Private credit is having a very public freakout

Morning Brew Design

Jittery private credit investors are rushing for the exits just like your coworkers when you start microwaving leftover salmon for lunch. This week, investment giants Apollo Global Management and Ares said they are limiting payouts to shareholders in their private credit funds as investors’ requests to pull their cash soar across the industry. Meanwhile, Moody’s downgraded the credit rating of a private credit fund run by KKR and Future Standard yesterday, sending its debt into “junk” territory after more of its borrowers stopped paying their loans. The news adds to Wall Street’s anxiety about the health of a $1.8 trillion industry that’s suffered from significant defaults and faces fears that it’ll get pummelled if AI disrupts software companies—which JPMorgan estimates account for 30% of its loans. Rationing cash Private credit funds, which plug investors’ money into risky loans to midsized companies, typically guarantee that they’ll offer to pay out 5-7% of the value of the investments quarterly. But last quarter, cash supply couldn’t keep up with withdrawal demand: Investors in Apollo’s and Ares’s private credit funds asked to exchange over 11% of their shares for cash. Both companies said they’ll pay out less than half of what investors asked for to ensure total payouts don’t exceed 5% of the fund’s value. Meanwhile, private credit peers like Blackstone and Blue Owl Capital have sought to calm investors by letting them pull more cash than the guaranteed minimum. Banks try to see the upside After post-2008 financial crisis regulations restricted banks’ ability to lend to risky borrowers, private credit swooped in to occupy that niche. Now, banking giants like JPMorgan—whose CEO, Jamie Dimon, is a longtime skeptic of the opaque industry—are letting clients bet against private credit. But it’s no gloatfest…as many private credit lenders are also bank borrowers, which means the likes of JPMorgan could get caught in the turmoil.

Alberta Won’t Recover $250M in Property Taxes from Deadbeat Fossils, Minister Admits

Alberta Won’t Recover $250M in Property Taxes from Deadbeat Fossils, Minister Admits

Alberta Won’t Recover $250M in Property Taxes from Deadbeat Fossils, Minister Admits
March 18, 2026
Reading time: 3 minutes

Author: Compiled by The Energy Mix staff
Full Story: The Energy Mix



Hillebrand Steve/Pixnio



The Alberta government is admitting that it won’t likely recover $250 million in property taxes that oil and gas companies owe rural municipalities, even though it hopes to get the problem under control in future.

A report issued Monday by the province, Rural Municipalities Alberta (RMA), and the Property Tax Accountability Strategy Working Group [pdf] laid out 17 recommendations to prevent future instances of deadbeat fossils failing to pay their taxes,. “They range from making property tax payment a condition of holding or maintaining an Alberta Energy Regulator licence to making property tax payment a key measure of industry and regulatory performance,” CBC reports.

The report concluded that 96% of oil and gas companies do pay their taxes. But Municipal Affairs Minister Dan Williams acknowledged it’ll be harder to collect from “companies that are winding down, companies that don’t exist anymore. and companies in bankruptcy processes will not have the capacity to pay,” the news story states.

He singled out companies “that have obligations to reclaim that land environmentally—we appreciate that a lot of that isn’t going to come forward, isn’t going to be paid back to the province or municipalities.”

“The majority of past arrears are fundamentally unrecoverable,” Williams told media. “We can’t go back and collect from companies that don’t exist anymore.”

But Energy and Minerals Minister Brian Jean said the province will be more vigilant about companies that try to keep operating after falling behind on their local taxes.

“What happens at the end of a life cycle of some of these oil fields or gas fields that are not producing the wealth that they used to produce, is that the leaders of those companies often strip off the value and find ways to pay what they prioritize to pay,” Jean said. “And what we need to do is make sure the communication is there well in advance, so that as that starts to happen, we’re able to torque up enforcement and take away their ability to continue to operate and take over that situation.”

RMA President Kara Westerlund told media the province’s rural municipalities are facing a $25-billion infrastructure deficit, and they’ve been trying to draw attention to it for years. “Every penny and every cent collected will more than likely go to infrastructure needs within our municipalities,” she said. “We’re talking roads, bridges, culverts, wastewater, and water.”

