point where you're where you're seeking approval.
[27:08] Lorena Patterson: Um I think the the current government has brought that down by creating this national interest category for projects and working with the Major Projects Office to try and reduce the uncertainty related to the political piece. But, um again, uh regulatory certainty actually means you know that if you tick all the boxes, the project will go forward. So I think we have to find a good balance between that national interest and the community interest, and we haven't been there for a while. It's I think it's encouraging to see us moving back towards a place of a little bit more balance, and it it doesn't imply that there would be a lesser focus on environmental concerns. Again, we've got very, very strong, rigorous uh standards as a country, and I think everyone expects us Canadians expect us to be very mindful of environmental concerns. But the the bar has to be set at a reasonable place, and it has to be achievable.
[28:13] Trevor Freeman: Mhm.
[28:14] Lorena Patterson: So this is uh I think this is where we're at right now. We're still figuring out exactly what that achievable system will look like, and I think the Prime Minister is taking some important steps to finding a a better balance for industry that will actually encourage them to come in and invest. And that's a very, very important piece.
[28:32] Trevor Freeman: Is there a model out there that has worked elsewhere? I'm thinking of other jurisdictions. Like is there someone that we can look to to say they've kind of figured it out? They they understand how to make these large-scale infrastructure projects happen without sacrificing that kind of all the things you're talking about right now, something that we can look to to sort of say that's that's what we should be thinking of, obviously keeping it within a Canadian context as well?
[28:57] Lorena Patterson: Yeah, international bars um I I'm a little bit cautious about using those, because Canada is such a large country.
[29:06] Trevor Freeman: Yeah.
[29:06] Lorena Patterson: There aren't many countries that have our type of extension uh or our type of of forest. Um you know, you can look at Australia. I think things are faster there, but at the same time, it's not the same sort of environment. So we really need a a based-in-Canada approach. The other piece that's very important to all of this is the Indigenous consultation piece, which Canada is working very hard to get right. Um they're engaging very early now in projects. Um and I I don't think you find many jurisdictions where it's uh is perhaps as complete as it is here. So I think we really do need a Canada, a made-in-Canada solution for this.
[29:46] Lorena Patterson: Um the other factor is I know we base a lot of things on what they do in Europe, but again, those European countries are much smaller. They don't have the same amount of territory that we do, and while some of those standards work there for project development, they really complicate things here.
[30:03] Trevor Freeman: Mhm.
[30:03] Lorena Patterson: So um we do need uh we really need something that takes all of the all of the aspects of the Canadian um landmass into account, and still makes it workable.
[30:16] Trevor Freeman: Gotcha. Uh and one of those things you just touched on it is sort of the Indigenous um uh engagement and stakeholdering. Uh I know you put a strong emphasis on uh Indigenous equity ownership and partnership, and you've talked about the role that hydropower can play, especially in northern and remote communities. Um so there's a tool, a voluntary tool, um called the Hydropower Sustainability Standard that ensures new developments build kind of, you know, genuine, lasting economic prosperity for local communities. Talk to us about the work that you're doing there and how you're advocating for proper engagement of um of Indigenous stakeholders.
[31:01] Lorena Patterson: Yeah. Um the Hydropower Sustainability Standard is uh it was developed by the International Hydropower Association, and it is a way to measure um how well utilities are meeting some of the sustainability goals that have been set internationally. Um in Canada, I think we're we're actually pretty good already with our with our current regulatory process. This is a voluntary uh standard that that uh utilities can meet. I know one of our members, Hydro-Québec, has uh voluntarily met those goals and they have a they've received a gold standard for for some of their facilities.
[31:42] Lorena Patterson: But, um broadly speaking, Canadian companies are pretty sustainable already. They've got a lot of things that they need to do in in our current regulatory process. Um and uh you know, we're be a little bit hesitant to add one more thing um on top of what what is already very, very robust. I think this the Hydropower Sustainability Standard serves as an example internationally um for countries that are still developing their resources, that that don't have such robust uh systems as we do. Um and a lot of Canadian companies actually participate in that process, so they're helping out with with uh doing those sorts of evaluations and making sure that the industry writ large is elevating its its attention to a lot of these things.
[32:32] Lorena Patterson: Um and our uh experience with the Indigenous piece, I think, is extremely important, and it's serving as a great example within uh these sorts of standards to make sure that other utilities are are also following suit. So I think that's how we're using it. Um the idea was I think behind it was that companies that that meet the standard, it's a third party that comes in and evaluates if your system um actually meets those standards, and companies that do choose to go through that will get a a special designation, which can help them with funding for sustainability funding and whatnot. Um but it is voluntary, and uh and again, I think, in Canada, each of the utilities will take into uh consideration. Some of them will opt to go in, and others may not, given given all the other regulatory requirements that they have to meet.
[33:31] Trevor Freeman: Gotcha. Okay. So I want to uh bring it back to, as we kind of wrap up our conversation here, uh affordability, and again, this is something that, you know, is top of mind for, I know, our customers, and I'm sure, you know, energy users across the country of all different types, residential all the way up to large commercial and industrial. So, you know, we're talking in some cases about major infrastructure build-outs. We're talking about doubling the grid, you know, massive demand increases. Um these come with some pretty significant upfront capital price tags on them, uh big capital investments. How do we manage to do those, and in in your case for for hydro projects, while not passing that solely down to the the consumer, the ratepayer, um or, you know, who's whoever's paying that household bill? How do we manage to keep energy affordable while still accomplishing these major capital infrastructure upgrades?
[34:31] Lorena Patterson: This is one of the um aspects of hydropower that is uh certainly that we grapple with, because these are very, very capital-intensive at the beginning. Um residents of Quebec today are the grandchildren and children of the people who, in the '70s, financed their build-out of hydropower. So it is uh it's certainly a long-term uh type of project. We released an economic study earlier this year that argued that the time frame for amortizing costs of hydro should be 50 years or more, because the life of the asset is really perpetual. It will just keep running forever. So you shouldn't be constraining it to to financing for 20 years or 30 years. Uh it's
[35:22] Trevor Freeman: Is that common now?
[35:23] Lorena Patterson: They are starting to increase the time frame for amortizing it, but um I think we would argue probably just not not quite enough yet. So we're still we're still working on that with regulators and with um independent system operators and whatnot. Um It It It does make sense. When you put a hydro facility into a community, you're going to have it forever and that community will benefit forever. But the costs are borne by the generation that won't ultimately benefit from it as much as the next generations to come. So that's the struggle. And then you bring in whether it should be the ratepayer that pays this or the taxpayer that pays this, and that balance is a constant tension.
[36:09] Lorena Patterson: The reality is all new infrastructure has to be paid somehow, and we will have to absorb new costs um as whatever project comes on stream and and supports our national grid. I think this is one of those difficult conversations with with uh communities that need the energy, they want clean energy, um hydropower fills that that gap, but they also have to accept the cost that comes with developing it. So this is something that certainly we all struggle with, and amortizing the costs over a longer period of time will certainly go a long way to enabling these projects to come to fruition.
[36:51] Trevor Freeman: Are you seeing like a a a more diversified source of capital for this, whether that's So, obviously, there's kind of the ratepayer side of things, but then there's, you know, private investment, um there's sort of government intervention or or, you know, what whatever the case may look like. Are there Is there a more diversified source of capital for these projects, or is it still mainly borne by the end user?
[37:12] Lorena Patterson: We're seeing both. Our hydro finance uh summit is coming on February the 24th to actually tackle some of these questions. It does bring in uh private investors as well as um the typical banks and and um infrastructure banks that are federally owned to try and figure out what's the best balance to enable the industry to go forward and to kick off some of these larger projects in particular.
[37:41] Trevor Freeman: Okay, great. Well, Lorena, I really appreciate the time that you've taken today. Clearly, hydro is a a pretty fundamental source of energy generation here in Canada, and and I think it's great to talk about the fact that it's not just static. There's more to come, there's more projects to do, there's expansion, renewal, etc. So it's it's been great chatting with you. We do always wrap up our conversations here with the same uh set of questions to our guests, so I'm I'm going to dive right in and and hopefully you're ready for this. Um so, Lorena, what's a book that you've read that you think everybody should read?
[38:15] Lorena Patterson: Um right now, uh I would say Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi. I read that book many years ago. Um it comes back to me all the time. Our current situation of conflict with uh which isn't our conflict, but the conflict with Iran, um it explains a lot about what happened during the fall of the Shah and the new regime when it came in. So I've I read that book many years ago. It made a huge impact on me, and I keep coming back to it uh over and over again as as things develop there. So I would be I would strongly recommend that one.
[38:52] Trevor Freeman: Mhm.
[38:52] Lorena Patterson: It's a very good read. It was written by an English professor who was in the United States teaching English literature, and she moved back to Tehran just as the uh as the regime was falling. Um it's very well written and it's a it's it's a good read.
[39:07] Trevor Freeman: Mhm. Yeah, great suggestion. Um so same question, but is there a movie or a show that you think everyone should check out?
[39:13] Lorena Patterson: Um the most recent one that I've seen that I think people should see if they haven't is Frankenstein by Guillermo del Toro.
[39:20] Trevor Freeman: Mhm.
[39:20] Lorena Patterson: Um he's a great Mexican director, love his love his work. And this is a much more in-depth analysis of the psychology behind Frankenstein, and uh I think there are a lot of elements to it that that people will respond to.
[39:34] Trevor Freeman: Mhm. Yeah, kind of like a a deeper dive into a story that everyone probably kind of knows a little bit, but um I I watched it. It was great. Yeah, really good one. Um who is someone that you admire?
[39:46] Lorena Patterson: Um I admire a lot of people. I would say um Nikola Tesla would be my example, but engineers in general. Um I've worked with a lot of large infrastructure development over the years and have never It's never ceased to amaze me how engineers can come up with solutions for things that you think are going to be impossible. Um I have a lot of admiration for that profession, not an engineer myself, um but uh so I would say Nikola Tesla kind of as the shining example, but engineers in general um often come up with some amazing solutions that bring us so much further ahead in terms of where we are in our industry.
[40:29] Trevor Freeman: Mhm, yeah, great. Uh if someone offered you a free round-trip flight anywhere in the world, where would you go?
[40:35] Lorena Patterson: Turkey. That's on my bucket list for for the for my next trip. Yeah, absolutely Turkey.
[40:40] Trevor Freeman: Great call.
[40:41] Lorena Patterson: Um have not been there yet, and uh I'd like to spend like several weeks there, I think.
[40:45] Trevor Freeman: That's awesome. I have So one friend has just come back from Turkey, and I have another friend who's about to go to Turkey. This is the third time it's come up in the last couple weeks in conversation. That's great. Now it's on my list.
[40:55] Lorena Patterson: [Laughter]
[40:57] Trevor Freeman: That's usually what I do these questions for is I need to build out my book list, and my movie list, and my travel list, um which is already long. Uh okay, last question. Uh is there something about the energy sector or its future that you're particularly excited about right now?
[41:12] Lorena Patterson: Oh, I'm excited to see things get built. Um we've been at a standstill for quite a while in in Canada, and I'm excited to see people back to work, shovels in the ground, activity. Um I think the the benefits of what's coming will be felt for generations, and it's going to be great to be part of that.
[41:31] Trevor Freeman: Great. Yeah, it it definitely seems like, I mean, I've been saying this for a while, it seems like a a pretty pivotal time, a great time to be in the energy sector. I find it really fascinating and and fun to be a part of, so yeah, great to hear that. Well, Lorena, I again, I really appreciate your time here today. Thanks for coming on the show.
[41:48] Lorena Patterson: Thank you. Have a great day.
[41:50] Trevor Freeman: Take care.
[41:51] Lorena Patterson: You too.
[41:52] Outro Voiceover: Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Think Energy podcast. Don't forget to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and it would be great if you could leave us a review. It really helps to spread the word. As always, we would love to hear from you, whether it's feedback, comments, or an idea for a show or a guest. You can always reach us at thinkenergy@hydroottawa.com.

Summer rewind: When we say 'the cloud' what we mean is 'the data centre'. Globally, data centres are projected to consume over 1000 terawatt hours in 2026. What does that mean for energy production, distribution, and consumption? Guest Phil Harris, Cerio President and CEO, joins thinkenergy to shed light on something we all rely on but may not fully understand. From efficiency to sustainability, environmental concerns to Cerio's role improving how data centres manage energy. Listen in for the future of cloud computing.
Related links 
Cerio: https://www.cerio.ai/

Phil Harris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paharris/

Trevor Freeman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trevor-freeman-p-eng-8b612114 

