By Gilbert Bennett, P.Eng., Senior Advisor, WaterPower Canada
A key lesson of the past two centuries is that the single most important driver of prosperity is access to abundant, affordable energy. For more than 100 years, hydropower has served as the foundation of Canada’s electricity system. It continues to do so today, supplying roughly 60 per cent of our electricity and delivering some of the lowest-cost, most reliable power in the world. Backed by large reservoir storage, Canada’s hydro fleet provides dependable energy to provinces such as British Columbia, Manitoba, Quebec, and Newfoundland and Labrador at a fraction of the cost of new nuclear, natural gas, wind, or solar generation.
The durability of this system is not theoretical. Many of Canada’s largest hydro stations have been operating for 60 to 100 years with consistently high availability, demonstrating a level of reliability unmatched by most other generation types. Outage statistics tell the same story: provinces with large hydro systems routinely maintain among the lowest outage rates in North America. This is reliability measured the only way it matters to customers—by keeping the lights on.
Designed for Variability and Change
We cannot afford to let this endowment of low-cost energy go to waste. Nor should we overlook the fact that hydropower has been designed from the outset to operate across highly variable conditions. Precipitation changes year to year; that is a given, and it has been for decades. Canada’s hydro systems were built to manage this variability, and operators are actively adapting to changing climate conditions through improved forecasting, coordinated watershed planning, and ongoing modernization.
The key insight often missed in public debate is that hydropower is managed on multi-year cycles, not seasonal ones. Reservoirs are operated to move water through periods of surplus and shortage without compromising the needs of domestic customers. This multi-year balancing is why hydro-heavy provinces maintain strong reliability through droughts and floods. The system’s performance is not coincidence, it is the result of decades of deliberate engineering and operational planning.
These fundamentals are sometimes misunderstood outside Canada. During wet years, Canadian utilities export surplus hydropower to neighbouring U.S. markets; in dry years, our hydro resources are used at home to serve Canadians. This pattern is not a sign of unreliability. It is exactly how the system was designed to function.
North–south transmission connections were built expressly to manage these fluctuations, enabling utilities to export when reservoirs are high and import when economic or operational conditions warrant. No Canadian utility has ever designed its system to permanently meet the needs of another jurisdiction. Hydropower remains fully reliable for the people and businesses it is built to serve.
Meeting Rising Demand Through Modernization
Looking ahead, Canada’s large hydro fleet is already adapting to meet rising electricity demand as the economy electrifies and decarbonizes. Across the country, utilities are adding substantial new capacity through upgrades and refurbishment: replacing turbines and generators with high-efficiency equipment that allows existing stations to produce more power during peak periods without altering dams or reservoirs. These upgrades can add hundreds of megawatts at individual sites and represent one of the fastest and most cost-effective pathways to increasing supply.
Several facilities are also installing additional turbine-generator units. Although more capital-intensive, these expansions can deliver capacity increases of 1,000 megawatts or more at Canada’s largest stations. Combined with hydro’s unparalleled operational flexibility—its ability to ramp output up or down within minutes—these investments reinforce hydropower’s essential role in supporting a grid with growing amounts of wind and solar. Operators perform this balancing role every day, backing up thousands of megawatts of variable generation and maintaining system stability even as extreme weather events become more common.
Hydropower’s Next Chapter
Hydropower has never been static. It has evolved with the country and is evolving again now. Modernization, pumped storage, uprates, and Indigenous-led hydro developments represent significant near-term opportunities to add dependable capacity without the long lead times of new nuclear or the volatility of merchant gas markets. These options also allow Canada to expand its clean electricity system without dramatically increasing its physical footprint—an increasingly important consideration as expectations for environmental stewardship evolve.
A Strategic Asset for Generations
Canada’s hydropower system is not tapped out. It is not unreliable. It has underpinned a century of prosperity and, with thoughtful investment and modernization, will continue to do so for generations to come. In a world with ever-increasing demand for clean, reliable energy, Canada must make the most of its most strategic asset.