Central Alberta landowner Dwight Popovich, a member of the Coalition for Responsible Energy (C4RE), said he’s finally receiving the years of tax payments he’s owed on an orphaned well 120 kilometres east of Edmonton—but the money is coming from taxpayers, not the company.

“It shouldn’t be landowners or taxpayers having to pay anything for any of this problem that’s been created,” he said Tuesday. “This report that’s just come out is another one of those times where they’re ignoring us.”

Last week, landowner and C4RE member Mark Dorin tore up an active lease held by Calgary-based MAGA Energy and blockaded an active well site, three years after unpaid rent had begun to accumulate, the organization reports.

“Pay your damn bills, clean up your mess, and get the hell off my land,” Dorin told the company. “We are done with you.”

The Energy Mix has asked MAGA Energy for comment, and will update this story when we hear back.

Business continuity strategies: why backups alone are not enough

Business continuity strategies: why backups alone are not enough
For business


Kate MenziesPublished on March 11, 2026

Most teams start their business continuity strategies with the same assumption: If we have backups, we can recover. Backups are important, but they’re only one piece of continuity, and often not the element that fails first.

In modern, cloud-heavy environments, the fastest path to downtime is often loss of access: stolen credentials, locked-out administrators, misconfigured identity settings, or an incident that forces you to revoke access faster than you can restore systems. If your team can’t sign in, approve changes, rotate secrets, or coordinate response securely, having clean backups won’t get operations back online.

This article explains what business continuity strategies are (and how they connect to disaster recovery planning), why backups alone create blind spots, and which security-focused controls strengthen a business continuity plan in practice—especially around access and credential security.

It also shows where a business password manager like Proton Pass for Business fits into business networks: helping teams reduce credential risk and keep access controls usable, auditable, and resilient.

What are business continuity strategies?

Why backups alone are not enough

What is the role of access and credential security in continuity planning?

Which measures strengthen business continuity beyond backups?

How does Proton Pass for Business support continuity strategies?
What are business continuity strategies?

Business continuity is the set of plans, processes, and procedures an organization uses to keep essential functions running during and after disruptions. It typically includes risk assessment, emergency response procedures, communication plans, backup and recovery, staff training, as well as a regular schedule for testing and updating that plan.

A business continuity plan is where these strategies become operational: who does what, in what order, with which tools, and what “acceptable service” looks like under pressure.
Business continuity vs. disaster recovery planning

Business continuity strategies often get conflated with disaster recovery planning, and both are sometimes confused with incident response. They work together, but they solve different problems.Incident response focuses on the security event itself: detecting what’s happening, containing the threat, removing it from affected systems, and investigating impact so you can prevent recurrence.
Disaster recovery focuses on restoring IT systems and data after disruption — for example, infrastructure failure, corrupted databases, or a cloud region outage.
Business continuity planning focuses on keeping essential operations running during disruption, even when technology is degraded. It covers people, processes, vendors, communications, and decision-making — and defines how the business continues to deliver critical services while recovery is underway.

This distinction is important. The FFIEC’s Business Continuity Management booklet(new window) (written for financial institutions but broadly applicable) emphasizes that business continuity planning is about maintaining, resuming, and recovering the business, not only the technology.
Why having a continuity strategy matters

A continuity plan that lives in a folder and hasn’t been tested isn’t a strategy; it’s just a document. An actual strategy is something you can run:You know which functions are truly critical.
You’ve defined what “downtime” means in measurable terms.
You’ve rehearsed scenarios that stress the whole organization, not just the IT team.
You can prove controls work and improve them over time.

