SEATTLE — The longstanding links among U.S. and Canadian electricity grid operators won’t be fractured easily by the tariff-driven political rift between Washington, D.C., and Ottawa, industry participants on both sides of the border say.

“The grid really recognizes no political boundaries,” NERC Vice President of Government Affairs Fritz Hirst said Nov. 10 at the Annual Meeting of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners in Seattle. He was speaking during a “Northern Exposure” panel discussion moderated by Nevada Public Utilities Commissioner Tammy Cordova.

“Like any other region anywhere on the grid, we have a natural complementarity north and south of the border where different regions depend on each other for energy transfers when needed,” Hirst said. “It’s probably one of the purest examples of the energy partnership we have between Canada and the U.S.”

Hirst noted that while Canada accounts for 10% of North American electricity load, it represents “a critical piece of the pie,” with 30 U.S. states trading power with their northern neighbor to the tune of 70 million TWh per year — enough to power about 6 million homes.

Maine Public Utilities Commission Chair Philip Bartlett pointed to a concrete example of that cross-border relationship: Residents in the northern part of his state receive all their power from either local resources or transmission coming out of neighboring Canadian province New Brunswick.

“For us, this is particularly important, and when we started hearing news of tariffs and concerns about the relationship between the United States and Canada, we got pretty nervous, because these customers are really wholly dependent on the very positive relationship that we’ve built over the years,” Bartlett said.

Bartlett pointed to the lines connecting New Brunswick with the larger ISO-NE system and noted that the New England Clean Energy Connect (NECEC), a 320-kV HVDC line capable of delivering 1,200 MW of Québec hydropower output to Massachusetts, is expected to be completed by the end of 2025.

New England’s relationship with Canada is expected to grow in importance, Bartlett said, in part because of the region’s lack of natural gas pipeline capacity to support new gas-fired plants and the Trump administration’s halting of offshore wind projects. (See Feds Pile on More Barriers to Wind and Solar.)

“Maine and the region had been really expecting to rely on offshore wind as a really important way for us to meet increased load, and also to deal with the expected retirement of some of our older oil plants,” he said. “So given that offshore wind is delayed in the United States, to the extent there are opportunities in Canada to move faster, that is something that could be a real reliability benefit to the region.”

Canada’s Internal Strains

“Yes, it’s hard to be a neighbor to the U.S. right now,” said Francois Emond, a commissioner with Régie de l’énergie du Quebec (part of the Canada Energy Regulator), referring to the tariffs Trump imposed on Canada earlier in 2025.

In laying out the top three challenges he thinks Canada faces now, Emond pointed first to the impact of the trade dispute with its southern neighbor.

“Canada’s economic health is highly susceptible to global political and trade shifts, a vulnerability that’s rooted in its heavy reliance on the U.S. market, with two-way trade accounting for about 65% of the GDP,” Emond said.

Tariffs and other global disruptions — such as supply chain issues — drive up costs for consumer goods and construction materials, including those needed for transmission lines and other energy infrastructure, he said.

The second challenge is the “regional and political divisions” that threaten national unity, with parties in Alberta — and Québec — reviving talk about separating from Canada.

“Tensions persist between regions like Alberta and Ottawa, and Quebec and Ottawa, fueled by disagreements over resource allocation, federal fiscal policy and differing approaches to the energy development and climate actions,” Emond said.

The third challenge has to do with the intersection of climate policy and energy affordability. Emond said that while Canada is committed by law to getting to net zero carbon emissions by 2050, the nation’s carbon tax “has become a lightning rod for political contention, with some provincial leaders calling for its removal, citing its impact on the cost of living and business competitiveness.”

“The priority for the country right now is to build resilience across its trade networks, critical infrastructure and the national unity to prevent increasing domestic and global volatility,” he said.

But even in light of that priority, Emond acknowledged the reality that, from an electricity standpoint, Canada’s provinces are more interconnected to their U.S. neighbors than to each other, a state of affairs he attributes to the country’s internal politics and lack of a national energy policy.

“If any provinces in Canada are saying we’re going to cut power to the U.S. because we don’t like what they’re doing, it’s not possible … the grid is integrated, you cannot do that, and we need also the power coming from the U.S.,” he said.

‘Giant Battery for the West’

Amy Sopinka, director of market policy for Powerex, the power marketing arm of Vancouver-based BC Hydro, said the British Columbia grid is connected to the neighboring province of Alberta and to the Bonneville Power Administration system in Washington, but that 90% of its power trading is with U.S. entities.

Sopinka pointed to the B.C. grid’s contribution to the broad geographical diversity of load and resources in the Western Interconnection: It’s a winter-peaking system compared with the summer-peaking systems in the U.S. Southwest, so its periods of highest demand complement much of the rest of the Western Interconnection. Also, BC Hydro controls about 19 GW of generating resources, including 16 GW of hydroelectric capacity, much of which are storage dams that “can act like a giant battery for the West,” Sopinka said.

“We’ve been both net importers and net exporters over the years,” she said.

Sopinka noted Powerex’s commitment to participating in Western Power Pool’s Western Resource Adequacy Program (WRAP) and SPP’s Markets+, the latter of which is to launch in 2027.

“The Western Resource Adequacy Program is a tool for formalizing the relationship of that resource diversity and demand diversity” for ensuring and accrediting RA, while Markets+ “will allow for the transactions” that support that diversity, Sopinka said.

‘Continental Interconnection’

Cordova asked panelists to share their hopes for the future of the U.S.-Canada electricity relationship.

Bartlett said he hopes for “more integrated analysis” of certain benefits and needs on both sides of the border, as well as “additional partnerships” and the identification of new transmission lines that serve both countries.

“I think the magic wand is we need the [U.S.] federal government to be more encouraging in this effort, because I think it really would benefit the United States in terms of the economic development, [and] the ability for us to build out the renewable resources and other resources that we need, but also do it in a way that is much more reliable and probably a much lower cost, if we can have effective interconnections,” Bartlett said.

But Bartlett also expressed concern that if the U.S. “were to go through two or three administrations like this one, that’s going to make it very difficult for Canadian governments.”

Emond said those in the electric sector might have to look beyond the current challenges to adopt “a more pragmatic way of thinking” that moves beyond politics to identify real needs and “keep discussing,” “making deals” and “do what’s needed for the consumers.”

“We need more generation in North America; that evidence is quite clear as we confront our economic needs [and] the AI race,” Hirst said. “So, I think I would just underscore the need to continue uplifting the North American relationship and truly think of us as a continental interconnection.”

“We have advantages, and it’s best if we can share them all, and then the system becomes more reliable,” Sopinka said.