Tapping the source: How relics of the industrial age could help power the future

For Andrew, this idea matters now more than ever.

In his home province of Pei, he's watching closely as the grid is under increasing strain.

Last year in 2025, in the winter, communities were told that there would be controlled structured rolling blackouts that would be announced one to two hours before the community or the zone was shut off.

Specific reason was demand on the grid.

For the first time, the utility is preparing for what it calls rotational outages to protect the grid.

That means for some communities, the power could be shut off to prevent a total blackout.

So this was not attached to a weather event, as you would expect.

As what we've seen in Canadian culture in the past, this was in order to prevent grid collapse.

This is very serious.

What's going on? What explains this? Is it population? It's

housing and it's industry.

So that is a grid that is hyper-constrained and that has a major demand for baseload.

There's a baseload sinkhole there that is not being fulfilled.

PEI has now invested significantly in waste to energy and other types of baseload they can source.

Historically, they got their baseload from New Brunswick Hydro.

New Brunswick is also constrained.

I think you can imagine how much worse that situation will become in 2026, this winter and next winter.

And I think that this really showed Canadians for the first time that it's not just future energy demands that are a challenge, but that our system is dangerously constrained today.

This is a massive problem.

In the end, rolling blackouts or load shedding weren't needed last winter.

But the problem of a possible energy shortage remains.

Now the four Atlantic provinces are looking at ways to better coordinate their grids to avoid such problems in the future.

Every province is managing this differently, but the crisis that we're in, the constraint on this infrastructure is shared nationally.

And in fact, should be probably addressed at a national level.

However, we know, for example, that British Columbia has been in a call for power for two years, three years almost, right?