That’s why business continuity overlaps with governance and compliance. Many frameworks (such as ISO 22301 for business continuity management, sector rules, customer questionnaires) want evidence that continuity is repeatable, owned, and tested, not improvised.
Why backups alone are not enough

Backups solve a specific problem: data restoration. However, incidents rarely arrive as a neat “data lost” event. In the real world, disruptions create multiple constraints at once, and backups don’t address several of the most common failure modes.
Backups don’t help if you can’t access the systems that restore them

A continuity plan often assumes your administrators can sign in, elevate privileges, and execute recovery workflows. But many incidents begin with credential compromise, identity provider lockouts, or account takeover. If attackers get in first, they may change passwords, rotate keys, add new admin accounts, or disrupt your identity stack. Recovery then becomes a race for control, not a restore-from-backup task.

This is one reason incident response planning belongs next to business continuity planning, not as a separate security document. Proton’s incident response guide stresses that incident response starts with understanding threats and defining actions you’ll take when affected, which directly impacts how quickly you recover access.
Backups don’t prevent downtime caused by everything else

Backups won’t stop the kinds of disruptions that shut teams down before any data restore even begins, for example:A widespread SaaS outage that blocks access to core tools.
A credential phishing campaign that forces mass password resets and account lockdowns.
A malicious configuration change that breaks permissions or sharing.
Ransomware that disrupts endpoints and authentication.
A vendor incident that requires urgent access revocation and customer communication.

In all of these scenarios, the immediate continuity question is the same: Can we keep operating safely while we fix this? Backups may help later, but they don’t solve the first-hour problem.
Backups don’t reduce legal and compliance exposure from data access

Backups restore data; they don’t undo unauthorized access. If sensitive information was accessed or exfiltrated, you may still face contractual obligations, regulatory reporting, or customer trust impacts, even if you restore systems perfectly.

This is where continuity strategies should include preventive controls and detection — and needs tight alignment with security and incident response — because recoverable is not the same as acceptable.
Backups can fail, and attackers know it

Backup failure isn’t always technical. Common issues include:Incomplete coverage (critical SaaS data wasn’t backed up)
Stale backups (recovery point objective is worse than assumed)
Untested restores (the backup exists but cannot be restored quickly)
Unavailability of required credentials and keys in an incident.

According to the FFIEC booklet, the effectiveness of a business continuity plan can only be validated through testing or practical application. If you haven’t tested restoring workflows under realistic constraints (limited staff, stressed systems, uncertain scope, access restrictions), you don’t know your real recovery time.
Backups don’t address the human continuity problem

Continuity is also about coordination: who approves emergency actions, how you communicate internally, how you avoid unsafe workarounds, and how you maintain accountability. If your only plan is to restore from backup, you’re underestimating the operational complexity of incidents.

This is why business continuity strategies are increasingly security-focused: the same weaknesses that cause breaches (weak access control, inconsistent credential hygiene, unclear ownership) also provoke extended downtime.
What is the role of access and credential security in continuity planning?

If backups are the recovery layer, access and credential security are the control layer, the part that determines whether you can act quickly and safely during disruption.

In practical continuity terms, credentials matter because they control:Who can execute recovery actions (restore, rotate, revoke, isolate).
How fast you can contain the incident (disable accounts, cut access, reset keys).
How confident you are in your environment (audit trails, verified changes, least privilege).
Whether people can keep working securely (without copying secrets into chats or personal notes).

This is why the best business continuity strategies treat credential governance as a continuity requirement, not just an IT hygiene item.

A technology risk management program can help you formalize this. Proton’s technology risk management plan article explicitly frames risk management as a way to prevent major incidents, which includes creating incident response plans and reducing the spread of sensitive data by using secure password managers and secure storage.
Which measures strengthen business continuity beyond backups?

Below, you’ll find seven security-focused measures that strengthen continuity in modern environments. You don’t need to implement them all at once. The goal is to reduce your most likely downtime drivers and to make recovery actions feasible under stress.
1. Define continuity requirements around critical workflows

Start with the question: What needs to keep working for us to deliver essential services? Then map the supporting tools, people, and dependencies.

A good business impact analysis and an accurate risk assessment are widely recognized as foundational to an effective business continuity plan. This is where you define what unacceptable downtime looks like to your business, which functions are time-critical, and where the biggest dependency risks live.