Hydro Ottawa: https://hydroottawa.com/en   
 
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Transcript: 
[00:00:00] Trevor Freeman: Hi everyone, and welcome to the summer edition of Think Energy. As a reminder, we are in podcast vacation mode, and while our normal day-to-day work continues, we are on a brief pause from our regularly scheduled episodes to recharge, rethink, plan for the fall. But we don't want to leave you without anything to listen to. So, we've pulled some of our favorite insights and episodes from the past year related to the energy transition and where we are. So, welcome to episode two of our summer rewind, the August episode. So, as a reminder, this summer, we're looking at that collision between digital infrastructure and physical infrastructure, how the world of evolving technology is shaping and influencing and changing the way that we interact with energy and, in fact, interact with the energy grid as well. Last month, we looked at my conversation with Lynn Pettis from Overstory and how Overstory and Hydro Ottawa have partnered together to use satellite imagery and AI to protect our grid. In part two of our summer rewind today, or the second episode, we're looking at the world of data centres, and we're hearing lots about data centres as AI grows and takes kind of more of an ever-present role in our day-to-day lives. And I had a conversation with Phil Harris from Cerio. So, we're going to dive back into that episode and look at kind of the staggering energy footprint of AI data centres, of the cloud, etc., and how this boom is really changing how we do data centre design and really forcing a change in how we do data centre design just because of the sheer magnitude of energy required here. And we're going to look at kind of what this means for the future of global power distribution. So, sit back, relax, hopefully somewhere cool in the heat of the summer, and listen to this episode of Summer Rewind with Phil Harris from Cerio.
[00:02:18] Podcast Intro: Welcome to Think Energy, a podcast that dives into the fast-changing world of energy through conversations with industry leaders, innovators, and people on the front lines of the energy transition. Join me, Trevor Freeman, as I explore the traditional, unconventional, and up-and-coming facets of the energy industry. If you have any thoughts, feedback, or ideas for topics we should cover, please reach out to us at thinkenergy@hydroottawa.com.
[00:02:49] Trevor Freeman: Hi everyone, and welcome back. Data centres have come up a number of times on this show, and for very good reason. They have become a key underpinning technology for so much of our lives. Every time we pull out that phone from our pockets to pull up directions or buy something online, or doom scroll on your social media or news site of choice, every time you use your phone, stream a movie, leverage an AI model, whatever you end up using your phone for. It's funny, as I read this list, I'm sure there's like some university student out there who's thinking, man, what is this old man talking about? We don't use our phones for that. Whatever the kids are doing these days, whatever we're doing these days with our phones, with our computers, our tablets, etc., all of that leverages infrastructure that most of us have never seen, and quite frankly, probably don't really understand. We talk about the cloud like it's this amorphous, nebulous thing. But in reality, we're talking about real hardware in a real building that uses real energy, mainly electricity, a lot of water. And this isn't really new. Like, we've been leveraging centralized data centres for many years now. But what is changing is the scale of the data centres that we're seeing now and the pace of growth in computing power that we need to do the things that we want to do and that our data centres are able to deliver. So, just to throw a few numbers at it, the traditional data centre servers that maybe powered the early days of on-demand online streaming services, for example, they used anywhere from 5 to 15 kilowatts per rack. But modern server racks that are used to power AI searches, for example, can hit anywhere from 60 to 100 kilowatts per rack. This is great from a power output per rack perspective, but it means massive energy needs. And that is showing up in the size of load requests that we're seeing from new data centres. New data centres today are asking for service connections that are orders of magnitude higher than those built even just 5 years ago. Globally, data centres are projected to consume over 1,000 terawatt-hours in 2026. And just a quick kind of refresher from high school or wherever you would have learned this, a terawatt is 1,000 gigawatts, which is 1,000 megawatts. So, 1,000 terawatt-hours, which is roughly equivalent to the annual electricity demand from the country of Japan, an entire country. So, given all of this, there are a lot of incentives to find ways to maximize efficiency and reduce some of that energy demand. And that's where my next guest, Phil Harris, and his company, Cerio, come into play. I'll let Phil get into the details of exactly what Cerio does, but essentially, their goal is to reimagine the data centre to maximize sustainability and reduce energy needs. Phil is Cerio's President and CEO, and has been in the networking and data centre industry for over 35 years, including at well-known companies like Intel and Cisco, to name two. And I'm really excited about this conversation, one, to understand how do we make data centres a little bit more efficient, or maybe a lot more efficient, but also just to really understand, like, what are we talking about when we talk about a data centre? What is actually happening, what is physically inside these buildings? And we'll get into a little bit of that in our conversation. So, Phil, welcome to the show.
[00:07:05] Phil Harris: Well, thanks, Trevor. I appreciate it.
[00:07:07] Trevor Freeman: So, Phil, obviously, we're here today to talk about your work building sustainable data centres, or trying to make data centres a little bit more sustainable. But before we get into that, you know, you've spent your career, you know, decades of your career at different tech giants, let's call them, Intel, Cisco, to two to mention. You've seen quite a bit of change, no doubt, over your time. Has that change, like does this industry change linearly? Does it grow fairly steady, or is it kind of big jumps? And are we on the cusp of any major shifts? What can you kind of tell us about the future of this sector, data, tech, etc.?
[00:07:54] Phil Harris: It's interesting. I think as companies start, and I was at companies like Cisco, for example, when it was a very small company to where it was a very large company, and this should be no surprise to anybody, the bigger the company gets, the harder it is to change. And they really find that the only way they change is when they absolutely have to, not because they want to. And that's a combination of just inertia and shareholders' expectations and a whole bunch of things. So, I would say that the bigger the company is, the harder it is for them to react. And so, I think small, nimble companies tend to do much better when there's a lot of transformational technology and development and changes in the overall ecosystem we live in. I think your, the second part of your question, you know, I look at the current situation as a point in time where a lot of companies will have to make some significant changes simply because we are hitting two new walls: technological walls, commercial walls, geopolitical walls, that are really sort of confining what people can do. So, I think what's about to happen is we're about to see a significant change. And this is not atypical in the industry. If we think about back into the start of what we would think of today as computer science around mainframes that were happening in the '60s, you know, for about a decade and a half, two decades, there was a lot of dominance around a particular way of doing things. And then some new innovational technology came along that rapidly changed that, scaled out, and it went from a very dominant set of players to a much larger number of smaller players who could then provide more innovation and more scale and more choice. And I think we're about to see that transition occurring as well.
[00:09:47] Trevor Freeman: So, is this, is there sort of like an analogous time, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, are we on the cusp of like the big, the big change that we've seen before? Like, what would you compare this to, you know, in the last 20, 30 years?
[00:10:01] Phil Harris: Yeah, I mean, I think there's been eras of compute. And if we say, I mean, we can find analogies outside of the compute world, but let's just stay in the computer science world. I gave the mainframe example as one, and then we went to what we call client-server, which scaled out rapidly. Telephony, we went from large, big telephone exchanges that started in the government space, went to very large organizations. Now, basically, we've completely scaled out how we make phone calls, to use that now 20th-century terminology. Nobody really makes telephone calls anymore. And we went through this with cloud computing and the internet, where there was a change in the approach to the way we did things that suddenly gave us a scale-out mentality rather than a scale-up mentality. And I think that's what we have to key in on here, is that we can, someone, I was on a panel yesterday where we were talking about scale. And I said, well, to scale or not to scale, that is not the question. It's how do we scale? Do we continue to scale up, which is the current model, or do we start to think about scaling out, which is a more distributed model? So, we go from a small number of big things to a large number of smaller things. And typically in computer science, whatever you want to, storage, compute, memory, telephony, everything we've ever done goes through this arc.
[00:11:32] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, it's interesting, and there's, obviously, my brain's going to immediately try and find those similarities between my world that I live in on the energy side of things. And it's the same question. There is no path where we're not expanding the amount of energy we need, we're not going to be using more energy. But there are different ways to do that. And there are different paths we can take: the business-as-usual, the just grow, grow, grow, centralized energy production and large-scale transmission, or there's a combination of like grow those things, but also find alternative methods, more DERs, more sort of like close to consumer energy sources and storage, etc., etc. And people that listen to this podcast know I kind of go on ad nauseam about this. So, lots of similarities there. Another kind of framing or foundational thing that I want to talk through before we really get into the meat of our conversation is helping ground both myself and our listeners in what exactly we're talking about here. So, we all use, whether we know it or not, we use, you know, like cloud computing constantly, whether it's in our calls, how we're using the internet, using AI more frequently now. What is the physical reality behind that? What's actually happening? What is, you know, the term "data centre"? What is a data centre for our listeners here? What does that look like?
[00:13:17] Phil Harris: Yeah, let's start there. And that's a great question. We started recognizing that the amount of power and space required for computers in companies and government and all sorts of different applications was getting larger than we could put in a room in a closet near maybe where people were using it. We had to start to create dedicated space, because the power requirements, the cooling requirements, just the noise—you can't hear this, but just in my basement, I have a few different compute systems that my wife continually tells me is keeping the neighbors awake. The reality is the environmental aspect of these things became very difficult. So, we created these purpose-built locations that had then different requirements in terms of access and facilities and power and cooling and staffing. And so, they became a new way of thinking about building compute infrastructure at a building level, not just at the individual computers themselves. So, a data centre is usually a very large room, or building, I should say, that houses large amounts of compute and storage and other networking equipment. There's a whole range of different technologies that go into a data centre that allows us to process information. That's what a data centre is. To give you some analogies, in the US, there's about nearly 6,000 data centres, depending on how you measure a data centre. In Canada, we have about 400. In Europe, there's about 750 that we can identify as standalone data centres. You can probably find more places where computers are outside of people's homes, but that's about the ratio we're looking at.
[00:15:10] Trevor Freeman: And we're seeing, I think, and tell me if I'm wrong here, like all this talk about the AI proliferation, data centre proliferation, we're seeing an expansion of these. Is that we're seeing the size of these data centres expand, or we're seeing just more of them popping up? Like, what does it mean when we say we're seeing like data centre growth because of AI? What does that mean?
[00:15:36] Phil Harris: Well, it's fascinating because now our worlds collide. Because the way we now think about how to describe a data centre isn't in the square footage or the number of computers. It's in how much power it consumes. And we now measure it in megawatts. It starts in 10 megawatts, or single-digit megawatts for very small data centres, into average-sized data centres in the tens of megawatts, up to now the hundreds and the gigawatts of consumption that you look at these hyperscalers. But I think we have to put this into a sort of a human scale. It helps us to put this in human scale. If I were to go back to ChatGPT, actually about now 15 months ago, ChatGPT-4, if you were to put that data centre footprint into the province of Ontario, for example, where you and I both are right now, it would be the equivalent of a million internal combustion engine cars driving 30 kilometers a day. If you ever drive up the 401, you probably don't want to see another million cars on the 401. But that's the amount of energy that we can think of in terms of a data centre of that scale.
[00:17:02] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, and again, putting it in the electrical industry's terms, what we consider as a large load—so, we have a specific designation of a large load request—that is anything 5 megawatts and higher. Up until recently, we would get one or two of those every once in a while. Like, it's pretty rare to get a large load request. We are seeing large load requests coming in at a near constant pace now. Like, the number of large load requests we're getting, and a lot of it is because of this—not all because of data centres or anything like that, but a lot of them are certainly driven by that need for more computing power, more facilities that support that.
[00:17:53] Phil Harris: That's right. And at the same time, we're seeing a demand on energy around now home EV charging and other aspects of the general distribution of power. Everything is taking a step function. But if I could just say one thing to your point about 5 or 10 megawatts was a high load, I think we may need to change that scale. It's almost inefficient to build a data centre unless you're somewhere above the 10 megawatt range, because at that point, get somebody else to do it for you.
[00:18:23] Trevor Freeman: Ah, interesting. Yeah, and that's where sort of like, almost like renting space in a data centre for a request of that size. Interesting. Something that, you know, I've seen kind of in your writing on your blogs is the idea that traditional data centres are really built for peak capacity, which absolutely mirrors the power industry. We build our electrical grids for peak capacity. And obviously, that leads to a fair amount of inefficiency. So, if you're building just to peak capacity, if you're not at peak capacity, there is an inefficiency happening there. Something that you identified, it's a stat from your research, talks about graphics processing unit usage rates as low as 20% or 25%. So, I'm assuming that means kind of like three-quarters of that hardware is sitting idle or not being used valuably. Tell us a little bit about what Cerio, what you're doing, what your composable architecture specifically is doing to reclaim that wasted power and cooling capacity.
[00:19:42] Phil Harris: Yeah, and so it starts off with the premise you correctly raised, is that if we think about the equipment, the physical equipment, and how we put these devices and these components together in a data centre, the same model we've been using today is about 30, 35 years old in terms of individual compute systems where we run applications, software, that has memory and central processing units, those typical things you have in a laptop or you have in every computer. But then we put these accelerators, these GPUs, companies like Nvidia now are the one of the most valuable companies on the planet, if not the most valuable company on the planet, because that's the technology they develop. But we're trying to put these new class of accelerators into an existing compute model, which wasn't designed for this. So, that in itself now starts to fragment the ability to leverage those resources in a data centre. And as you accurately said, you know, it's interesting, if I could geek out on this a little bit for the energy consumer in the room...
[00:20:53] Trevor Freeman: Please do.
[00:20:54] Phil Harris: ...we think about the notion not only of the megawatts of power going into the data, but we think about what we call power usage efficiency. And that basically says, whatever the power delivered to a data centre, how much of that is applicable to the IT systems in that data centre? A good, well-run, efficient data centre is about 1.2. That means that about 1.2 times the amount of power that's used is delivered. Your home, for example, is about 30 times the amount of power we use is delivered. We are very inefficient from our home use, by the way. But that's another problem to solve another podcast. But in this case, that's all true until we then ask the question, but what's actually being used of that equipment? And that's now in that 25% to 30% range at any point in time. And we refer to that as stranded and idle assets that, for whatever reason, aren't where the application is or aren't applicable to be used for the application at that moment, because they're in some other box. Or it's a time of day when people use equipment. And by the way, equipment like that isn't being used 24/7, but it's drawing power 24/7. So, there's lots of inherent inefficiencies in that model. So, what we do is we provide the ability to dynamically have pools of resources where we can dynamically attach resources to a compute system as required, at the scale you required, and allowing you to be much more efficient in the timing of that and the amount of equipment required to meet your end solution. And by doing that, we can increase the number of accelerators that you apply to a compute system, which inherently means you are much more efficient in those compute systems. Because it's not just the computers, as I said before, there's storage, there's firewalls, there's load balancers, there's networking equipment, all of that can now be much more efficiently used, all of that is drawing power.
[00:23:01] Trevor Freeman: So, is the idea then that the equipment not being used or when you're at a lower demand time in terms of computing power, you've got physical equipment idling, sort of in more idle mode, drawing less resources that you can then ramp up? So, the peak amount of equipment's still there, you're just being more efficient with it when it's not being used, and you've developed a way to sort of dynamically pull that in. Is that what I'm hearing?
[00:23:28] Phil Harris: Exactly. I'll give you an example. A data centre here in Toronto wanted to have a block of 128 GPUs they could service their customers with. With the current systems they were using previously to deploying our infrastructure, they had to deploy actually 200 GPUs and a very large number of servers to house those GPUs. By deploying Cerio technology, they brought that down to 136 actual GPUs, and they reduced the number of compute platforms by a factor of 4. So, they reduced it by 75%.
[00:24:10] Trevor Freeman: Wow, that's fantastic.
[00:24:11] Phil Harris: With exactly the same outcomes to their customers, with no contention for resources, no oversubscription of resources, just more efficient use of those resources.
[00:24:23] Trevor Freeman: Gotcha. So, still able to meet that peak demand, but not firing up that equipment when it's not needed.
[00:24:30] Phil Harris: Well, not just not firing, not having to have as much stranded equipment, because we can use all the equipment all the time.
[00:24:38] Trevor Freeman: Gotcha, okay. So, in when I was kind of setting up that last question, I used the term "composable architecture," and I'll admit that I pulled that from your material. Help me understand what that means. So, I've also seen you use "composable infrastructure," sounds a bit abstract. What are we talking about here? What does that actually look like?
[00:25:02] Phil Harris: When a consumer or someone who's building a data centre buys their computer equipment, they usually will actually buy the computers, the GPUs, the storage, and other things at the same time. And they will get delivered together, and that box now becomes a unit of compute capacity. But the thing about that is, whether you're able to use that entire capacity, the length in which that's useful, there's a lot of innovation churn right now as new things are coming through very quickly. But that box is now statically built for the rest of its life pretty much. IBM did a study, to take a server out of a rack, these big 6-foot racks or bigger where these servers are housed with lots of wires going into them, power and data and all sorts of things, it's about $1,000 a minute to take one of those servers out of the rack and either change something that's broken, update something. So, they just don't get taken out of the rack, because the average time to take a server out of a rack is about an hour. The math on that's pretty simple. So, if I'm spending $60,000 to upgrade a $20,000 or $30,000 server, I'm just going to leave it there and buy another one. So, that creates more of these stranded assets. So, composability says, let's separate these things into, as I said, pools of resources: compute, accelerators, and other devices, and have a fabric between them that allows us to in real time assemble a compute system that I need—that's the composing part—as I need it, because I can now take the resources anywhere in my data centre if you've got the right fabric, which we've built, that allows you then to real time build that compute system with exactly the same capabilities, exactly the same performance, and without having to change any of your software or the way the servers work. Everything has to be off the shelf to make this work, and that's what we've built.
[00:27:03] Trevor Freeman: Gotcha. So, two of the terms—and you'll forgive me, this is sort of a new sector for me—two of the terms that are used as metrics to determine performance are power usage effectiveness, and you've kind of talked about GPU usage. Is the industry moving more towards that GPU usage metric? Is that just something that you guys are kind of leading the curve on, or where are we at on that?
[00:27:36] Phil Harris: Oh, no, this is very much the industry way of describing not just efficiency, but requirements. And we use very weird terms for this. Every industry has their weird terminology.
[00:27:46] Trevor Freeman: Absolutely, yeah.
[00:27:47] Phil Harris: And we're now moving to the, for example, in AI, the number of tokens per second. When you and I put a request or a question into ChatGPT or Copilot or Claude, whatever we use, those words get translated into tokens, actually numbers. Every compute system is just a big calculator at the end of the day. We do massive processing on numbers. How many of those tokens can I put into the system? How long does it take to process those tokens and give me a response? And the tokens per second per watt is now what we're asking. So, how many tokens a second and what power per token is it costing me to process information? And that's the interesting way of thinking about how AI, for example, that's where you started this conversation, will be measured, is the most amount of tokens per second per watt. Now, right now, we're focusing on tokens per second. We're not looking at the last denominator, which is watts. So, that's why these data centres are getting so ridiculously large. And, you know, we even heard it in the State of the Union address in the United States earlier in the week where, you know, there's now the administration pushing cloud vendors and AI vendors to say, "Hey, pretty soon, you're going to be on your own about delivering power because, quite frankly, the way you're going, it's going to become untenable to think about that from a national grid perspective." Now, I think that may be a little bit into the future, but I don't think it's a completely unreasonable sentiment at this point.
[00:29:32] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, and I mean, you're talking about, and we talked earlier about the just the scale of energy usage here is reaching a new height, a new level. And if we break it down to the individual racks, you know, these these racks of servers or processors that you've got in your data centre, we're now talking about anywhere from 50 kilowatts to 100 kilowatts of cooling need. And that's the big driver of energy usage, I think, is correct here, is the cooling need per rack multiplied by, of course, big numbers to get those, you know, 5, 10, 20, 30 megawatt data centres we're talking about. When we talk about cooling and we talk about hotspots within a data centre, how does your approach differ from kind of the standard way of doing it?
[00:30:32] Phil Harris: That's a great question. And I think we should explain why the cooling part, it's a bit like buying really good, expensive Wagyu steak every day and then having to spend a lot of money on a gym membership to then go and burn off those calories. So, we put all this power into power these compute systems, but then we have to keep them cool. The faster they run, the more powerful they run, the hotter they get, but we need to cool them. So, there's this relationship between the more power we draw, the more cooling we need. And cooling is becoming, as I said, that sort of tradeoff for performance. Now, there's lots of exotic ways of cooling computer systems. We can just blow air across them, we can have liquid like the radiator in your car, or we can literally drop these compute systems into baths of solvents. Ferdinand Porsche, I like to use of other industry analogies. Ferdinand Porsche, the guy who obviously designed the first Porsches and the VW Beetle, realized if I could distribute the heat of the engine block with a horizontal block, I could blow air across it, it was much more efficient than trying to put a radiator to actually cool down the engine block the way that other cars who have the engine in the front. And it's because of surface area. Now, if I've got to put all my GPUs and CPUs and memory close together either in the same box or the same rack, that concentration of heat needs to be addressed with cooling. One of the ways we can address this is not only to be very selective when I compose the GPU, it's the only time it's drawing power, but also, I can spread them out through my data centre by having a fabric that allows me to connect them to the compute systems with the same performance. But now I can distribute my heat generation, that means I can cool more efficiently, just like that Ferdinand Porsche analogy of the Porsche 911. Because now, heat over spread of distance and surface area is a more efficient way, which means that it won't mean that we won't ever get to liquid cooling. I don't think immersion cooling is a good idea for lots of other reasons, but it's a necessity more than an optimization. But we can defer the complexity, the cost of those exotic cooling systems if we're more efficient in the way we use and design our data centres.
[00:33:10] Trevor Freeman: And I guess there's a similar description there of if you're concentrating all that heat in a specific physical area within a bigger building, room, whatever you want to call it, that cooling system is having to work to that peak cooling need, so to that hotspot effectively. But it's not working just on that spot, it's working across the whole physical area. If you're spreading that cooling need out across the whole room, one, the peak is a little bit lower, and you're just more effectively using your whole cooling system, is that fair to say?
