Canada’s Ventures to Value Chains: Electricity is part of Foresight's initiative to leverage data from technology companies and key stakeholders to map, categorize, and analyze strategically important industry value chains for Canada in the clean economy.
The Future of Canada's Electricity
Electricity technology plays an essential role in decarbonizing our electrical grid and supporting widespread electrification across other sectors, and Canada has a well-established ecosystem of innovators in this space.
Over 80 per cent of our electricity comes from from renewable and non-emitting sources.
On a global scale, Canada has a competitive advantage, as clean electricity grids are now a key decision factor for many investors, companies, and project developers.
Despite Canada’s leadership and advantages, the electricity sector will need to make significant adaptations to achieve the federal government’s emissions reduction plan for a net zero electricity grid by 2035 while also keeping up with rising electricity demands.
Our report aims to add to the existing body of knowledge on the electricity sector by exploring the strengths, gaps, and areas of opportunity specific to the national electricity technology innovation ecosystem. It also aims to recognize that technology innovation is only part of a bigger picture where project developers, service providers, utilities, independent power producers, all levels of government, industry associations, communities, businesses, educational institutions, and individuals all have roles to play in shifting paradigms, adopting new technologies and methods, and supporting transformative change.
This report is available for download. Submit this form for access.
Electricity: The Value Chain
The value chain describes the journey of electricity from source to customer by outlining a series of processing steps and inputs and outputs along the value chain. It describes how electricity is generated, transmitted, distributed, stored, and managed. This value chain is intended to be forward-looking and reflect a cleaner and more distributed future for electricity that focuses on renewable and non-emitting electricity sources.
Canada’s Electricity Technology Companies
245 companies were assigned to Canada’s electricity value chain. Overall, most of the technology innovation represented in the database tends to be clustered in one of the following two themes:
- Modular and scalable technologies to enable a transition to a more renewable and distributed electricity grid.
- Technologies that optimize, integrate, and monitor infrastructure and processes.
The top three value chain categories with the highest number of companies assigned are energy storage, distributed electricity generation, and distribution.
Our data and analysis indicates and discusses provincial trends and clustering, areas of competitive strength, and potential opportunities for growth. Some of the key takeaways include:
- Solar is the most reflected electricity generation technology in the database, especially in distributed electricity generation. Solar generation is an area of strength in Ontario.
- Electrochemical energy storage technologies are a growing area of strength for Canada.
- British Columbia has the largest number of electricity generation companies with applications for rural and remote communities.
- Hydrokinetic generation technology is a growing area of strength, but it is still in early stages across the country.
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Why?
Foresight’s venture acceleration programming emphasizes the importance of understanding your value chain.
Knowing where a company fits along the value chain, which companies or technologies come before or after, who the competitors are, and where trends are happening geographically is critical information for ventures, industry, and investors to understand.
This information is also highly important for governments to identify areas of strength, gaps, and opportunities in the innovation landscape, pinpoint areas for targeted support and where targeted R&D and project funding will deliver the greatest return on investment for Canada’s communities and environment.
The Canada’s Ventures to Value Chains: Electricity database and analysis report are invaluable tools intended to provide the Helix-5™ ecosystem unique insights into the landscape of Canadian Agri-Tech.
Interested in learning more about Canada’s electricity value chain? Download the full report below.