From a security angle, continuity planning should extend beyond core infrastructure. You must consider:Identity providers and admin consoles.
Password and key storage.
Shared inboxes and customer communication channels.
Finance tools and payment workflows.
Vendor access paths and integrations.

If a disruption blocks access to any of these systems, teams may be unable to operate or execute recovery steps. At that moment, downtime is an access problem, not a data-loss problem.
2. Treat access control as a continuity control

Access control is often discussed as security, but it’s also continuity engineering. During an incident, you need to reduce risk quickly without breaking the business.

Practical continuity-minded access patterns include:Least-privilege roles for day-to-day work.
Separate admin accounts (used only when needed).
Clear break glass procedures for emergency access.
Documented ownership for critical systems and vaults.
Scheduled access reviews and offboarding controls.

The point isn’t to add bureaucracy; it’s to ensure you can change access rapidly and confidently when the environment is unstable.
3. Centralize credential governance

Shadow access happens when credentials are stored outside controlled systems: browser-saved passwords, shared spreadsheets, notes, ticket comments, or temporary chat messages. These shortcuts feel productive until you’re trying to contain an incident and discover you don’t know who has access to what. A key finding of our 2026 SMB cybersecurity report was that teams with password managers often didn’t use them.

Centralized credential governance means:Credentials live in a controlled system.
Sharing is deliberate and revocable.
Offboarding isn’t a scavenger hunt.
Rotations can happen without breaking workflows.
You can prove your controls exist.

This is a continuity win as much as a security win: the fewer unknown credentials that exist, the fewer emergency resets you need.
4. Elaborate a credential compromise playbook

Credential compromise often triggers the most disruptive continuity actions: e.g., mass resets, revoked sessions, forced multi-factor authentication (MFA) changes, access reviews, and emergency communications. If you’ve never rehearsed it, the situation becomes chaotic quickly.

A credential compromise playbook should answer:How do we detect signs of compromise?
Who can revoke access and where?
What do we rotate first (high-privilege accounts, shared vaults, API keys)?
How do we communicate changes without leaking secrets?
How do we keep customer-facing operations running during resets?

This is where incident response and continuity overlap directly. Incident response planning is not an extra. It’s how you stop relying on improvisation and start relying on continuity.
5. Use encryption to reduce impact, not just for compliance

Encryption is typically framed as a compliance checkbox. In continuity terms, encryption reduces blast radius when things go wrong.

Examples:Encrypted credential vaults protected by access keys reduce the risk of secrets being exposed through device compromise or insecure storage.
End-to-end encryption models limit visibility of sensitive content, which can matter for risk posture and data protection.
Strong encryption also supports safer collaboration (sharing access without exposing secrets in plain text).

This is also where many teams get stuck: they want encryption, but they worry it will slow down work. The right tools make encryption part of normal workflows, not a special process people use to bypass.
6. Make security awareness operational

In many organizations, the first continuity break is a human workaround: someone shares a password over chat because a teammate is locked out; someone uses a personal account to keep work moving; someone approves an urgent access request without checking scope.

This is why security awareness is a continuity control. It reduces the chance that a disruption becomes worse through reactive behavior.

If you need a practical baseline for small teams that still applies to enterprise habits, Proton’s roundup of cybersecurity solutions for small businesses emphasizes choosing tools that reduce risk without requiring heavy time or budget investment.

The aim is simple: make secure actions the easiest actions, especially when people are stressed.
7. Test your plan like you expect it to fail, and improve continuously

A continuity plan that hasn’t been tested is still an assumption. Testing shows what actually works under pressure: whether recovery steps are executable, access rights are correct, credentials can be retrieved securely when required, communication paths hold up, vendor dependencies are clear, and your critical functions were prioritized correctly.

The FFIEC booklet explicitly affirms that business continuity planning is only proven through testing or real-world use, so tabletop exercises should reflect modern scenarios, such as:Authentication outage tied to a SaaS provider.
A credential compromise that forces rapid rotations
Ransomware that requires isolation and emergency access changes.
A vendor incident that demands fast containment and coordinated communications.