[00:33:48] Phil Harris: That's exactly the right way of looking at this. And think about it from this perspective as well. The reason we have to cool is because if we don't cool sufficiently, those devices become very unreliable and reduce their useful lifespan. Without going into who, because they keep this information confidential, but one large cloud provider in the US, for example, a GPU that normally has a lifespan of at least 3 years is going down to about 9 months right now. And the reason for that reduction in the lifespan of the use of that GPU is because of the heating characteristics within these boxes even with all these cooling mechanisms are becoming now a reduction in the lifespan. So, that means we have to create even, remember I said what it costs to take a system out of a rack?
[00:34:44] Trevor Freeman: Yeah.
[00:34:45] Phil Harris: That means if we don't have to apply an efficient and effective cooling strategy, our power strategy and cooling strategy, then we start hitting problems very quickly.
[00:34:56] Trevor Freeman: Gotcha. Okay. Okay, so there's a mantra that I'll admit I hadn't seen before until kind of reading some of your material. It's, "Friends don't let friends build data centres." And I think it's referring to, you know, this move in there's so many industries that kind of do this cycle of centralization to decentralization. And the sort of data movement went towards that centralization, and you saw these big, massive data centres. But there's kind of a move now back to, let's call it, decentralization or repatriation of data. And so, for various geopolitical reasons, organizations, companies, governments are wanting to pull their data back home and have it kind of be more in their control, living in their own servers. So, how are you or how is Cerio helping companies kind of get back into the data centre business or repatriate their data without kind of, you know, getting into the troubles that led for to that centralization in the first place?
[00:36:12] Phil Harris: Yeah, and by the way, I can't take real credit for that quote. Cole Crawford, who was one of the early guys at Facebook before it became Meta, and was one of the leading voices in the Open Compute Platform movement, which was trying to standardize how we do these things, Cole is now the CEO of a company called Vapor IO. And what he was really saying is, it's so complicated and difficult to run data centres, let alone build them, the capital expense. AI isn't just one thing. There's lots of stages in the workflow of AI. We train these big models, you have heard of large language models like ChatGPT or Copilot. But what we use them for, the results of those trained models, is what we call inference. Now, you'll now hear about agentic AI, where we turn those results into actions. Okay, that's the agency part of agentic. Well, the use of AI in the corporate world is now becoming, as you said, both regulated, but from an intellectual property perspective, it's about how I control my data and my information. Because if I put that all into somebody else's large language model, I've basically populated somebody else's large language model with what might be my proprietary information or information that's very sensitive. And it's one of the reasons why you'll hear in the press about Anthropic, for example, trying to put guardrails around the use of their AI, because they're very sensitive to this. Most enterprises, governments, of all sorts, have realized, though, they need to run this in their own data centres, because they need to have control over this information and the use of this information. That's the repatriation you're talking about, moving these workloads now into the organization that previously had said, "Hey, cloud computing can take this problem." We've got to now figure out how enterprises, which are far many more of them in far more diverse locations, can now build their own data centres and get the right power, the right efficiency, the right capabilities at the right cost.
[00:38:22] Trevor Freeman: Does that open the door? I mean, earlier you talked about, you know, if we're talking about a 5 megawatt data centre, it's almost not worth it. You know, that's just sort of renting space in someone else's. How does how does that track with an organization that won't have enough data or enough computing power, whatever the metric is, to to warrant a 30 megawatt data centre for their own data, but wants to get that that control, wants to bring it more in house? Is your technology helping those smaller data centres exist? Is that the correlation there?
[00:38:58] Phil Harris: We can now move it into, another couple of terms that may be you're listeners may not be familiar with, in the compute world or the data centre world, we talk of brownfield and greenfield. Brownfield is that which is already there, greenfield is something I have to build new. A lot of the brownfield world is the predominant quantity of compute power on the planet is primarily brownfield. The question is, can I take that existing infrastructure and put the capabilities we've been describing in this discussion into those brownfields, so I can reduce the cost of the expansion of that, because I can reuse the compute equipment that's there? I can now add just the discrete GPU technology, for example, into an existing data centre that doesn't then far blow the power budget or the cooling envelope within that environment, but I can still now start taking advantage as I figure out what my larger plans are. And at the same time, how do we have a tier of providers who I'll give you an example. There's a company in again in Canada, ThinkOn, who are building a data centre in in Ottawa. It's going to have its own liquid natural LNG as its source of power for its own power requirements. Why? Because they can have the power they need as they need it in that location, and they can provide that secure infrastructure for both government and private enterprises. And ThinkOn is is certainly in Canada one of those companies that's really seen to be a trusted partner in this. So, it'll be a bit of what can I do myself, how do I have a trusted partner. We think of sovereign AI a lot. That means trust more than anything. And that's becoming the new mechanism of thinking about this.
[00:41:01] Trevor Freeman: Thinking about the the environmental impact of of tech and of of data, you know, we've talked about the energy usage here, but there's also the physical aspect to it of, you know, the the pace of improvement in technology means we see obsolescence, or we see kind of technology being outdated fairly quickly. We all, like on the personal level, we all see this with our our cell phones, our smartphones, our our whatever tech we have at home that seems to be out of date fairly soon. I think the the stat or the the saying that's out there is, you know, tech is kind of obsolete or becomes trash within 3 years. Obviously, this is not sustainable. Is this part of the drive of what you're doing? Is it are you looking to sort of extend the life of the physical equipment? You've touched on this a little bit, but maybe expand a little bit on that.
[00:42:01] Phil Harris: Yeah, this this goes a little bit back to that brownfield, greenfield discussion. But one way of looking at it, I guess, is um when I put all of these components into one the classic model, the current model, I put my my my central processing unit, my memory, my storage, my GPUs, all in the same box. What is the thing in that box that I want to take advantage of as new innovation happens versus that which is happening over a slower evolutionary cycle? Well, right now, if I put everything in the same compute unit, go back to my cost of taking that box out of the rack, I'm pretty much limited by the slowest innovation curve within that platform now as what I can take advantage of over time. Interestingly, GPUs are innovating currently at a clip of about once a year. Nvidia comes out with a new generation of GPUs once a year. Um but now we're getting more GPUs into the market, we're getting much more diversity, and that diversity means I'll have more options more often. But if my compute system itself is only innovating once every 3 years to your point, then if I don't decouple these things, if I don't have the ability to separate these innovation curves, I'm always stuck with the slowest innovation curve. One of the things we've done at Cerio with the fabric that we've built and the platform we've built is to allow you now to, if you like, dislocate those innovation curves and those options so as new technology comes along, I can apply it to the things that are innovating slower and still get the outcomes I'm looking for. And that will significantly increase the existing lifespan of equipment that's in people's data centres.
[00:43:56] Trevor Freeman: So, so looking at a data centre of the future, and not, you know, not far into the future, let's say 5, 10 years from now, are we seeing some of the same technology still exist within that data centre, or is it, you know, everything gets cycled out within Like what's the generation of a data centre, for example? Like how often or how soon will we see it all cycle out?
[00:44:20] Phil Harris: I think you there's a there's a there's a technical answer to that, and a financial answer to that. The depreciation models, so that the capital infrastructure can be written off people's books over a 3 to 5-year window, is very typical. So, we see that there's just an a financial inhibition to changing more or faster than that 3 to 5-year window. The technical churn, as I said, is happening much more rapidly in the technologies that are drawing most power, but providing most capability. So, one of the things we're we're looking at is how companies now start leasing infrastructure. Because if they lease the infrastructure, they can now recycle that and bring new technology in faster into their organizations. But to do that, you've got to have the ability to bring new technology in and not be stuck with these static systems that we have today. So, there's a set of financial instruments and now, with work that Cerio is doing, technical capabilities that allow customers to really continue to innovate. So, there's no real, "Hey, it's going to be all churned out in 3 years." I'll continue to innovate over those 3 years, recycling the technology that can stay where it is and bringing new technologies as it becomes available at the right financial model.
[00:45:39] Trevor Freeman: I'm curious about what that innovation is. Um so, you talked about Nvidia kind of essentially a new GPU every year, there's a new version every year. What is the innovation? Are they just Is it getting faster and more compute power and therefore it's pulling more energy, and is that just like a perpetual increase, or is it kind of same compute power, less energy? Like, do we ever see, I guess what I'm what I'm getting at with this little bit of a ramble here is, do we ever see that that rate of change in energy usage start to flatten out and come down while we still can grow our computing power, or does energy usage just continue to grow, like are we on a bit of a path with no end right now?
[00:46:36] Phil Harris: History taught us a little bit about this. Uh Gordon Moore, who was one of the founders of Intel, actually, we had this term called Moore's Law. And Moore's Law was basically this idea that every 18 months, we'll double the number of transistors on a piece of silicon. Now, for those in the computer science world, we all understand what that means. For the rest of the world, the transistor is the smallest unit of technology within the computer. It's the basic building block of how we build computers, the central processing units, all the GPUs, they all come down to taking literally silicon, and in a foundry, we call them, figuring out how to make as many transistors interconnect with each other in a in a smaller area as possible, or the most amount of transistors we can. So, a bit of a geeky answer to your question, but the way that we look at how each innovation improves is are we increasing the number of transistors, which means we can do more math. Remember, all we're doing is processing numbers.
[00:47:45] Trevor Freeman: Per unit, per physical unit, right?
[00:47:47] Phil Harris: Per physical unit.
[00:47:48] Trevor Freeman: Okay.
[00:47:49] Phil Harris: And the way we do that is in these big foundries that process all this silicon into these components, they have what are called process nodes. And the and literally how we etch a transistor, it's called lithography, onto a piece of silicon tells us the power of that piece of silicon. And the more I can etch, so we get into what we call the nanometer scale of what we call a process node. So, every time, if you really look into the spec sheets of Nvidia every generation, they'll talk about how many nanometers their silicon process is based on. Because the smaller I can get that number, the more transistors I can have on the same amount of silicon, the more processing I have, BUT every transistor takes power. So, with more transistors, I require more power, even though in the same physical space, it looks like the same amount of silicon. Therefore, your question was a great one. Do we ever get to zero nanometers? Well, no. We're going to hit a wall here eventually. So then the question is, that's the scale-up model: try and make one thing as big as possible. How about if we make lots of things powerful, but we have more of them? In China, last year, we heard of DeepSeek. DeepSeek was a Chinese government-sponsored effort to try and come up with a much more cost-effective way of doing the equivalent to ChatGPT. They didn't do that with bigger GPUs, they did it with much smaller GPUs, but many more of them. And that comes back to how efficient I am in deploying lots of things together. And that goes back to my earlier point about, we start with scale up, inevitably in the industry, we go to scale out.
[00:49:50] Trevor Freeman: And there's Is it fair to say that the power usage per transistor, is that fairly static? Like, is there efficiencies to gain there, or your GPU is going to use more power because you're packing more transistors into it, and once you hit that wall, that's going to be the the power consumption level. Is that right?
[00:50:15] Phil Harris: Well, this is the games that the silicon manufacturers like Intel, AMD, Nvidia, they're all trying to figure out how to sort of figure out new and interesting ways of packaging all the silicon in these processing units. And we've got a whole industry and science around the packaging mechanism to make those tiles, and we now think of them as little tiles of processing power. And some will be doing very specific jobs, some will be doing very general jobs. It's now getting to the point where the science around the packaging of these dies or these tiles is as much of the of the of the innovation as the actual tiles and the processing on them. So, it's an extremely complex um um technical problem, uh and we are hitting some walls here, which is why I go back to my earlier point. We're now reaching a point where is it just a technical problem to solve or a technical, operational, and commercial problem we have to think about? And this is that wall that you asked me about right at the beginning of this conversation: are we about to hit a wall? And the answer is yes.
[00:51:26] Trevor Freeman: Hmm, interesting. It's I mean, I'm always fascinated by like what are the what are the really smart people in the industry focusing their time on. And it's so that's why we're talking to you, um of you know, you're looking at how do we operationalize this, how do we get the most efficient combination and structure of what we're doing here. There's folks that are looking at how do we pack the most computing power efficiency into these specific units. I guess there's an aspect of how do we cool this in the in the most effective way, like what's how do we um, you know, drive down the cooling power needed. Uh what else is out there in terms of like we have smart people focused on this efficiency? What's the thing that's missing from that that sort of list?
[00:52:26] Phil Harris: Well, I think maybe what's going on right now, and if I could just add one more layer of complexity, I'll try and keep it concise. Remember I said we were processing silicon? Well, the earth's got lots of silicon, but we don't have lots of places to process that silicon. The companies that are formed to process silicon into these processing units, we call them foundries. The world's largest is TSMC based in Taiwan, um and then we have Intel, we have Samsung, we have a few others around the world, GlobalFoundries is another one. There is a limit, physical limit, because these foundries are huge and they take decades of development and optimization. So, if we start breaking ground on a new foundry tomorrow, we'll see output in about 5 years. So, we have a constrained supply. So, if I'm a if I'm Jensen at Nvidia or any of the big silicon manufacturers, I'm going to optimize that relatively constrained supply to where I'm going to get the best return on my investment, and that's why this scale-up model is happening. So, given that, we know that we won't have any more foundry capacity of scale for another couple of years at least, then the reality is we've got to think differently about how we're thinking about the processing of that silicon. Do I want just ever bigger processors that become more expensive, more limited in where I can deploy them, and quite frankly, the top 15 consumers in the world of silicon consume about 80% of that silicon, if not more. How do I democratize that? Again, it goes from scale up to a scale-out model where I can use that same processing capacity to produce more silicon.
[00:54:20] Trevor Freeman: Fascinating. Um yeah, I just I took us down a little bit of a nerd out path. You had me really interested in that. Um okay, so last question here. We hear this term for a bunch of different reasons um around the world right now. Um we're hearing this term "democratizing" happening a lot, and and I know um and you've talked about democratizing AI. What does that mean? What does that mean to you, or or describe that for us?
[00:54:51] Phil Harris: Yeah, I think it really means going right to my last point about if if 15 big, big consumers of silicon are going to consume the vast majority of available supply chain, that makes that a losing proposition for the the rest of the organizations and the rest of the governments and the rest of the individuals on the planet. So, how do we make sure that AI can be built both responsibly from a a sustainability perspective, and I don't mean just ecological side, but that's important here too, but also from the ability to I was on a panel yesterday between the UK government and the Canadian government where we were looking at how do countries around the world have the ability to control their own destiny. There's this whole notion of sovereignty and AI sovereignty right now. That isn't because people want to have closed walls around them, they want to have choice. They don't want to be dictated to by very dominant players where they quite frankly don't have the buying power to compete, you know, the amount of capital going into some of the AI companies, we saw $30 billion going into Anthropic last week, that's actually a small increase in their capitalization relative to the other big AI players on the planet. That's $30 billion. So, we've got to think to ourselves, is that a sustainable model commercially? And the answer is no. So, we've got to have technology, we've got to have the right ability to deliver power, we've got to have the right designs of data centres that can keep them cool in an effective and efficient and responsible way, and we've got to be able to give them enough power to make them viable to make them useful. That's the democratization we all have to be focused on.
[00:56:46] Trevor Freeman: And we need every I guess to to round out the point is we need everybody to be able, everybody being, you know, whatever, major industry, countries, whoever, to be able to access that equally so that we don't have to rely on the major players out there in order to do those things you just said. Gotcha.
[00:57:04] Phil Harris: That's exactly right. And look, there'll always be a pyramid here. There always has been in technology, there's always still the big players, right? But the question is, have the big players stifled out the ability for smaller players to come up, innovate, provide choice, provide alternative ways of looking at things? And that's what we've got to make sure that we keep the the And there's always reliance on some new technology coming along that enables that. Cerio believes that we've created that next layer in the stack, if you like, of technologies that gives us that opportunity to rethink the innovation curve going forward.
[00:57:42] Trevor Freeman: Very fascinating. Phil, thanks for your time. I really appreciate it. This has been super interesting. It's not an area that I often get to spend my time thinking about, so it was great to chat today. As you know, we always kind of round out our interviews with the same series of questions to our guests. So, what's a book that you've read that you think everybody should read?
[00:58:05] Phil Harris: Well, I'm not sure I can recommend this for everybody. One of the people who basically along the lines of some of the things I've been talking about today, who've revolutionized the computer world was a gentleman by the name of Linus Torvalds in Helsinki in Finland at the time, he's now based in the States. He realized that there was a dominance around how the operating systems on computers, the things that run the software, was limiting basically innovation, choice, and forcing us down a very closed path. So, he wrote something called Linux, which was a new operating system, so be it on your phone, your TV, your microwave, that's running Linux today. Because there wasn't an operating system that we could then generally deploy that meant there was more developers had the ability to write applications, more hardware vendors could now have software they could run on their on their platforms. He gave the world a new innovation curve, and every time this happens, to my last point, good things happen, very good things happen for the world, for every individual on the planet. And Linus was one of those individuals who saw that need. And so, his book, "Just for Fun," and he's a very quirky guy, as you can probably imagine, is a great book about his philosophical approach to what it takes to change really big problems. And I would encourage all of you just even just read the first few chapters. It's a fascinating view of how an incredibly smart man, smart individual took on probably one of the biggest problems we had in the 20th and 21st century of computing and solved it by recognizing you take a different path.
[01:00:03] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, very cool.
[01:00:04] Phil Harris: As far as as far as shows, I don't know, I'm one of these guys, I've got two 13-year-old daughters, so my wife and I get to watch TV for a very limited amount of time when we can watch it about the things we want to watch. So, we tend to sort of cram things in. But I am I am a huge Aaron Sorkin fan. So, if I ever need something on a rainy day to go back just to think about how the world could be, I watch The West Wing. It's a show that's imaginative, it's got incredible script writing, it's got incredible character development, but it really talks about how to think about doing the right thing as well. Now, whether you agree with the politics or not, that's a different question, but just the thought that smart thinking solves big problems, again, sort of it's a bit like the Linus Torvalds book, it just speaks to me about sometimes we can solve big problems with individuals or people who just have the right way of thinking about things.
[01:01:06] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, I think that's that's the kind of, you know, call it entertainment because it is entertainment, but it's the entertainment that sticks with you and that we we go back to time and again is the ones that we can also like see the the underlying philosophy or or, you know, theory of change that goes into that entertainment. And it's it's fun to watch, it's, you know, either humorous or dramatic or whatever, but there's still that underlying message. And I think, yeah, West Wing is a great example of of that. There's a handful of those other sort of classic shows that are in that line, too. Um, a free round-trip flight anywhere in the world, where would you go?
[01:01:46] Phil Harris: This is hard. Um, my wife and I were talking about this the other day, and um I've had I've had the luxury of traveling just about everywhere. I think there's 15 countries on the planet I haven't been to. Wow. But if I ever want to go to one place, it's Bali. And there's two reasons: one, my wife and I went there for our honeymoon and it was the beginning of the most important chapter of my life by far. Um, and and secondly, it's because it has that balance of everything. It's I love to scuba dive, I love the rainforests, the jungle, the architecture, the people, the food. It just brings everything into one package for me. And so, um it just, again, it's those things that sort of speak to you emotionally and also intellectually. It's one of those things that I could always go back to.
[01:02:40] Trevor Freeman: Oh, fantastic. Um, who is someone that you admire?
[01:02:45] Phil Harris: In history or today?
[01:02:47] Trevor Freeman: Ah, you pick, anything.
[01:02:48] Phil Harris: That's fascinating. Um, I think historically, it's I'm a Brit, it's hard not to go back to some of my my my forebears or my my country's forebears. Alan Turing, who against all adversity, social, political, technical, came up with an inspirational way of thinking about solving what were deemed to be unsolvable. And again, it was a it's a tragic story, I think we've all if you see, you know, the movie that was made about his life, um, it's a very tragic story, but it's an inspirational story about how again, if you just take a different approach to solving what seems to be an unsolvable problem, you can. You get smart people together, doesn't have to be a big army of people. And I think so Turing is one of those people that always comes back for me, thinking, "Wow, if I could have just some of his courage and some of his imagination and some of his intellect, I'd be a very happy person."
[01:04:02] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, and it's almost, I mean, obviously a brilliant man, but it's the willing to think in a different way or willing to approach a problem in a different way that, I mean, there's a long list in history of of major turning points that are as a result of someone thinking in a different way or doing something in a different way, and I think that's a great example of it, so. Just about the entire course of human life in the midpoint of the 20th century changed on that that man's inspiration, that man's imagination. Yeah, and that's that's not an understatement. That's fantastic. Uh, okay, last question. What's something about kind of the energy sector or, you know, your sector that that you're really excited about, or something that you see in the future that you're really excited about?
[01:04:47] Phil Harris: Actually, I see it now, to be honest. There are things in the future. Hey, I I I have two 13-year-old kids. I want to have a sustainable ecology and world environment for them to live in and bring their own families up in. And I think about how we can use power more efficiently, but how we can make it It does Look, sustainability is important. I want to see renewable, sustainable energy for the general world as a as a thesis. Right now, it's how we can be much more efficient in the use of power and the right power delivery. And I think, as I said, I gave the ThinkOn example, that's incredibly exciting because now if we can do that at scale, that's an opportunity to do that democratization that I spoke about. So, when I think about the things that are really exciting me about the data centre world, the world I live in, actually that power generation and power availability in a clean, effective, well-managed fashion is exactly what we need right now while the rest of us are solving these transistor problems.
[01:05:58] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, it's I mean, our listeners are probably going to roll their eyes because I say this all the time, but one of the things that excites me the most is seeing like we're in a period of change, and and that's a really exciting time to be working in this, and I kind of hear that from you in in your sector as well, and I see it in mine, in the energy sector, of we're we're actually getting to see some of this innovation, some of these like leaps and bounds forward. That's not to say there aren't still problems, that's not to say there aren't steps backwards as well, but it it's very cool to be working on this at a time when we're seeing that change, and and that's kind of what I'm hearing from you as well.
[01:06:34] Phil Harris: Indeed.
[01:06:35] Trevor Freeman: Awesome. Phil, thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate it. This has been great chatting with you.
[01:06:39] Phil Harris: Trevor, the pleasure was all mine. Thank you.
[01:06:41] Trevor Freeman: Fantastic. Take care.
[01:06:42] Phil Harris: Take care.
[01:06:43] Podcast Outro: Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Think Energy podcast. Don't forget to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and it would be great if you could leave us a review. It really helps to spread the word. As always, we would love to hear from you, whether it's feedback, comments, or an idea for a show or a guest. You can always reach us at thinkenergy@hydroottawa.com.

