Canada does not have a national grid.

The country, as thirteen systems

Colour is the 2023 share of generation from hydro, nuclear, wind, solar, and biomass. Quebec, Manitoba, B.C., Newfoundland and Labrador, and PEI’s own generation are already nearly non-emitting. Alberta, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, and Nunavut are not. That is the whole climate geography of Canadian electricity.

How the megawatt-hours are actually made

Quebec is a third of Canadian generation. Ontario is a quarter, and most of that is nuclear. Alberta is a gas system that still carried some coal in 2023 (the last year in this series; coal was gone by June 2024). The bars are sized by TWh, not by politics.

Wires that run north–south

Named international paths in the NRCan 2026 intertie map sum to about 17,097 MW of transfer capability toward the United States. The five prairie-to-Ontario east–west hops sum to about 3,355 MW. Churchill Falls to Quebec (5,428 MW) is the largest interprovincial path in the country — and it is a 1969 contract, not a national grid.

2023 net exports were 27.0 TWh, all of it with the United States. That was a drought year: B.C. flipped to a 10.2 TWh net importer, Quebec’s exports fell, and Canada still sold a surplus south. The pattern is structural. The volume is not.

The forecast is a fan, not a number

CER Energy Future 2026 does not publish “the” Canadian outlook. It publishes four. Current Measures, Higher, and Lower vary GDP, LNG, data-centre load, and prices. Canada Net-zero forces a 2050 emissions endpoint. Generation in 2050 ranges from 865 TWh to 1,323 TWh. Treat anyone quoting a single 2050 TWh as selling a scenario.

Four systems that set the country

v1 of this atlas is complete for Quebec, Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia. The other nine jurisdictions have a comparable hero strip so the 13-up never breaks.