Therefore, treat what you’ve learned like product work: capture the gaps, assign owners, set deadlines, and retest until the plan is reliable.
How does Proton Pass for Business support continuity strategies?

Proton Pass for Business is not a full business continuity platform, and it doesn’t replace backup systems, DR infrastructure, or broader governance. Where it supports business continuity strategies most directly is in a high-leverage continuity control area: credentials and access.

Continuity efforts often fail in the messy middle of incidents: when teams are trying to contain risk, keep operations running, and coordinate changes without leaking secrets or losing control. Proton Pass for Business helps reduce that chaos by making secure credential practices easier to adopt and enforce.

Here’s how it maps to continuity needs:Secure, centralized credential storage and sharing. Proton Pass is designed for business credential management, helping teams avoid storing secrets in scattered documents or chats, therefore enabling safer sharing patterns.
Administrative controls and governance. Proton Pass for Business includes team management and security policies (including rules around sharing and 2FA), which support continuity governance as organizations scale.
Visibility through logs and reporting. During disruption, visibility matters. You need to know what changed and when. Proton Pass offers usage logs and reporting, so admins can review activity across team accounts.
Trust through transparency. Proton’s approach emphasizes verifiable security: Proton Pass is open source, and Proton publishes independent audits, supporting organizations that seek evidence-based security controls.
Dark web monitoring. Pass Monitor alerts admins and team members if logins stored in their Proton Pass vaults appear in breach datasets, so they can rotate affected credentials early and reduce post-compromise risk.
Password health check. Pass Monitor also flags weak or reused passwords (and inactive 2FA), helping teams fix risky credentials before they’re exploited.

In continuity terms, the value is practical: fewer unknown credentials, less insecure workarounds during incidents, faster rotations when compromise is suspected, and clearer accountability for access changes. That’s how access and password management stop being just security and become operational resilience.
Final takeaway: continuity is a system, not a backup job

Backups are necessary, but modern business continuity strategies require more than recovery storage. They ask for a plan you can run under pressure, controls you can prove, and access practices that won’t collapse when the environment becomes unstable.

If you want a practical roadmap to strengthen continuity through security, with quick wins you can implement now, download Proton’s comprehensive security ebook for growing businesses.

Proton Mail: https://go.getproton.me/aff_c?offer_id=7&aff_id=13658

Alberta Municipality Bets Tens of Millions on Wonder Valley Data Centre

Alberta Municipality Bets Tens of Millions on Wonder Valley Data Centre

Alberta Municipality Bets Tens of Millions on Wonder Valley Data Centre
March 9, 2026
Reading time: 4 minutes

Full Story: The Energy Mix
Jody MacPherson








Photo of Kyle Reiling speaking at the PTAC conference. Provided by PTAC.



This story is part of our ongoing investigative series, Hidden Wonder Valley.

A rural Alberta municipality has spent about C$70 million to lay the groundwork for ‘Wonder Valley,’ the proposed site for the world’s largest artificial intelligence data centre powered by North America’s largest gas-fired plant.

And while the municipality lacks a formal purchase agreement more than a year after the project was first announced, a local official says he’s confident it will move forward.

The process has not been easy, Kyle Reiling, executive director of the Greenview Industrial Gateway (GIG), where Wonder Valley is being floated, told a gathering of the Petroleum Technology Alliance Canada (PTAC) in Calgary last week.

First announced by Kevin O’Leary in December, 2024, the vision for Wonder Valley is massive: the celebrity investor promised to raise $70 billion to build a 7.5-gigawatt gas-powered data centre on 14,000 acres in Greenview, about 460 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.

At one point, when Reiling was balking at the plans for millions in spending, he said council told him to keep going: “‘we believe in this, we believe that this is the right thing to do, and we’re going to signal to the province and we’re going to signal to industry that we’re moving ahead with this.’”

Reiling said he modelled the industrial area after the Heartland Designated Industrial Zone northeast of Edmonton.