Trees are a major cause of power outages. They're also a wildfire risk—when branches hit a conductor, a small spark can become a big blaze. Lynn Petesch of Overstory joins thinkenergy to talk trees, exploring how AI, satellite imagery, and vegetation intelligence help utilities prevent outages and reduce wildfire threats. Including Hydro Ottawa, who saw a 44% drop in tree-related outages since partnering with Overstory. Listen in for how we work together to keep the grid safe in an era of extreme weather.
 
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Overstory: https://www.overstory.com/



Lynn Petesch on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lynnpetesch/ 

 
Trevor Freeman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trevor-freeman-p-eng-8b612114 

 
Hydro Ottawa: https://hydroottawa.com/en   

 
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Transcript:
[00:00:00] Trevor Freeman: Hi everyone, and welcome to the summer edition of Think Energy. We are officially in podcast vacation mode. So while our normal day-to-day work continues, we're taking a brief pause from our kind of regularly scheduled episodes to recharge, to think about what's coming up in the year ahead content-wise, and just do some planning. But while we do so, we don't want to leave you without anything to listen to, so we look back at some of our favorite insights and episodes over the past year, and that is our summer rewind. So this summer, we're tackling a pretty significant and overarching theme that's really defining the current state of the energy transition, and that is the collision between digital infrastructure and physical infrastructure as it relates to our energy grid. It's this really kind of fascinating look at old versus new, traditional versus up-and-coming, and how we progress to meet the energy needs of our customer base, the growing energy needs as we electrify, as we, you know, expand, while also implementing new technology to protect our grid, protect our assets, to better manage things. So it's kind of a common theme in a lot of episodes that we have done in the last little while and a lot of the conversations that we're having. So in Part 1 today, we're kicking things off with a look at the physical world of our grid and how we're using new technology to protect it, and that is our conversation with Overstory. So we'll re-examine how we use high-resolution satellite imagery and artificial intelligence to act as kind of a shield almost, you know, helping utilities proactively manage our vegetation and reduce vegetation-to-powerline contact, which can reduce power outages, wildfires in many cases, and really has been an important tool for us here at Hydro Ottawa as well as in the utility industry more broadly. So sit back and have a listen to my conversation with Lynn Pedesch from Overstory, and enjoy this summer rewind.
 
[00:02:26] Trevor Feeman: Welcome to Think Energy, the podcast that dives into the fast-changing world of energy through conversations with industry leaders, innovators, and people on the frontlines of the energy transition. Join me, Trevor Freeman, as I explore the traditional, unconventional, and up-and-coming facets of the energy industry. If you have any thoughts, feedback, or ideas for topics we should cover, please reach out to us at thinkenergy@hydroottawa.com.
 
[00:02:58] Trevor Freeman: Hi everyone, welcome back. Today on Think Energy, we're going to be talking about trees. Yes, you heard that correctly—trees. I know this is a show about energy, but there's actually a very real connection between our electricity grid and those slow-growing, majestic givers of shade, lumber, fruit, and so many more benefits. Honestly, who doesn't love trees? But I'm not just kicking this episode off in my capacity as a tree hugger. Let's take a look at this through a utility lens, and I will use Hydro Ottawa as an example. Hydro Ottawa's service territory includes some very rural and very forested areas. Even our urban territory has a fairly extensive tree canopy. As a result, Hydro Ottawa trims about 60,000 trees each year. Now why? Because trees contacting power infrastructure is a big problem. Tree interference remains a leading cause of power outages for us. Strong winds force them onto our wires. Heavy snow or freezing rain builds up and weighs down branches, breaks limbs, and increases the risk that part of a tree may touch a line. And in some extreme cases, heavy storms can even send trees or branches crashing into our poles, damaging the poles. The struggle between power lines and trees—which again, don't get me wrong, we all love trees—has been going on for years. There is a constant struggle between trimming enough and getting the right trees trimmed and maintaining as much tree coverage as we can. In 2022, we identified a disruptor in this stance. The solution came through a partnership with Overstory, a company that uses satellite imagery, infrared technology, and artificial intelligence to help utilities manage vegetation and trim trees more efficiently. And the timing could not have been better. Just days after we started working with Overstory in the spring of 2022, the Derecho hit Ottawa. Our Ottawa-based listeners will remember this storm well. It was monumental in the history of our city and indeed for us as a utility. Winds reached 190 kilometers an hour. For our non-metric listeners, that's nearly 120 miles per hour. The storm ripped through poles, houses, and caused considerable damage to our city's urban forest. Overstory played a crucial role during the cleanup and in helping us level up our vegetation management strategies moving forward. We realized that the insights we got from Overstory would help improve our proactive approach to tree encroachment and hazard identification, and this is essential in this era of extreme weather events. We know that climate change is causing more frequent and more extreme weather events. According to Climate Central, the number of weather-related power outages in the United States increased by 78% between 2011 and 2021. And severe weather accounted for over a thousand outages across Nova Scotia just in the year of 2024. We want to keep you connected during these heavy storms, and that's why we're looking to organizations like Overstory. So what does Overstory do to help us keep the lights on? Well, without giving away too much, because we're going to get into the details shortly, Overstory, through a detailed analysis of the scans they do of our entire grid, identifies high-risk areas which we can then prioritize and better focus our resources when it comes to vegetation management. This level of monitoring and focus reduces the risk of trees from coming into contact with our poles and disrupting your connection to the grid. The results speak for themselves. Since partnering with Overstory, we've reduced vegetation-related outages by 44%. And that's only part of the story. As we'll discuss further, Overstory also plays a crucial role in helping utilities prevent wildfires in high-risk areas across North America. Similar to extreme weather, wildfire frequency and intensity is also increasing, in part due to climate change, expanding cities, and many other factors. And when wildfires do happen, these stories are heartbreaking. What many people don't realize is that lots of wildfires are sparked by trees making contact with power lines. And that is why Overstory plays a key role in tagging areas where those fires are most likely to ignite and spread, making it easier for utilities to prioritize trimming work and vegetation management in those areas. To dive more into how Overstory is helping us here at Hydro Ottawa and other utilities, helping us identify and act to mitigate risk associated with vegetation, I'm really excited to have Lynn Pedesch on the show today. Lynn is Overstory's Head of Customer Success and has spent the past 10 years building customer-facing teams with a specific focus on technologies that tackle the climate crisis. She began her career working for the United Nations and the diplomatic service of her home country Luxembourg, before moving into the tech sector to really work in environments where she could drive impact more quickly and at greater scale. Lynn Pedesch, welcome to the show.
 
[00:08:05] Lynn Pedesch: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
 
[00:08:07] Trevor Freeman: Okay, so let's start at the very top with a high-level look at what Overstory does and how the organization came to be.
 
[00:08:15] Lynn Pedesch: Yeah, let me tell you about Overstory. I mean, we are a vegetation intelligence platform. We use remote sensing and AI to give electric utilities, including Hydro Ottawa and others, a clear system-wide view of their risk. They always do it because they want to address three things, or sometimes more, but kind of there's always a few goal posts, and it's either improving reliability, reducing wildfire risk if that is if they're in an area where that is a concern, and/or improving operational efficiencies. So Overstory very much becomes a decision-making tool for their programs. We're used mostly by the vegetation management people, operations people, wildfire mitigation teams, and they each time they want to either use a program that exists, prioritize it, reshape their work, they might be preparing for a storm, they might be working on a wildfire mitigation risk. So the company more broadly was founded in 2018 by Aniek Schouten and Indra den Bakker—this was back in the Netherlands. And they were leveraging or getting really interested in satellite imagery and were very initially using it for deforestation purposes. So the climate resilience DNA has always been with us, but like any startup, we were looking at that kind of target audience that was most interested in what we had to offer. And pretty quickly, we landed on the electric utilities. They had the most pressing need to use remote sensing at scale to solve very big problems, honestly. And so we pivoted into that space of electric utilities. And then in 2020, Fiona Spruill, who's our CEO right now, she joined us. She shaped the company into what it is today, and that is really around building safer and more reliable operations.
 
[00:10:14] Trevor Freeman: That's great, and I want to dive into some of the details. Our listeners will know that we talk a lot about grid modernization here and talk a lot about better intelligence of what's happening on the grid in all aspects. And something we haven't really talked about and I'm excited to talk to you about today is the sort of vegetation management side of it. So really excited to get into the details, but before we do that, I'm always really curious to understand, you know, the people behind the conversations. How did you get into this area of, you know, high-tech vegetation management? I touched a little bit on your bio in the intro, but give us a sense of, you know, how did Lynn come to be in the space that you're in right now?
 
[00:10:52] Lynn Pedesch: Yeah, I wouldn't say I grew up thinking I was going to work in this space, but I love working in it now. So actually right out of college, I went to work for the United Nations, but then in the last 15 years, I started working at high-growth tech companies, startups, and I've always been focused on leading and building CS operations, which is basically the customer success teams. They're the ones that are in front of the customers, implementing these software programs, kind of working very closely with customers, solving problems. And about four years ago, I decided that I did want to focus the rest of my career on solving the climate crisis more broadly. And I remember very clearly that I came across Overstory and there were two things that really resonated with me. One was hearing that utility-caused wildfires could be a thing of the past—like they are preventable—and the other thing was learning about this world where vegetation is the biggest cause of outages, which is, you know, I did not know before! And so I think, you know, having these very clear goals is very compelling to kind of work on something where it's so easy to understand what the big problems are. So I joined Overstory, and for the last couple of years, I've been building a team that gets really deeply embedded in these utilities, specifically with the vegetation management and the wildfire mitigation teams. And we work on their programs, we understand their programs, we help them reshape their programs, we roll out obviously the software element that is Overstory. It's been very fun and rewarding work.
 
[00:12:30] Trevor Freeman: That's great. And I really love, you know, talking to people from a variety of areas that touch on climate change and the climate crisis, and I think there's a bunch of us who share that passion of wanting to do something. I spoke with a group of recent grads about what a green career, what a career in climate change looks like, and really it looks like whatever you want it to look like. There are so many aspects that touch on this. So kind of neat to hear how that was your passion and then you figured out where it made sense for you to enter into the climate sphere, so that's great.
 
[00:13:06] Lynn Pedesch: Yeah, I guess when I was young, I thought you had to be a scientist to work on climate, and I think now anyone can find an angle on how to contribute to it, and I think everyone needs to help contribute.
 
[00:13:15] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, any job can be a green job if you care about it and if you make it that. Okay, so let me get back to Overstory. Tell us a little bit about the evolution of the company. You talked about it kind of founding about seven years ago. Tell us how it's evolved and progressed over those seven years.
 
