Energy Industry
December 15, 2025
Proudly Canadian Since 1995
Energy Industry
The conversations at the Grimsby Energy Summit didn’t end when the lights came up. They revealed fault lines between the energy businesses need and the infrastructure built decades ago that are now shaping every expansion plan in Ontario. This final piece pulls forward the five forces that emerged across panels and side-room conversations, the ones that will quietly determine who grows in 2026 and who sits idle waiting for capacity that doesn’t come.
Business leaders must develop genuine energy literacy to remain competitive. Understanding how operations impact grid demand, consumption patterns, and pricing is no longer optional. Companies must be proactive by building in-house expertise on energy procurement strategies and integrating energy efficiency into core business functions. This shift requires organizations, even those with little prior experience managing energy as a variable, to move beyond passive consumption and treat energy as a strategic asset. The alternative is those who fail being forced to adapt will face escalating costs and diminished competitiveness in a market that increasingly rewards agility and insight.
7-15 year project timelines for energy infrastructure are fundamentally incompatible with the needs of modern industry. Current regulatory frameworks, originally designed to prioritize stability, must now evolve to support the pace of contemporary economic growth, without compromising safety or environmental protection. Utilities and regulators are being challenged to review approval processes, streamline permitting, and create flexible mechanisms that allow infrastructure projects to move from planning to execution at a speed that matches private-sector urgency. As one panellist summarized: “Too late, too long, speed it up.” The willingness to modernize regulation will directly impact Ontario’s ability to compete for industrial investment.
Traditional, siloed approaches, where each stakeholder operates independently, are hindering progress for everyone involved. Electricity providers, natural gas utilities, industrial customers, and municipalities must prioritize transparent communication, coordinated forecasting, and shared planning. For example, customers should provide utilities with timely and detailed demand forecasts, while municipalities should engage industrial clients early in infrastructure discussions. This collaborative approach is essential to avoiding delays, maximizing resource allocation, and ensuring new investments can be supported without bottlenecks or costly surprises.
Germany, one of the world’s most industrialized nations, operates with over 900 electric utilities. This fact challenges the conventional wisdom that consolidation always leads to efficiency. In practice, Germany’s decentralized structure has enabled closer utility, customer relationships, faster response times, and localized solutions, offering a counterpoint to Ontario’s increasingly centralized model. In the Ontario context, municipalities like Grimsby, with community-owned utilities such as Grimsby Power, Niagara-on-the-Lake Hydro, and Canadian Niagara Power, possess a structural advantage. Their proximity to customers allows them to anticipate needs, address concerns quickly, and adapt services in real time. These capabilities will become increasingly important as energy becomes a strategic business differentiator.
The accelerating transformation of the energy landscape will create both winners and losers.
Winning organizations will:
By contrast, organizations that treat energy as an afterthought, wait passively for grid solutions, or assume the invisible infrastructure of the past will continue to meet their needs, are likely to encounter delays, higher costs, and diminished opportunities for growth.
Canada is exceptionally well-positioned, with abundant natural resources, strong industrial investment, and global demand for its products and expertise. However, realizing this potential will demand adaptive organizational structures, robust communication channels, and new frameworks for matching supply capabilities to rapidly evolving customer needs. The summit highlighted that while utilities understand the urgency of investment and industrial customers are ready to engage, current regulatory timelines and planning cycles are too slow to support real-time business needs. The challenge now is for all parties, including regulators, utilities, and customers, to coordinate and act quickly enough to secure Canada’s economic future before opportunities migrate to jurisdictions with more agile systems.
The Grimsby Energy Summit did not claim to have solved Ontario’s energy challenges, but it did establish a crucial platform for ongoing dialogue between supply and demand. This environment, where utilities, regulators, customers, and municipalities can hear each other and respond collectively, is the necessary first step toward systemic change. The legacy of the summit will depend on whether these conversations continue beyond the event and translate into meaningful, sustained action.
The era in which utilities dictated terms and customers passively accepted them is ending. The emerging model will demand adaptability, mutual understanding, and a willingness to embrace change, even when it is uncomfortable. For Canadian businesses, there is a straightforward path emerging: adapt to the new energy reality by investing in knowledge, collaboration, and proactive strategy, or risk being left behind as investment and innovation shift to more responsive regions. The future will belong to those who lead the transformation, not those who wait for it.
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