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Heartland is a formalized agreement to streamline regulations and cluster petrochemical infrastructure in one area. Five municipalities, some environmental groups, and more than 40 companies participate, with help and incentives from the provincial government.

Greenview is not a designated industrial zone but was originally the site intended for a petrochemical plant. The initial plan was to process gas into commodities like ammonia, methanol, and ethanol, but Reiling said the community “couldn’t get the carbon hub created in time.”

It was a “real letdown for the region” when the project did not go ahead, he said.

He added that the municipality has invested millions over the last decade on roads, water outtake from the nearby Smoky River, laser imaging, and geochemical and biophysical work on the industrial land.

Reiling, who is an employee of the municipality, is also actively involved in planning the Wonder Valley project.

“Our conference calls start very early because we have members in the United Arab Emirates, but we also have members in Indianapolis, New York, Florida, Louisiana, and Grand Prairie,” he told the PTAC audience. “And we get together with one common goal, and that’s to design Wonder Valley.”

Last month, O’Leary’s company announced a second Wonder Valley project in northern Utah that would be the same size as its Alberta twin. “The reality is that we’re competing against Utah, where they have given them a 12-week approval process on 13,000 acres,” Reiling said.

The Alberta government has offered support to companies, including access to a provincial concierge service to help AI data centre proponents navigate the regulatory process.

“We will work with you and bring the right people to the table at the right time and make sure that they have all the context that they need,” Technology and Innovation Minister Nate Glubish said in his keynote speech to the PTAC forum.

Alberta is willing to work with proponents to make the process “super easy, super simple, super-fast,” Glubish added.

“We’ll connect you to the gas provider. We’ll pinch through the fibre. We’ll help you navigate your water licences. Whatever it is you need, we’ll help you with that.”

Court documents show the province’s Aboriginal Consultation Office advised Greenview to skip Indigenous consultation when it applied for a permit to withdraw water for two locations along the Smoky River for Wonder Valley.

The water permit was granted by Alberta Environment and Protected Areas in April of 2025 and Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation has appealed the decision through the Environmental Appeal Board, a legal challenge working its way through the courts for almost a year now.

Reiling said the project will still need approvals for a permanent outtake water facility on the Smoky River, which would follow “phase two consultation” with the six to seven Indigenous communities in the area. Consultation is under way and “will take time.”

He said the GIG is the “cheapest place in the world” to produce electricity, with gas reserves of 25.3 trillion cubic feet and more than 5,000 wells.

The Wonder Valley site is directly on top of the Montney Formation, one of North America’s, if not the world’s, largest gas reservoirs. In 2024, said Reiling the project would require 10% of all the gas supply available in Alberta once fully operational.

Glubish said AI data centres are a way to bypass the dilemma of building gas pipelines and get billions of cubic feet of natural gas to global markets “through ones and zeros, through fibre.”

Experts say the Wonder Valley data centre alone could wipe out all of the gains Alberta made in reducing carbon emissions by phasing out coal-fired electricity 20 years ago.

Same hull, New configuration for 2027

 Same hull, New configuration for 2027

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There were 11 crew when the AC75 was first introduced for the 36th America’s Cup, with the crew reduced to eight for the next edition and now five sailors for the racing in 2027. With the hulls being reused from 2024, modifications are needed to adapt to the new crew limit.

The first look has come as Team New Zealand has relaunched their AC75 Taihoro at the Wynyard Point base in Auckland. While it is the same vessel that won in Barcelona, it has undergone a significant refit to meet the new rules with three specific modification categories:

• Cockpit Reconfiguration: Extensive work to transition the deck layout for the new crew requirements.
• Structural Rebuilds: The team was permitted to rebuild up to 4sqm of the hull using the same shape but different materials, allowing for localized strengthening or weight optimization.
• Functional Rebates: Modifications were made to add rebates to maximize aerodynamic efficiency. - Full report and video

 