[00:13:30] Lynn Pedesch: Yeah, so when we started working with utilities, I think at that point everyone was kind of assessing whether satellites could be a good use case for analyzing vegetation. We're now talking about 30-centimeter imagery, so the resolution of satellites has become incredible. You can really see branches, you can detect species of trees, you can see if they're healthy or not. So initially that was kind of our MO. We really were the leading provider to find out where the trees are, how close they are in terms of proximity to your network, so to the conductor, which is the risk. You know, we're looking at the terrain. If you're looking in the mountains in Colorado, you have very different terrain than maybe in Ottawa. So, you know, detecting tree species has been really interesting, detecting the health of trees, and how that decline is furthering. A lot of utilities are experiencing a lot of tree decline, die-off right now. So that was how we started. And then we started working with the really big utilities, and you had to think about this problem at scale. Now we might be scanning with satellites tens of thousands of miles at a time. And some of these utilities, they might have thousands, if not tens of thousands of trees that could pose a risk to their network. They might have had a really big, large weather event, a storm that knocked over some of their system. So at that point, it all becomes about that decisioning tool. Everything starts becoming a priority. And I think that's now where we're really leaning into, is making not just surfacing the data, but making it very actionable. Utilities have a lot to deal with. They deal with very tight budgets, they deal with crew constraints, they might have an aging workforce, there's regulatory pressure, they're really vulnerable to storms, increasingly there's a lot of wildfire exposure. So everything becomes a decision of where should I focus my attention, where can I get the biggest bang for my buck, what should I do, what should I not focus on. And that decisioning is where we really want to be a key player in.
 
[00:15:47] Trevor Freeman: Absolutely. And looking forward, I know we're jumping the gun here, we haven't gotten into the details of what you do, but looking forward, what is your vision for kind of the future of this space and how it's going to continue to evolve? Are you mature as a company yet or as a sector, or is there still a lot of growth to happen?
 
[00:16:04] Lynn Pedesch: Yeah, I think the vast majority of utilities are now leveraging remote sensing. It could be LiDAR, it could be drones, it could be satellites, so that has become a pretty established tooling within the sector. I think what our vision really is, is providing utilities that share resilience-first picture of risk. So, you know, we imagine a world where you can kind of see the emerging risks and you can start becoming proactive. Being proactive in this space of vegetation management has been really challenging. You never know where the next tree is going to fall, and over the last couple of years, customers suddenly have access to this risk across the territory so they can start being proactive about it. As a matter of fact, that was a key use case also with the team at Hydro Ottawa, is to start launching these proactive programs. And I think when we think about it, we get very excited about the world in which anyone from the field crews to the vegetation managers to the operation folks to the execs to the regulators, the community partners who think about the safety of their communities, all have that kind of shared view of risk. Just imagine, they all understand the same risk, they operate off the same sheet, and they make the same data-driven decisions. That could solve a lot of problems, because right now the data is often scrambled across different people—certain people have access to it, and certain people don't.
 
[00:17:33] Trevor Freeman: Great. Okay, so let's get into the specifics here. I want to actually talk about specifically what Overstory does. How do you find—we've kind of talked about vegetation management, obviously you're supporting Hydro Ottawa and other utilities in our vegetation management programs—how do you find and tag high-risk vegetation? What is high risk? Like, what do you actually do on a day-to-day basis?
 
[00:17:58] Lynn Pedesch: Yeah, that's the part that I deal with the most often! So excited to get into the specifics. Implementing with Overstory is actually pretty easy. I mean, when we start working with a customer, we need to know where your grid is, so we need to understand where your power lines are running. We need to understand the main configurations of them, you know, how tall are the poles, etc., so we can really compute that whole focus of where the trees are in relation to your power lines, to your conductors. That's all ultimately that we're focusing on. Increasingly, we're also focusing on the ground, I'll be talking about that as well. We then task these satellites over your territory. We do that during the leaf-on season, so that will be the summer, essentially. And then we run all these models. So we first need to understand where the trees are, what is their height, and what is their health. An unhealthy tree is much more likely to fall and cause damage to your power lines. We're looking at the fuels on the ground. We can help you determine what type of equipment you might need to attack certain types of vegetation, and we always compute that risk to the conductor, and we look at your right-of-ways. Now, I think the interesting part about your question is what is high risk, and that can be very different across different utilities. And I think that's the maybe unique part with Overstory, is that we can configure it to your standards. So every utility has very unique components. If you're on the West Coast and you're concerned about wildfires, your tolerance to risk will be very different than if you're on the East Coast where you're mostly concerned about not causing too many outages. Including that, you might have specific trimming specifications. The crews run around with chainsaws, they know exactly how far out they need to trim, how much they can trim, and there's a bit of a risk tolerance thing. So we build very configurable risk frameworks for all of our utility partners, so "high" means one thing to Hydro Ottawa, means something different to a customer in California that is facing a very different type of risk.
 
[00:20:04] Trevor Freeman: So you're out there assessing, essentially just for the context of our listeners, you know, we've got power lines that run overhead, they run through residential neighborhoods, commercial areas, but also forested areas, treed areas where there's lots of vegetation near our equipment. Your company really gets an understanding of the interaction between the vegetation and our lines, and says these ones are too close, or this is a tree that's, you know, not healthy and could come in contact with your lines based on your analysis. So help us, like let's paint that picture a little bit more detailed. How do utility companies take the information that you are coming up with, that your analysis is coming up with, and use that to run a vegetation management program more effectively? What does a utility do with that information?
 
[00:20:56] Lynn Pedesch: Yeah, so we always center it around four main use cases. One is optimizing a program that already exists, it's creating a targeted program for you, it's quantifying your work, and risk reporting. And I'll dive into each and every one of them a little bit to illustrate a bit more what that could mean. So when we think about program optimization, a lot of utilities have existing vegetation management cycle, they might have a regulatory obligation to visit their territory every four years, for example. Now a lot of times, they've been doing their program the same way for the last 10, maybe 20 years, but the conditions in their territory are different, right? I mean, the things we're seeing, the storms are heavier, there's more tree decline that we're seeing right now. So they know they need to adapt and they need to adjust it, but it's big programs with lots of budgets attached to it, a lot of crews running around, so starting to think about how you can start pulling a circuit that you're meant to trim forward, or starting to tackle an area where you say is more residential, there's fewer trees, focusing on your high-risk areas first, re-managing these programs is one key component that we work with a lot of companies on, and thinking about Oklahoma Gas and Electric, for example, that they have a budget and they can only do that much with the budget, and it was really about reinventing where they can get the biggest impact. The second use case is this targeted program creation, and I'll use the Hydro Ottawa use case for that. You know, they suddenly had a view about where all of their hazard trees are. Hazard trees are these trees that are declining, they're dying or they're dead, and they could have an impact on your system. Now suddenly you know where they are, so you can start building a targeted program about dedicating some time and budget and crews to actually going and addressing those trees. That has a big impact on your reliability and on reducing tree-caused outages. And there's many others, sort of like hot-spotting is a very common term about starting to become proactive and doing something for a specific program. The third use case is work quantification, and I think there, when you think about it again, there's large contractors that are running around managing your territory, and now utilities for the first time often have that data to actually assess how much work there is. So that's really helpful in terms of negotiating your contracts, getting better bids. Some utilities say it's pretty hard to find contractors that want to work on their system because it's very hard to estimate how much work there is. Or they might have a budget to mow certain vegetation along a transmission corridor. Just knowing how much vegetation there is is a really helpful tool to address it and prioritize it in the right way. And then the fourth use case is risk reporting, and that is about getting that baseline view about your risk and tracking it year-over-year. And this is really where we want utilities to have that data to report it out to their boards, insurers, regulators, and often it's used to defend your budget, secure your budgets, or really have some data to kind of back you up on what the problems are that you're facing.
 
[00:24:26] Trevor Freeman: Great. So you talk about data, and, you know, each of those use cases that you mentioned or strategies that you mentioned really are about getting the right information in the hands of the right people to make decisions and sort of more efficiently and effectively make decisions. But it's a lot of data. And so Hydro Ottawa has over 6,000 kilometers of lines, you know this of course as our partner. We have a big territory and we have a fairly treed territory. That's a lot of data points. You're collecting a lot of data from your satellites, you're doing analysis on that. How are you doing that analysis? Is it—you know, AI is kind of a buzzword in every sector right now, and the utility sector's no different. Are you using some form of AI or machine learning analytics? What are you doing in terms of, you know, crunching the numbers and coming up with the right actions?
 
[00:25:25] Lynn Pedesch: Totally. Yeah, AI is a buzzword, but it's also very exciting. I think utilities have really embraced it already. They're using it for demand forecasting, they're using it for customer service, they're using it for asset planning. I mean, at the core, Overstory has been using AI to turn remote sensing data into operationally useful intelligence about their vegetation. So when you say, yes, Hydro Ottawa has that many thousands of kilometers of overhead lines, we need to rank it to them: This is your worst circuit, this is your worst area, this is the area where you have the most hazard trees, for example. So we can really rank order on a span level from the worst to the best, right? So that could be one thing. It's still an overwhelming amount of data. So where we started by using AI to kind of predict where the trees are, how tall are they, what was their relation to the conductors, now what we're really excited about or kind of leaning into with AI is how to intelligently kind of assess and prioritize risk. So not every hazard tree has the same impact. If a hazard tree falls on a line where more houses are dependent on, you will knock out the power of more people. So it's always a prioritization exercise, and leveraging AI for that is what is most exciting to us right now. And I think it's important to note that we also don't just want it to be a black box. All of the models we've built, they're always validated by certified arborists and kind of our utility partners, and I think at this stage, this is very important, because every tree that we find exists in the real world, and so validating this AI with ground-truthing has been really important for us to also build that trust in the technology.
 
[00:27:14] Trevor Freeman: That's great. And I do think it's helpful for our listeners to kind of understand the context before this. This work is sort of done—you know, in the absence of a tool like yours, it's sort of done, you know, there's a degree of manual effort here. There's a degree of patrolling the lines, there's a cycle of vegetation management. So if you've done a line this year, in three years or four years or five years, you want to be looking at it again. This takes a little bit of that—I don't want to call it guesswork, but it takes a little bit of that manual effort out of the equation and really focuses efforts in the right way, and it's only with the tools that, you know, you folks are using that you're able to do that volume of analysis and get that pinpoint accuracy. So that's fantastic. Let me get into the success of it all, like the big picture. We've obviously talked a couple times here that you're our partner here at Hydro Ottawa, so I know the success that we're having with you, but, you know, tell us some of the great success stories with other utility partners. Are you actually reducing weather-related outages? Are you seeing the impact of using the Overstory tools and methodology to support utility partners?
 
[00:28:28] Lynn Pedesch: Yeah. I mean, weather-related outages can mean many things. You have trees knocking over, like the pole might crack, etc. You know, those, there's a lot of things that can happen during a storm, and I've heard a lot of stories about some of the storms that Ottawa has experienced in the past years where, you know, you could have had anything and they're just heavier and the consequences are really strong. But what we can impact is the tree-caused outages. And that we've proven with Hydro Ottawa where, within a year, by focusing that targeted program on going to an area where you had a massive amount of these trees that were dying off, and at any point with just a little bit too heavy wind could be toppled over and fall on the line, we had a 44% reduction in tree-caused outages. That's a real, tangible number you can see. I'm thinking about a utility as well on the East Coast, a co-op that runs through very rural areas. In those areas, you have trees outside of the right-of-way that are toppling over onto lines, so tree-caused outages are a huge issue for them and it's really impacting their SAIDI and SAIFI, those key KPIs that utilities are always tracking. And by us just giving them a rank order of which hazard tree—they had so many of them—which hazard tree to even go to first, because if that hazard tree were to fall on a line, a ton more people are going to be out of power than if the other one were to fall on the line where you will have like one rural cabin that will not have power. That led to a reduction of something around 90% of tree-caused outages to 70%. It's still a long way to go, but it was a really tangible number that you can see, and it shows that if you then do that proactive work, you have a real impact on your tree-caused outages. And if I think about our customers in California, Pacific Gas and Electric for example, it's a lot about helping them understand where they don't need to go. So it's kind of doing something of a visual inspection and actually skipping certain spans. That can be in itself a really big use case, because right now, if you don't have an understanding about where your risks are, you might be sending trucks to roll for hours around areas where there is not really any tangible work to be done. So redirecting them to the right areas is where we've seen a lot of success there, and that obviously leads to budget wins, right? You'll be saving a lot of money by doing that, and those are kind of the use cases that we chase and that we kind of help prove the cases on.
 
[00:31:07] Trevor Freeman: Absolutely. Yeah, there's only so many resources you can throw at this, and making sure that we prioritize and focus those resources in the right spot is absolutely critical. You were just talking about the West Coast and you mentioned this earlier, I know wildfires is an area that is obviously of great interest for your organization. We're fortunate here at Hydro Ottawa in that we haven't really had to deal with that much, but anybody who's, you know, following the news knows this is a major problem for us. So how, what is your role in helping those utilities prevent wildfires? Maybe give us a very quick primer on why utilities are a factor when it comes to wildfires first, and then how your organization is supporting that.
 
[00:31:52] Lynn Pedesch: So unfortunately, utility-caused wildfires tend to be the most catastrophic wildfires because they're critical infrastructure, and we've obviously seen that happen across the world and in the US recently again and again. But utility-caused wildfires, as I said at the beginning, are also the actual wildfires that are preventable. So that's really where we're lying into. A lot of the forests right now, they've become tinderboxes. That is obviously because of fire suppression policies, that's because of forest management techniques that have been leveraged in the last couple of hundred years that are slowly changing at a different pace. Canada's had some, unfortunately, some really bad fire seasons recently as well. And so where Overstory wanted to place itself is in that prevention space—to even not get to the point where you have a spark, because there's a lot of tools out there that focus on mitigation and what do you do when you see that first plume of smoke coming up, and so we've landed in kind of really focusing on the prevention side so that utilities are hopefully in the future not the ones that spark any of those catastrophic wildfires. We've already always been looking at the vegetation that could touch your conductor, right? That I've been speaking about a lot. But now we're really excited for the first time and we recently announced that we launched a fuel detection model. So that's us looking at the ground fuel conditions, and those are actually usually the key contributors to the spark that spreads the fire. We're now providing that to utilities as a much higher resolution than ever before. For me, it's interesting cause I've spent a lot of time looking at trees, and now I'm going into the field and I'm looking at the ground, and it's a new perspective! But yet again, we could just, you know, we don't want to overwhelm our customers with a lot of maps and showing the fuel conditions necessarily, we can really help them identify those spans where a single failure would have the greatest consequence. So yet again, it's about how to make that data—there's a lot of wildfire risk maps out there—but make it a very actionable list of spans that if they were to tackle those, they are very proactively reducing the risk of igniting a fire and as a result obviously protecting their communities.
 
[00:34:10] Trevor Freeman: Got it. So it's not just about the overhead trees, branches, etc., contacting the line, it's, you know, if a switch goes, if an insulator pops, if something happens that will cause sparks, what's happening on the ground below that line, and how do we make sure it is able to withstand sparks that might happen.
 
[00:34:29] Lynn Pedesch: Exactly. If you have dry grasses, if you have sagebrush, if you have certain types of fuels, they're just much more likely to spark a fire and then spread out without there even being any trees. You have these prairies along Texas that can blow up in a fire very quickly, and the fires can spread to tremendous sizes. And so understanding the fuels on the ground is really important.
 
[00:34:55] Trevor Freeman: Super interesting and fascinating, fascinating work to get involved in. As you mentioned, this is obviously an area of, I don't even know if I'd call it growing concern anymore, great concern for the utility industry and all of us. So with the technology that's, you know, we talked about AI a little bit ago, it's literally growing before our eyes, it's really evolving fast. Do you see your technology evolving along with it? What's kind of next for your organization? You talked about getting into sort of the ground vegetation management—what comes next? How do you see it evolving as AI and tools evolve?
 
[00:35:32] Lynn Pedesch: Yeah, I mean, if we see that the future is where we want to support a grid that is much safer and reliable as I mentioned, we also want to make sure it's resilient to the climate and the economic pressures that there are. So our initial focus and our continued focus and where we have a lot of our expertise has been with vegetation. Now we're starting to look at the ground fuels, then that naturally evolves into looking at the asset vulnerabilities, so, you know, the actual poles and if there's any failures potentially on those, as well as further weather exposures, right? It becomes then about the soil moisture, it becomes about the wind speed, it becomes about the rain precipitation, etc. So there's a myriad of things that we can start looking at and that we want to start looking at in order to get that more holistic view of risk and go beyond just vegetation. Right now where we're investing most heavily in is that wildfire risk. There's also the resolution that we see with satellites right now is at 30 centimetres, that might drop down to 15 or 10 centimetres, so the resolution will get higher. There's other sources that we're exploring already, sometimes flying aerial imagery that is at 5 to 15 centimetres. Then you really start seeing—then you can start seeing a leaf on a tree! It gets really impressive. There's LiDAR, there's lots of other kinds of remote sensing technologies that we're looking to leverage in the future. And then as a company as well, we're starting to obviously also expand internationally. We started working with utilities in New Zealand that have very similar problems and various regulatory changes, they also have a problem with wildfire risk. So that is another angle that at Overstory we're chasing right now.
 