The AI…it filled the code with bugs

Sebastian Kahnert/Getty Images

The amount of bugs popping up in AI-generated code is reaching the loose Sour Patch Kids under a camper’s bunk level. Amazon’s e-commerce senior VP, Dave Treadwell, called an all-hands for engineers at the company yesterday to address the growing frequency of outages, some of which can be traced back to code developed by generative AI, according to the Financial Times. Treadwell urged e-commerce engineers to attend this week’s (normally optional) meeting, noting that the “availability of the site and related infrastructure has not been good recently.” Last week, Amazon’s store malfunctioned for a few hours, which the company attributed to “a software code deployment.” And Amazon’s cloud services unit, AWS, had at least two large outages recently related to AI coding assistants. In December, the company’s cost calculator was down for 13 hours when Kiro, its AI coding tool, tried to change the code, and delete and remake the entire system. Though Amazon downplayed the meeting as routine in comments to the FT, the paper reported that Treadwell told employees that senior engineers will now need to sign off on AI-assisted changes made by junior and mid-level engineers. It’s not just Amazon Vibe-coding, in which developers simply tell AI what they need and sit back, is on the rise. Anthropic released Claude Code in February last year and passed $1 billion in annualized recurring revenue by November. Other tech giants have put out rival coding programs to try and snag those enterprise accounts. But while AI might code faster…it’s usually a lot messier: A report last year from software company CodeRabbit found that out of 470 pull requests (engineer speak for bug fixes or changes in code), AI code had 1.7 times more issues than human code. An expensive solution. Anthropic rolled out a review tool yesterday in Claude Code to (hopefully) catch those vibe-coded mistakes—but with each pull request costing up to $25, it may get pricey fast.

Ottawa Invests $100M in Grid Upgrades for Western Canada Mining

Ottawa Invests $100M in Grid Upgrades for Western Canada Mining

March 9, 2026
Reading time: 2 minutes

Full Story: The Energy Mix
Nathaniel Crouch



stevepb / Pixabay



The federal government is investing more than C$100 million in three Western Canadian transmission projects, underscoring the consensus that Canada’s clean-energy transition depends as much on wires as it does on wind turbines and solar panels.

Announced March 3, the funds will be drawn from Canada’s First and Last Mile Fund for critical minerals infrastructure, reported The Globe and Mail. Ottawa is providing $44.2 million to expand the Northwest Transmission Line, improving power supply to B.C.’s mineral-rich Golden Triangle and supporting developments like the Red Chris copper mine expansion and a gold-copper mine proposed by Seabridge Gold. Another grid upgrade will help power the Highland Valley Copper Mine near Kamloops.

In Saskatchewan, $18 million will fund planning and design work for a pair of new transmission lines connecting northern and southern grids. The Athabasca Basin would benefit with new mining opportunities created, Ottawa said.

Responding on LinkedIn to the announcement, New Economy Canada President Merran Smith highlighted how transmission expansions unlock large amounts of power for Canada’s critical minerals push.

We talk a lot about critical minerals, electric vehicles, batteries and artificial intelligence, Smith wrote. “None of these economic opportunities are possible without electricity.”

So “if we’re serious about electrifying the economy, competing in critical minerals, and reaching net-zero, we have to build the grid to match the ambition.”

But permitting challenges, jurisdictional complexity, and fragmented provincial electricity systems have slowed the pace of transmission expansion in Canada. Meanwhile, power demand is expected to rise as climate policy drives rapid electrification—from electric vehicles to heat pumps.

Expanding transmission is also key to addressing the growing risk of stranded renewables infrastructure amid grid congestion—a point recently underscored by analysts at Barclays. Traditionally, the idea of “stranded assets” was associated with fossil-fuel infrastructure rendered obsolete by climate policy. But Barclays now suggests the concept may increasingly apply to renewables when projects cannot connect to the grid or are forced to curtail output because of insufficient transmission capacity. In such cases, even fully built wind and solar installations can struggle to deliver their expected value.

“Slow grid expansion, not technology cost, is the binding constraint on electrification,” write [pdf] the authors of the Barclays report.