[00:37:18] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, I'm glad you brought up that understanding of other assets beyond just vegetation has kind of been running through my head of—we talk about, and I think we've talked about it here on the show, if we haven't I should do an episode on that, like a digital twin. A digital twin of our grid, and really having a good understanding of not just, you know, a line drawn on a map of, "Hey, your circuits run this way," but really physically what's happening out there and it being able to sort of model that, interact with it in a digital way to understand if we do X, Y, and Z, what happens. So the technology that you guys are using to really get good imagery and understanding of what's out there, I think what I'm hearing from you is that could potentially be leveraged in that next level to understand what poles do we have, what health are they in, what's happening with that conductor, is it sagging too much, is it in good health, like there's all this opportunity. That's really fascinating to hear.
 
[00:38:15] Lynn Pedesch: Yeah, already now when we look at transmission corridors, we look at the sag of these lines, and the terrains are also really challenging things to look at. So there's a lot of factors that need to be taken into account, and that can only expand as we want to look at risk more beyond just the vegetation element.
 
[00:38:34] Trevor Freeman: Very cool. Well, Lynn, very, very interesting to hear this. I'm really glad you came on the show today to talk to us. Fascinating to hear what Overstory's up to. I know that we're super excited to be working with you here at Hydro Ottawa, and excited for what comes next. We always end our interviews with a series of questions, so I'm going to dive into those, and here we go. What is a book that you've read that you think everyone should read?
 
[00:39:00] Lynn Pedesch: I was thinking about an author more than a book. My favorite author is Jonathan Franzen. If I would recommend one book, it'd probably be The Corrections, his most famous one, I believe. But they're like these chunky 800-900 page books where you kind of get immersed in these families and you feel like you know them at the end, and then they kind of, I think about them for like months afterward! They're really good reading, at least for the winter when it's cold and you spend a lot of time inside, so probably Jonathan Franzen's books, yeah.
 
[00:39:31] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, we're recording this just before the holidays and I think we'll be releasing the episode after, but winter is such a great time to curl up with a book and it's awesome to have a good recommendation of a nice thick book.
 
[00:39:41] Lynn Pedesch: It'll still be cold in January, especially in Ottawa!
 
[00:39:44] Trevor Freeman: Absolutely, absolutely. So, same question, but a movie or a show?
 
[00:39:49] Lynn Pedesch: Yeah, I'm not a big movie buff, but I recently rewatched What's Eating Gilbert Grape. I don't know if you've seen it, with Johnny Depp and Leonardo DiCaprio, and I always felt like Leonardo DiCaprio should have received an Oscar for that performance back when he was 14, but yeah, it's a beautiful movie.
 
[00:40:07] Trevor Freeman: Oh, nice! Yeah, that's a bit of a blast from the past, but you're right, that is a fantastic one. If someone offered you a free round-trip flight anywhere in the world, where would you go?
 
[00:40:17] Lynn Pedesch: French Polynesia, because it's so far, I've never been. I had a friend who went, and I'm sure it's very expensive to go there, so it'd be great for someone to pay! Yeah, no, that's a place I'll go one day, so yeah.
 
[00:40:31] Trevor Freeman: Fantastic. Who is someone that you admire?
 
[00:40:34] Lynn Pedesch: Yeah, that's a tricky one because I was thinking about people in my family, etc., but if I were to think about a public persona—and also a bit of a blast from the past—I'll think about Tina Turner. She's been my icon since I'm a kid. I was always listening with my dad to Tina Turner. And I think the word that I've probably most used in today's episode was like "resilience," and I always think about her as like possibly the most resilient woman in the world who reinvented herself and her career in her 40s and 50s, and is this complete power woman, you know, always done everything at her own terms. So I get so much energy from, not just her music, I've seen so many documentaries about her, and she's always been this kind of woman that fills you with energy and kind of drives you. So, I'm a big, big fan of Tina Turner.
 
[00:41:28] Trevor Freeman: That's fantastic. I have to say, that's never come up on the show before, and now I need to go and dive down a rabbit hole of learning about Tina Turner and listening to some music. That's a really good answer. Last question: What's something about the energy sector or, let me expand that to kind of the climate sector, that you're really excited about?
 
[00:41:47] Lynn Pedesch: Yeah, I'm going to take a very high level, but I think the thing I've been following the most is like that broad topic of the energy transition, and I think the recent changes or like kind of the way we talk about it has become a lot more interesting because it used to be this kind of fluffy, big kind of vision, and now we're in that phase where it just has to be very practically implemented. And we're trudging along with it, no matter the political climate, etc., there is kind of a move forward. And I actually really like the way that, I think when I first started learning about it or getting interested in it, it was always about renewables, and now it's around just sort of like needing to build a system that is both like low carbon and climate resilient, and there's something in that like way we talk about it now that I find really interesting. There's immense amounts of innovation in it, so, yeah, I'm just enjoying following what's happening on that and how we are moving that direction no matter what's happening right now, so that's exciting.
 
[00:42:48] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, good one. I know my listeners are probably rolling their eyes because I say this all the time, but it's a very exciting time to be in this industry, and very exciting to kind of see the evolution of energy and how we're interacting with it, how it's impacting our society. It really feels like we're at an inflection point, and very great to have you working on one aspect of that that people probably don't think about a lot, so thanks very much for what you're doing.
 
[00:43:13] Lynn Pedesch: Yeah, exactly! When you start working for Overstory, the one thing that happens is wherever you go, you see trees and power lines, and I have a very keen eye for, unfortunately, trees that are in poor health right now, so that's one of the professional things I've developed.
 
[00:43:28] Trevor Freeman: You carry like a spool of red ribbon around, you can tie on the at-risk trees, just so someone could come along! Lynn, thanks so much for coming on the show today, really appreciate it. It's been great chatting with you.
 
[00:43:38] Lynn Pedesch: Thank you so much. Take care.
 
[00:43:40] Trevor Freeman: Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Think Energy podcast. Don't forget to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and it would be great if you could leave us a review—it really helps to spread the word. As always, we would love to hear from you, whether it's feedback, comments, or an idea for a show or a guest. You can always reach us at thinkenergy@hydroottawa.com.

The era of top-down energy projects is over. Today demands collaboration, equity, and stakeholder engagement. And in the clean energy movement, Indigenous partnerships often lead the way. James Jenkins, Executive Director of Indigenous Clean Energy, joins thinkenergy to unpack the Regenerative Energy 2026 Report. He explores what a just transition looks like, how Indigenous communities are shaping the future, and what the industry can learn from working together.
Related links: 
Indigenous Clean Energy: https://indigenouscleanenergy.com/

James Jenkins on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-jenkins-27787913b/

Regenerative Energy 2026 Report: https://indigenouscleanenergy.com/regenerative-energy-national-survey-2026/

Bringing it Home Program: https://indigenouscleanenergy.com/our-programs/bringing-it-home/ 

Trevor Freeman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trevor-freeman-p-eng-8b612114 

Hydro Ottawa: https://hydroottawa.com/en   



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Transcript:
[00:00] Trevor Freeman: Welcome to Think Energy, a podcast that dives into the fast-changing world of energy through conversations with industry leaders, innovators, and people on the front lines of the energy transition. Join me, Trevor Freeman, as I explore the traditional, unconventional, and up-and-coming facets of the energy industry. If you have any thoughts, feedback, or ideas for topics we should cover, please reach out to us at thinkenergy@hydroottawa.com.
[00:26] Trevor Freeman: Hi everyone, and welcome back. We often talk on this show about the what of the energy transition. What needs to happen, what is happening, what technologies or initiatives are growing or up-and-coming. But it's also important to consider the how of it all. Energy systems are complex. That is something that should be clear in all the conversations we have around here, but it's not just technical complexity that we need to consider. Our energy systems are also socially, politically, and societally complex. It's not just a matter of picking the right technology and implementing it. If it was that case, we've got, you know, most of the technology we need, and we'd be in a much better position than we currently are. We have to figure out how we move these projects forward.
[01:14] Trevor Freeman: Traditionally, energy projects have been these large, top-down infrastructure projects. But increasingly, we're moving into a time when collaboration, equity, and stakeholder engagement are critical components of project success. One area where this can be seen—and, in fact, it's an area that's really pushing a lot of this change—is Indigenous leadership.
[01:38] Trevor Freeman: Over the past decade here in Canada, at least, we've seen a profound evolution where Indigenous communities are not just participants in the clean energy transition or kind of bystanders; they are actively leading it in many cases. That's not to say all the problems or challenges have been solved, but we're seeing a lot of movement here. And that's the topic of my conversation today.
[02:02] Trevor Freeman: To help us understand the scale of this movement, I'm joined by James Jenkins. James is the Executive Director of Indigenous Clean Energy, which is a leading organization accelerating First Nations, Inuit, and Métis participation in clean energy projects from coast to coast. I'm really excited to have James on the show today because his expertise comes straight from real, actual experience on these projects. As a proud member and former CEO of the Walpole Island First Nation, James personally drove the equity development for two 100-megawatt wind farms for his community. Today, he leverages that firsthand experience along with a diverse background in consulting, local government, and academia to serve as a national champion for Indigenous clean energy partnerships.
[02:54] Trevor Freeman: His organization just released their third national survey, the Regenerative Energy 2026 report, which provides a really eye-opening snapshot of how Indigenous communities are shaping Canada's energy future through innovation, equity ownership, and community-driven solutions. So today, we're going to dive into the findings of this report, talk a little bit about, you know, what a just energy transition looks like, and explore what utility and industry players can learn from these successful partnerships. James Jenkins, welcome to the show.
[03:31] James Jenkins: Hi Trevor, thank you for having me.
[03:34] Trevor Freeman: So, James, let's start a little bit with some background. Tell us about Indigenous Clean Energy and how your organization works to advance First Nations, Inuit, and Métis participation in the clean energy sector.
[03:47] James Jenkins: Sure. Indigenous Clean Energy is a not-for-profit organization, and we've been operating for about 10 years. So we started 10 years ago with the 2020 Catalyst Program, which was designed to develop a cohort of clean energy leaders coming primarily from Indigenous communities and businesses that could really shape the future of Indigenous participation in the energy transition. So we started with a cohort. It was led by just a few staff and our founding director, Chris Henderson. And this is our 10th year, so we'll be celebrating 10 years of the 2020 Catalyst Program at our national gathering in August.
[04:24] Trevor Freeman: Awesome. Congrats.
[04:26] James Jenkins: Thank you so much. So the goal of that program was to really expand the opportunities, the capacity, and the number of communities engaged in clean energy. And we have seen that progress tremendously over the last 10 years. We've seen federal grant programs to support that work also emerge as major contributors, and we've seen utilities across the country get on board and try to find ways to expand Indigenous participation.
[04:54] James Jenkins: So we've seen quite a bit of success, and with that success, we've grown as well. So we're now a team of about 35, and we're much larger. So we've expanded into a few other areas. One of them is youth, so we have two different youth programs. And we've expanded into energy efficiency as well, mostly under our "Bringing It Home" umbrella.
[05:16] James Jenkins: And the idea behind that is we've seen the success of the 2020 Catalyst Program and clean energy leaders really pushing the envelope in terms of what is possible when it comes to Indigenous-led generation projects. So now we're identifying a gap still existing when it comes to energy efficiency. And so, in a way, we're trying to replicate the success of the 2020 Catalyst Program. We'll be running our third year of the Project Accelerator soon. So that's geared towards energy efficiency; it's an intensive training program, and it comes with a grant.
[05:47] James Jenkins: And finally, we have a policy arm as well that's also very involved in engaging at the community and regional level. So that's through our Energy and Climate team, and we have a national hub that just completed a series of directional gatherings regionally. We also have a global hub as well that's active in Oceania and Latin America.
[06:09] Trevor Freeman: Oh, that's fantastic. Tell me a little bit about the youth programs that you're running.
[06:14] James Jenkins: So, we support youth across our programs, but we have two programs in particular that are geared towards youth. One of them is the Imagination Program, which comes with wrap-around supports and training. Right now, we're developing a micro-credential with the University of Saskatchewan for our program participants. It comes with a grant to lead a community-scale project. A good example might be a solar-powered greenhouse. Many of them are linked to schools, and, you know, we see the passion of younger members of communities that want to move these projects forward, but it's entrepreneurial in spirit.
[06:49] James Jenkins: The second is called Generation Power, which is a wage subsidy program for Indigenous youth, and we pair them with employers in the clean energy field. So some of them are utilities or renewable businesses; in some cases, they're communities or Indigenous businesses that are moving forward on projects. And it's more than just a wage subsidy; we identify all of the potential barriers for Indigenous youth entering these jobs and provide those kinds of support to increase their chance of success and staying in the workforce after the placement.
[07:22] Trevor Freeman: Oh, that's very cool. We've talked a few times on this show about building that next generation of energy champions and people that are focused, you know, on this new form of energy—this new energy transition or this new world of energy that we're moving into. So fantastic to see you guys participating in that. That's really cool.
[07:42] Trevor Freeman: So, I want to spend some of our time here talking about the report that your organization recently released titled Regenerative Energy 2026. So before we dive into the specific data and the numbers, let's talk about, you know, just that title itself and what the document sets out to achieve. So first of all, tell us about that term, "regenerative energy." What does that mean? Why did you choose that title?
[08:09] James Jenkins: Sure. So just generally, regenerative energy is the idea that these projects are doing more than producing electricity for the market and potentially bringing in revenue. They're also contributing to the broader ecosystem, which could mean the ecology of the landscape or a reduction of carbon into the atmosphere. So it's looking at the wider impacts and planning energy with that in mind.
[08:33] James Jenkins: In the Indigenous context, it goes deeper than that. We're incorporating sovereignty, energy sovereignty, and acknowledging that communities are increasingly expecting to be able to move through their energy journey on their own terms. And so that could mean other outcomes in addition to just energy stability and security. It expands to food security, but also ultimately the community being able to plan its future—how does energy fit into that?
[09:03] James Jenkins: I think it fits into what we're seeing in Indigenous communities in general, where there is a need to revitalize our cultures, our practices, our governance structures. We're finding that the energy sector—it's a business sector and an opportunity and an expanding sector—but there's also alignment in terms of values in many places, with communities looking to have an impact on their landscape, on the ecology, and this is a way to do that.
[09:30] James Jenkins: So regenerative energy is acknowledging that there is this revitalization happening. It's not as though our communities, our governments, our nations were extinguished over the last 300 years. What does it mean in terms of revitalizing those practices, and how do all of these projects and ambitions when it comes to energy fit into that?
[09:51] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, I like that description. Thanks for that, James. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but is it fair to say that the choice to use "regenerative" instead of "renewable"—which is fairly buzzy as a term, everyone kind of has renewable energy on their mind—was a deliberate choice? You're building more aspects to it; there are more facets of the description you just gave of regenerative energy compared to just renewable energy. Is that fair to say?
[10:19] James Jenkins: Well, and that's true as well. And as you've read in the report, we're seeing projects expand beyond just what we would term "renewable" projects. So that was the bulk of the projects up until recently, but now transmission lines and battery storage are becoming more prominent.
[10:36] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, absolutely. Great. Okay, I do want to talk to you about that. So my second question kind of at a high level around the report is, you know, one of the goals or one of the things you're doing in this report is really compiling and tracking national data around these projects. Why is that important? Why is that something that you're striving to do—to really track and compile that data?
[10:59] James Jenkins: Well, in the context right now, we have a federal government that is trying to identify meaningful projects that can have an impact on the economy, have an impact on spurring economic growth in different regions. And so it's a critical time for us to broadcast information on our dataset because collectively, these projects that have Indigenous ownership and co-ownership are a massive portion of the electricity generating infrastructure of Canada, and they have a meaningful impact on the economy, but also the ability for communities to finance their own programs, to reinvest in economic development.
[11:36] James Jenkins: So it's a critical time from that perspective. I think there's a need for us to be even louder because collectively as a nation, we seem to be looking for these wins that can be a shot in the arm. You know, we're worried about economic growth, and here we have many examples of projects that have Indigenous participation and that are having these benefits that are allowing different regions that are not participating in the economy in as active a way—this is a real opportunity for them.
[12:05] James Jenkins: And unlike many of the mega-projects that we're thinking about right now, these have shorter timeframes, less challenges, and the risk is much more manageable in comparison. So, you know, we are trying to point out that, A, these kinds of projects—which are renewables, but also battery storage and some of these other projects—these are important for the federal government to continue to invest in because they have been investing in it heavily over the last 10 years, and that's part of the success story.
[12:35] James Jenkins: But there is also a set of learnings that can be drawn from when we have so many examples of good partnerships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous organizations moving these projects forward. So I think when we look into the future as to how this should look, what does Indigenous participation look like for these mega-projects, we have a bit of a blueprint that we can draw from.
[12:57] James Jenkins: And so we are trying to bring more attention to this. I think it's really step one. The federal government can pat itself on the back that it's been one of the key reasons why Indigenous participation in the energy sector has grown over the last 10 years, but it's not getting the attention it deserves in the current conversation. So I think that's why it's a really critical time, possibly for other non-government actors as well that are asking, "Well, in the current global and national framework, what is the best way to achieve climate outcomes, Indigenous participation in the economy, greater social outcomes?" And so we do want to point to this as a good news story that has a track record, and that's what the data really does—it speaks to that track record.
[13:41] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, you often hear it framed, and in fact, just, you know, we're recording this on a Monday—just over the weekend I was listening to the radio, one of those call-in shows that really framed the choice as, "you know, we either invest in climate solutions or we focus on the economy." And I think you can probably say, "we invest in, you know, Indigenous partnership or the economy, or climate solutions." And what I'm hearing from you is it doesn't have to be a zero-sum game. It doesn't have to be either/or. In fact, the data you're showing and the projects that you're highlighting show that all of these outcomes can be achieved with the right focus and with the right investment. Is that fair to say?
[14:21] James Jenkins: It is. And generally, the bucket of renewable projects or clean energy projects, the timelines are shorter, the cost is going to be easier to quantify, and the cost is coming down for these technologies—wind, solar, battery—in comparison to some of the other technologies that are being framed as the solution, which I think they will be. But framing it as either/or doesn't make much sense, especially when electricity demand is growing and it's an immediate issue.
[14:51] James Jenkins: So we should look at some of these immediate solutions and acknowledge it's still a question mark for some of the other sectors that are going to be involved in building out our electricity capacity. Mining, some of these other sectors, there are some examples of Indigenous participation, but not hundreds of examples of equity participation. And so, absolutely, I've been hearing those kinds of either/or arguments, or "no more federal grants, we should have access to capital instead." That could do a real injustice to the existing capacity that's already there, like the number of people in energy offices at Indigenous communities right now.
[15:28] Trevor Freeman: Yeah. So let's dive into some of the data then. You know, you see headlines sometimes about major Indigenous clean energy projects happening in collaboration, and the data in your report really backs this up. I don't want to throw too many stats out there for our listeners, but just quickly, you know, there are over 350 medium-to-large electricity generation projects across Canada with Indigenous participation. We've got 250 of those already operational, the rest in either construction or planning stages. From your perspective, James, you kind of already touched on this—the role of the federal government driving some of this momentum and visibility—just expand on that a little bit. Like, how did we get to these pretty impressive numbers where we're seeing lots of these projects?
[16:15] James Jenkins: Sure, definitely. I think the origin goes back at least to around 2000 to 2008 when there was a series of Supreme Court decisions that ruled in favor of Indigenous communities when it comes to the duty to consult and accommodate—that's what the Supreme Court ultimately called it. So that's a framework that was very important when it came to Indigenous engagement in energy projects.
[16:43] James Jenkins: As the UN Declaration starts to gain traction in our country, it may become less important, but it was certainly a turning point. So decisions like Mikisew Cree up to Tsilhqot'in created a framework where communities could get involved and had the legal backing to do so. Some jurisdictions—with Ontario probably taking the lead at that time, BC following, and many others following that model—supported Indigenous communities so that they could be involved in what the Supreme Court was framing as consultation. And what that meant was having the capacity to be engaged in project review. And often, the developer bore the cost of that.
[17:23] James Jenkins: But there could be positive outcomes because it meant there was a framework and an impetus for communities and developers to sit down at the table when the development was taking place in the territory of an Indigenous community and their rights were potentially going to be impacted. So as that process became the norm in most regions in Canada, what emerged was this mechanism called an Impact Benefit Agreement as a way for the developer and the Indigenous community to sit down and say, "Okay, we've identified these impacts—and these are impacts to the practicing of rights that are enshrined in the Constitution, so there's this channel back to the Supreme Court decisions—so we'll have a confidential agreement called an Impact Benefit Agreement to offset those impacts," which never really fit the spirit of the Supreme Court decisions, but it was adopted all over the country.
[18:14] James Jenkins: And when Ontario and BC went to bring more renewables onto the grid more quickly, they were looking at different ways to ensure there was the kind of local participation, and so they experimented with creating incentives for Indigenous equity participation in the projects. Sometimes that included municipal participation as well, but we saw a large uptake in that. And that was something I was involved in; I was a band manager in my community of Walpole Island First Nation in the past, and while this was happening, I had some other roles.
[18:47] James Jenkins: But we saw it as an opportunity, and ultimately, there were many renewable projects entering the grid in Southern Ontario at a rapid rate. One of the things we were able to identify was that equity participation brought much more benefit to the community than an Impact Benefit Agreement. In the kind of projects we were looking at, it was usually tenfold if you quantified the net revenue from equity participation versus the takeaway from an Impact Benefit Agreement.
[19:17] James Jenkins: So that started to become the norm, and Indigenous communities started to see this as a more meaningful way to address the need for development to happen rapidly in certain regions and especially with renewables. So there was a period where new hydroelectric projects started to include some equity participation, and then we saw, with the expansion of wind and to some extent solar, that happening at a rapid rate starting about 2008.
[19:44] James Jenkins: It's expanded since then for a few reasons. So one is that over time, most regions in Canada have—most provinces have directed their utilities to put incentives in their calls to power to try to ensure more examples of Indigenous equity participation. The other possibility that's happened, which was more an Alberta story but it's been experimented with in some other jurisdictions, is a deregulated market where an Indigenous partner and non-Indigenous partner, or a fully Indigenous-owned project, can go to a consumer and negotiate a power purchase agreement, sell power directly. Sometimes having an Indigenous community providing power provides other benefits to the purchaser, whether it's the industrial or commercial partner, and so that led to quite a few projects as well in Alberta for completely different reasons.
[20:34] Trevor Freeman: Would those other benefits be like preferred rates? What are the other benefits that you're referring to there?
[20:39] James Jenkins: It could be preferred rates. In many cases, it's things like corporate responsibility, just the sustainability measures of having, you know, purchasing from an Indigenous partner. So that was enough of an incentive to really, you know, spur a market in those areas.
[20:56] James Jenkins: And then we've seen the federal government invest through grant programs in Indigenous capacity in the energy sector. So that has allowed communities in many regions to engage in these opportunities and just have the staff to do it. Because most communities are generally dealing with many, many issues all at once—it's like three levels of government all in one, and most services are underfunded. So being able to actively participate in these opportunities, ensure there is enough trust to move forward and that the community is coming along with it, usually requires some expertise and people in the community that understand energy enough to keep everybody engaged. And these federal grant programs have contributed to that as well.
[21:40] Trevor Freeman: Yeah. So with this change over the last let's call it 20-odd years or so, is there a fairly established model or process now that you see Indigenous communities and partners working through, or is every kind of new project finding its way anew? I guess what I'm asking is, yeah, is there an established process? Is it kind of like you know how these projects are going to go now, given that there's quite a bit of experience over the last 20 years?
[22:06] James Jenkins: It's not an established process. And so we—for our Energy and Climate team—we engaged with BC Hydro and Manitoba Hydro to some extent on their recent calls to power and procurement because they're both looking at ways to ensure there's more Indigenous equity in projects, and there are different models to choose from. But there is the ability to look at what happened in different jurisdictions, draw from maybe what worked and what didn't, and so we're seeing utilities start to do that as they develop new procurement procedures.
[22:38] James Jenkins: On the partnership side, things continue to evolve, and there's always the risk that some of these partnerships may be less beneficial to the Indigenous partner. So another report we released six months ago with Clean Energy BC is an equity guide, and the target audience of that is Indigenous communities that are looking at these equity participation opportunities to make sure that the process is fair to them and transparent to them. So there is a framework in place, but I think there's always a need to ensure that communities have access to the tools so that they have a meaningful seat at the table. And it's not a given that those will be in place, so it is an area where we place some of our efforts.
[23:22] Trevor Freeman: And have you seen a change—like you talked about kind of the initial push for a lot of renewable projects being part of the impetus of seeing a big expansion here in Indigenous partnership—at least here in Ontario, which of course is where I'm sitting and we're having this conversation, there was a bit of a slowdown in that, but as we see demand significantly increasing, we're looking at more and more projects. So are you seeing that ebb and flow of project participation as well, or has it been pretty steady in terms of engagement over the last little while?
[23:54] James Jenkins: In most regions, it's been growing. So you look at the Atlantic region, Quebec is really pushing for Indigenous participation in renewables. In most regions, that's happening—Maritimes very much so right now.
[24:10] James Jenkins: In Ontario, we saw with the results of the most recent call to power quite a few northern projects, which is a bit surprising, but I know that's what they wanted to see happen, and it opens up some opportunity for communities in Northern Ontario. In Ontario, I think there are more regions where renewables are less socially accepted right now. And I talk to some people in Southern Ontario that are surprised how accepted it is in most of the country, with a few exceptions. So, you know, I think we might see ways that Ontario tries to draw projects in, whether it's within regions or partners where there is that social acceptance. But that's to be seen.
[24:50] James Jenkins: But Ontario, like other places, knows they need to meet this growing demand, and renewables are relatively quick to deploy, relatively low risk, and will likely be part of that solution, just like everywhere.
[25:05] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, absolutely. Great. Okay, I do want to talk to you about that. So my next question, you mentioned this a few times, that we're not just talking about solar panels and wind turbines, which I think is what most people think of when they think of clean energy projects, but you have mentioned a significant growth in transmission projects as well as battery storage. And there's a number of projects that are now kind of in operation with Indigenous co-ownership that fall into that transmission and battery storage category. So tell us about the economic opportunity for Indigenous communities of these types of projects, not just generation projects.
[25:44] James Jenkins: Right. So battery storage is growing more along the same trajectory as those generation projects have been in the past, and as the cost for battery storage has come down, it's become a very viable way for utilities and provinces to deal with the intermittency of electricity and increase stability while meeting targets for carbon emissions. So we're seeing more Indigenous leadership in that area.
[26:10] James Jenkins: And there's a premier project in Ontario, the Oneida Energy Storage Project, where Six Nations of the Grand River approached NRStor, their partner, to develop the project and then went to the Ontario government and said, "This is what we'd like to do, this is how we see it will meet some of the needs." So there was some real ingenuity in there, and I think in some way, that's an example of what could be the next stage in terms of Indigenous energy planning as that kind of capacity builds because Six Nations of the Grand River had quite a bit of experience under their belt in terms of participating in energy projects.
[26:45] James Jenkins: And then Ontario has also been the leader in procuring battery storage projects, and for the most part, most of them have Indigenous equity participation in those projects. A lot of them benefit from existing relationships between construction companies and communities that can look at these opportunities and co-design them together. And I think we'll start to see that in other parts of the country as that builds. But it is a major opportunity as the technology allows us to meet some of the need to stabilize the grid, and, you know, it could reduce our reliance on solutions like natural gas, so it's a real opportunity.
[27:21] James Jenkins: When it comes to transmission lines, it's a slightly different trajectory, but I think it goes back to the duty to consult and accommodate and parties sitting at the table understanding where do we go from here when there's a project that is going to have this enormous landscape impact and we can no longer do what we did in the past, which was ignore any Indigenous rights on the landscape.
[27:46] James Jenkins: And I was in Ontario for the last 20 or so years and witnessed the demand from Indigenous communities to participate in transmission projects. It wasn't passive in any way. So now we hear from utilities that are saying the right thing to do is to provide these opportunities, which is fantastic. But back then, it really was Indigenous people with the foresight and the stubbornness to for years say, "No, we need a solution that's going to meet all of our needs." And as we started to see some examples—Saugeen and Nawash being one of the first, and then others in Ontario where there would be this kind of Indigenous co-ownership—it gradually started to become more accepted.
[28:25] James Jenkins: And now it's part of the plan in many regions of Ontario, and this is a way to move the project forward, have Indigenous communities on board, and when they're sitting there as partners, there are a number of advantages that they bring to the table because in many cases there is knowledge of the landscape itself. And looking at preferred routes and other major decisions can really benefit from having these communities at the table providing their knowledge as opposed to sitting sort of on the other side of an adjudication table, which is only going to add risk to a project.
[29:00] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, I mean we see all parts of the electricity sector growing, and transmission is one of those areas for sure that in order to support electrification across the province, we're going to see more transmission. So it's great to hear that this is an area that is growing, or getting more buy-in, or there's more partnership happening in all parts of the electricity sector.
[29:21] Trevor Freeman: So, James, you talked about regenerative energy earlier, we touched on that a little bit, and how that term is focused on being built on fairer and more equitable relationships. In your report, you kind of take this a step further by explicitly stating that this work seeks to advance the Truth and Reconciliation Commission—notably, Call to Action number 92. And so for our listeners who are not familiar—and please, definitely step in here if you want to explain it differently than I'm going to—but Call to Action 92 specifically calls on corporate Canada to adopt the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, to commit to meaningful consultation and consent, and ensure Indigenous communities gain equitable access to jobs, training, and long-term economic benefits.
[30:13] Trevor Freeman: So we often hear reconciliation discussed in a social or a political context, but your report really points to the actual act of Indigenous-led clean energy infrastructure and how that can embody this reconciliation in a material and meaningful way. And I apologize that I'm rambling a lot, this is a long question. How does building out physical infrastructure—like generation programs, transmission lines that we've been talking about, battery storage—how does that advance these goals that are kind of laid out and described in this particular Call to Action?
[30:52] James Jenkins: Mm-hmm. And you're right, the benefits of these projects isn't just the net revenue, but it's also apprenticeships, jobs, the business capacity that comes with participating in the project, and sometimes the ability to open up opportunities for practicing harvesting rights where, when Indigenous communities don't have a seat at the table, often the gate or the door is shut to opportunities and access. So it's a way to open those up.
[31:19] James Jenkins: And in my experience with projects in my community, when we were reviewing projects through the IBA or Impact Benefit Agreement process, the goal was always a number of apprenticeships, contribution to education, capacity, and it was always a good news story getting some jobs, employment readiness out of the project. And it was a remarkable shift to be sitting at the table as a partner and be discussing those same outcomes and really led to more of a spirit of cooperation. And we had some really great successes come out of that.
[31:51] James Jenkins: As well as community members feeling like, "This is an industry that I can go work in, and I'm not a stranger in a strange land. My community has a stake in this," and feel that sense of ownership but also home, which can be this indirect challenge when it comes to people entering the workforce and sticking with it. So that kind of ownership—it's part of the solution, how do we grow the Indigenous workforce? When the Indigenous communities have a financial interest in it, it really changes the picture quite a bit, and it really helps with the foreignness that can exist. And so we've seen the opposite in renewable industries and clean energy where many communities and youth are starting to see this as a viable career path and one that makes sense for them.
[32:38] James Jenkins: So, you know, and like I said before, when Indigenous communities are sitting at the table—and in my experience we had gone through project review on many, many projects because of the Impact Benefit Agreement process—we were able to bring that knowledge we had of project review to the table, which can help the project. So it was a real meaningful exchange of, "How can we meet these milestones on time? What can we bring to the table?" So there's that aspect of it, but then there's also the multi-generational knowledge that comes with living on the land.
[33:10] James Jenkins: And, you know, in some ways sitting down with elders, that does take a long time and commitment and is often different than how we would typically view going through the early stages of a project. But at the end of the day, it can lead to better outcomes and actually not take as long because the pathway to gain the knowledge for the least impact through a traditional process is also incredibly time-consuming. And so having an Indigenous party at the table that can bring the correct knowledge keeps things forward, making a meaningful decision from their perspective can really add value in that way as well.
[33:48] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, it's great to hear that you're seeing the impact of these programs on both the projects themselves and better outcomes in the projects, as well as building capacity and partnership in Indigenous communities. And I'm glad you kind of brought those youth programs back up; it's great to hear about those programs.
[34:07] Trevor Freeman: So, you have a report or you have a section sorry in your report called "Opportunities Unrealized," which really highlights major gaps or a gap for community-focused projects right now as different federal funding programs sunset, and you specifically call out three particular pillars that need renewed policy and funding commitment. So first off, you talk about 78 healthy energy housing projects that are mostly just small pilot initiatives. And that's looking at energy efficiency in homes, which you did touch on earlier, and how that's tied to Indigenous health and energy sovereignty. So how do we move beyond those pilots to fund these at scale? What are your thoughts on how we do that?
[34:53] James Jenkins: Right. So our approach is really, A, to support these pilots as much as we can so that we have that cohort of Indigenous leadership that has that experience in community, and so it can have that ripple effect where, when we started to see successful generation projects, some of them coming out of the 2020 Catalyst Program, other communities said, "Well, I want to do that too. How do I make that possible?" And then there's some leadership to grow from. So it's really catalyzing that momentum. And where do we start? So that's the piece in terms of making sure that there is a core group of energy leaders in communities that are almost at the stage where they can have a very impactful, community-scale project when it comes to efficiency that can be replicated and that there are individuals with this knowledge that are in the community.
[35:41] James Jenkins: So that's the first piece, but then the second piece and the other side of the coin that we're very active in is identifying what would the solution look like to make that kind of change repeatable on a national scale. And what we're generally pointing towards is some aspect of federal support, but also private investment as well. So what kind of mechanism can be put in place that will allow private finance to make sustainability programs for Indigenous healthy homes and buildings and infrastructure feasible?
[36:15] James Jenkins: And we think it is going to have to be some kind of partnership between the federal government to secure some kind of financing tool and then to bring that private capital in. And so we have a number of partners that's expanding in the finance sector, in government, to really look at what a solution like that looks like.
[36:35] James Jenkins: Indigenous housing, being a federal responsibility with the federal government having a large role in it, is certainly unusual and comes with some very unique challenges that make change at that scale difficult, but it's also an opportunity. And it does put the federal government in a position where it could lead a process like that and have some very large impact. So we want to make sure there is the existing community capacity for community members to know what meaningful change looks like at the local level, what the challenges and opportunities are that can contribute to that process. So that's the idea behind the Project Accelerator, but also design at the national level of a program that can lead to new builds, new sustainable builds, and retrofits on a major scale.
[37:21] James Jenkins: And there are interesting examples. I was in the US earlier this year at a clean energy conference and was surprised to learn that there were very large subsidies for energy efficiency that were available to Indigenous communities up until recently—I would say at a scale tenfold of what we've ever seen in Canada. So those kinds of programs are possible, and I think we need to think outside the box and think about how do we put this into action.
[37:51] James Jenkins: But ultimately, what we point out in those reports is that energy efficiency also leads to other very critical outcomes, including health and social outcomes at the community level. And speaking with communities, politicians from communities, housing tends to be a near number one or number one issue, with housing in need of repair being the core issue. And so ensuring that new housing is built with these sustainability measures in place will lead to houses that stay healthy for longer. And so, you know, it really goes much farther than just energy outcomes and that's why it's so critical.
[38:34] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, it's another example of it it's not an either or question here, it's, you know, do it right in the right way and have a focus on both healthy and affordable housing at the same time as making sure it's energy efficient and you're kind of achieving both of those goals. So that's great.
[38:58] Trevor Freeman: So, the second item you've identified in this section is, you know, a lot of northern and remote communities who rely on diesel for their energy focus, and our listeners may remember about a year ago we had a conversation with Quest Canada on this topic as well. And so, a lot of those communities are among the most affected by climate change and natural disasters, and you address what needs to happen from an early-stage planning and funding perspective to ensure that those communities that are not necessarily connected to a grid aren't left behind in this transition. Can you speak to us a little bit about that?
[39:41] James Jenkins: Absolute. So already the cost of diesel in these remote communities is very high. So it's already an economic and social challenge in the territories and remote areas in the northern provinces. And so it's an area where communities tend to be very engaged and have been since the beginning. So we've been engaged with northern communities since the beginning with 2020 Catalyst.
[40:15] James Jenkins: And I think it has a really—for them, clean energy has this impact on them like on a visceral level. For communities that have been able to implement clean technology and turn off the diesel generator for a while, they've talked about the impact of that silence that they haven't heard in so long, you know, the smell of clean air and that sort of thing. So there's this real passion, but also acknowledgment that, you know, they want to be part of a larger climate solution, they're feeling the impacts. And so there are many initiatives in the north, a number of which we've supported.
[40:53] James Jenkins: But there are many challenges as well in terms of logistics, the value chain. Transportation is a real challenge compared to infrastructure in the south. So because there have been so many projects and we partnered with the federal government through two phases of a program called the Indigenous Off-Diesel Initiative—and that was supported by a number of federal programs and we're just finishing off the second cohort—there is so much that we've learned through a couple dozen communities that have been heavily invested in reducing their diesel reduction.
[41:35] James Jenkins: And we're really at a stage now where we can learn—we can take stock of what we've learned through this process and identify how do we get this to the stage of successful projects. And we've learned a number of things. It's also bringing technology to these places that's robust enough to withstand the challenges and just be at a utility scale, ensuring different technologies can work well with each other.
[42:04] James Jenkins: But there's a real need to continue that growth, especially when there's been so much investment and so many communities are so close, with a few success stories and so much pride that comes with this. But ultimately, if they are left behind, the cost for them to power their communities with diesel is not going to become less of a challenge over time. It's only going to become more problematic. And so it's a real priority, and something that, you know, we need to keep staying loud about as well because these are where some of our real energy leaders are living and coming from when it comes to clean energy and ensuring that their priorities have a seat at the table.
[42:52] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, you mention success stories, James, and as we kind of wrap up our conversation here, I want to touch on that a little bit. So you talk about looking at this in perspective of the global stage, and one of your policy recommendations discusses Canada Global Indigenous Cooperation. And you outline that there are more examples of successful Indigenous-led energy projects in Canada than anywhere else in the world. How is your organization, Indigenous Clean Energy, sharing this expertise internationally, and what can the rest of the world learn about what's happening here in Canada?
[43:32] James Jenkins: So we started to learn just how far ahead Canada is in this area through participation in forums like the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, and we participated in a pre-conference with 88 global Indigenous delegates. And many of them were surprised to learn of these equity projects and opportunities that exist in Canada. For us, it can still be very frustrating, so it is good to put that in perspective in terms of—from many other jurisdictions, they're still at the beginning stages.
[44:06] James Jenkins: But we do have some programs in place, and for several years we've been supporting a sister organization in Australia called First Nations Clean Energy Network using a train-the-trainer model. So we've been active in Australia every year. We've been active in New Zealand as well. And we have some programming in South America in Ecuador and Colombia. And over the last year, we finished a program where we engaged with all of the provinces within Colombia with delegates from communities to assist in developing clean energy plans for their communities that they could bring to the government and and discuss a partnership framework so that they could start to reduce their reliance on diesel and other other carbon fuels.
[44:59] James Jenkins: And we supported those meetings with the government as well and supported delegates from these countries to also visit communities and see success stories in Canada. And the US is another area where there have been some really positive success stories over the last few years, and there were a number of energy programs that particularly rural and remote communities benefited from, Alaska having probably a slight majority and then others in the northern part of the Lower 48. I think they're going to start to struggle because those programs are sunsetting now, I think most of them have recently sunsetted. And so I think it should be a wake-up call to our federal government that there has been this investment in the form of grants from the federal government. If we don't have some kind of programming in place, we will start to see that progress recede.
[45:57] James Jenkins: But just in general, there's a lot that we can share with other jurisdictions globally, everything from what a good partnership looks like, you know, what are the learnings for meaningful participation. But we do have some examples that are very unique, I think, in almost every jurisdiction—Indigenous equity in transmission lines is is really unheard of, so so we should, you know, acknowledge that there are some things that we're doing well and um sharing that and learning what other communities are going through in other jurisdictions. It also really helps us in our strategy.
[46:40] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, I mean we started this conversation with you describing what your organization does, and something that struck me is it's a combination of supporting projects and project models and helping things get up and running off the ground, providing education, and focusing on advocacy. And I imagine that, you know, even within Canada but also looking at some of the partners you've just mentioned around the world, the focus on, you know, each one of those individual aspects will vary depending on what the biggest need is in that jurisdiction at that time as things change, as funding programs change. So I imagine, you know, advocacy becomes more and more important as you see funding programs change or even just project structure change. Is that kind of fair to say?
[47:28] James Jenkins: Definitely. And our model is very community-driven with with community-tailored solutions and with education and capacity building at the community level being our our primary focus, which does set us apart from other organizations to some extent, but does reflect that that um every every solution is going to be different, and really bringing up that capacity at the community level is the most effective way to do it. And for these kinds of projects, there isn't one solution that fits everybody.
[48:02] Trevor Freeman: Is there, to kind of wrap it up here, is there, you know, one piece of advice that you'd give to—I know this is a bit of a big loaded question, it's hard to boil it all down to one piece of advice—but is there something that you would kind of leave with let's say a utility or a developer who wants to build a successful and mutually beneficial partnership with Indigenous communities? What's that kind of one piece of advice you'd leave with them?
[48:30] James Jenkins: Um, the one piece of advice, and sometimes I am asked that question, and I know there are developers outside of Canada that are starting to look at our market as things change globally. And what I would share, first of all, meeting with the communities is incredibly important. Community leadership, finding out what their process is for engagement and then establishing that relationship is hugely important. And um I think the advice usually stops there. I think many utilities and developers have heard that.
[49:07] James Jenkins: But what I would suggest based on my own experience is that engagement occurs from the very top of the organization, from the utility and the developer. And that if the C-suite isn't meeting with the Indigenous partner themselves, they should be fully aware and engaged in what's happening. And that's usually the recipe for success. And you know, for these opportunities, many communities have a history where trust is something that does need to be cultivated, and that would be my main suggestion. I think it's where really successful partnerships have their strength, is there's that level of engagement from the entire vertical organization of the non-Indigenous partner. And so when there is an issue, political leadership from the community, they know who to call and vice versa, and it doesn't lead to larger misunderstandings. And it can lead to some of the more innovative projects we've seen like Oneida Storage, and there are many other examples of that where the developer and the community, after a successful project, they sit down together and they say, "What's next?" And they want to build on what they've developed together.
[50:37] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, I guess that's an indication of there actually being a relationship, trust built, rather than just kind of boxes checked and a process being followed. But if there's that actual trust built, it is more of a conversation that what next question can come up and there's sort of that mutual learning. So that's great. Thank you for that. So James, we always end our interviews with the same series of questions to our guests. So I'm going to dive right in here. What's a book that you've read that you think everybody should read?
[51:11] James Jenkins: These are the top uh these are probably going to be the tougher questions for me, but um so I recently read a book by Cal Flyn, a UK author from Scotland, and it's called Islands of Abandonment. And the subtitle is Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape. And what she does is, in an investigative journalist style, goes to places where there hasn't been human presence for 50 or more years. Some of them are no man's land in war zones, some of them are cities facing urban decay, some of them are environmental catastrophe sites like Chernobyl, but then finding that nature has rebounded and that there is remarkable biodiversity in some of these places.
[51:59] James Jenkins: So the message I don't want to take away from that is that if you get rid of humans everything will be perfect, because humans have had an impact on the landscape everywhere for much longer than we can comprehend. And in some cases, negative impacts to the landscape are because humans aren't doing what they were doing for a long time. So human intervention has a role and always will, but I think it's important to tell more stories that aren't a story of loss when we get to that point.
[52:36] James Jenkins: And for Indigenous communities, many of us have been going through a process of healing, and many of us are still in that process. But as we start to heal and and ask ourselves what's next, that's when we start to think about regeneration, so regenerative energy, revitalization of our culture and and that's what's next and acknowledging that practices that have been lost are near lost can be revitalized in a way that that is uh is incredibly meaningful. And so I was happy to see that story in a widely publicized book because the major story in conservation, but also climate and other areas, has been one of loss. And so, with all of this loss, and and in some cases, you know, a bedrock of tragedy and historical tragedy, where is the, you know, where is the good news story? And I think having these stories about how nature can regenerate is important. It's important to tell that story.
[53:50] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, that's fantastic. I appreciate that explanation, and these aren't supposed to be my questions to answer, but I do want to quickly mention a book called What If We Get It Right?—and I can't remember the author off the top of my head, but it really is a series of essays and poems and an exploration of like, what if we do the right things and we can address climate change? And I found it very helpful to kind of be able to imagine, yeah, this is what happens if we do the right thing, if we can address some of these challenges. So, along the same vein as what you mentioned. So, the next question is kind of the same, but what's a movie or a show that you've watched that you think everyone should take a look at?
[54:36] James Jenkins: Uh, that that's a really tough one. I do like movies and shows. Um, I recently started watching two British series, um and uh they seem to be very into murder mysteries in the UK, which uh isn't something, you know, normally my favorite, but they do it really well. So I I really liked um Shetland, which is a series that takes place in remote islands in Northern Scotland.
[55:06] James Jenkins: In some ways, I think even the setting that it's trying to tell, it resonates with our work in some ways and even the experience of living in an Indigenous community in a less remote location. So I enjoyed that, and then that led to um Sherlock, the the newer one starring Benedict Cumberbatch, which I thought was a very intelligent um show with a, you know, a compelling uh character with sort of superhero, but but somewhat comic book style realistic attributes, but also failings. Um, so I find I enjoy shows that are drawing from literature and putting them into today's terms and not worrying too much about um, you know, what's realistic and what's not, but really trying to—what would we how would this be written today? So I enjoyed that as well.
[55:58] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, I like that. Um, if somebody offered you a free round trip anywhere in the world, where would you go?
[56:05] James Jenkins: So, Air Canada used to have contests for that, and we used to say Nunavut because it would get the most bang for your buck. You know, these are $4,000–$5,000 tickets, which speaks to the challenges that those communities face when it comes to decarbonizing the north. Um, for me, I mentioned I spent much of my childhood in Northern Arizona. I think at this time I'd probably use it for that, you know, I hope to visit again soon.
[56:39] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, fantastic. Um, James, who is someone that you admire?
[56:44] James Jenkins: Um, I've been grateful for wonderful mentors in the course of my career. Um, I'm really grateful that the founder of ICE, Chris Henderson, has dedicated himself to be a mentor for me and has has really he's committed to that um and I've learned a great deal from him.
[57:04] James Jenkins: Working at Walpole Island, there were a number of chiefs that I worked closely with and have been thinking about one, um Charles Samson, who's passed away, and he really came into his own once he was chief. He had run for a long time, over 10 years, and um really learned a lot from him and his perspective. But then, uh other chiefs, Burton Kewayosh and Dan Miskokomon really really supported me and helped um helped develop my uh the breath of experience that I draw from. And today, um the current chief, Leela Thomas, is really showing some really great leadership, and I think it's a real breakthrough in our region that most of the chiefs in Southwestern Ontario are female, which was um really more rare in the past. So that's a breakthrough as well.
[57:59] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, that's great. Uh, and final question, what is something about the energy sector or its future that you're particularly excited about?
[58:08] James Jenkins: Um, I think what I'm excited about is that the door is open for Indigenous communities to really change the way that they're engaged with the economy, um for there to be some real opportunities for business development. Um, you know, for many years because I lived in the United States for a while, it felt like the overall economic development capacity of US tribes was far beyond what exists in Canada for a number of reasons. And and one of them is there were a few key industries in the US that the federal government, um it cultivated at different times, gaming being one, uh but it did lead to the infrastructure for US tribes to engage in business all across the country in a way that's still the exception rather than the rule in Canada.
[59:02] James Jenkins: So it is exciting for me to think about there being that shift and that um truly Indigenous-led projects stop becoming one-offs, um but they start to be that real uh, you know, Indigenous leadership becomes embedded in the framework of energy decision-making. Um, the idea of it becoming a career path becomes more solidified. So I think it was a dream at one point that some ambitious leaders had, like thinking of Saugeen and Nawash equity participation in that transmission line, there was no blueprint for that.
[59:39] James Jenkins: Um, but now that there's been a dream and we've seen it come into practice, so um it's exciting to think that we may continue to see that progress, and then in 10 years there there will be some foundational pillars for communities to really meet their own communities' needs on their own terms. Right now it continues to be a challenge in most places. It's uh, you know, what do we prioritize with limited resources? And um yeah, exciting that this could be a pathway to to start thinking more in terms of abundance.
[1:00:19] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, I mean we started this conversation with you describing what your organization does, and something that struck me is it's a it's a combination of supporting projects and project models and helping things get up and running off the ground, providing education, and focusing on advocacy. And I imagine that, you know, even within Canada but also looking at some of the partners you've just mentioned around the world, the focus on, you know, each one of those individual aspects will vary depending on what the biggest need is in that jurisdiction at that time as things change, as funding programs change. So I imagine, you know, advocacy becomes more and more important as you see funding programs change or even just project structure change. Is that kind of fair to say?
[1:01:03] Trevor Freeman: James, thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate you coming on the show and helping us understand the work that Indigenous Clean Energy is doing, some of the great success stories, but also a little bit of the path that's still to be walked in order to get to success. So thanks very much, I appreciate your time.
[1:01:21] James Jenkins: Thank you, Trevor, really enjoyed it. Thanks so much.
[1:01:23] Trevor Freeman: Great. Take care.
[1:01:25] Trevor Freeman: Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Think Energy podcast. Don't forget to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and it would be great if you could leave us a review. It really helps us to spread the word. As always, we would love to hear from you, whether it's feedback, comments, or an idea for a show or a guest. You can always reach us at thinkenergy@hydroottawa.com.