The Atlantic Economic Panel’s new report, Bolder Ambitions: Greater Prosperity for All, places energy at the centre of Atlantic Canada’s economic growth agenda.

Among its major recommendations is the development of an integrated regional electricity system, supported by coordinated investment in generation, transmission, storage and interprovincial infrastructure. The Panel also links electricity planning directly to industrial development and calls for greater development of Atlantic Canada’s natural resources, including natural gas, wind, critical minerals and bioenergy.

The recommendations reinforce much of the work undertaken over the past year through the Atlantic Energy Collective. Our March report, An Atlantic Canadian Energy Future, concluded that the region’s increasingly interconnected energy system can no longer be planned effectively one province at a time. It proposed a practical progression toward greater collaboration, beginning with shared data, modelling and regional integrated resource planning.

The Economic Panel takes that argument further, recommending a fully integrated Atlantic electricity market governed by a Regional Independent System Operator. While the Collective deliberately left the ultimate governance model to be determined through regional analysis and demonstrated value, both reports arrive at the same fundamental conclusion: Atlantic Canada’s economic ambitions require energy planning at the scale of the region.

The Panel’s report also broadens the recommendation beyond electricity. It calls for electricity infrastructure planning to be aligned with mining, critical minerals, forestry, bioenergy and offshore development. This ultimately recognizes that dependable and competitively priced energy is not simply an energy-sector objective, but an enabling condition for economic growth across Atlantic Canada.

More broadly, the Panel proposes a “One Atlantic Canada” agenda that includes a regional energy strategy and shared infrastructure priorities, alongside coordinated workforce and regulatory approaches.

The opportunity is clear. The next step is turning regional ambition into coordinated action.

What the Atlantic Economic Panel is proposing on energy

Electricity and regional energy planning

  • Treat electricity as regional economic infrastructure. The Panel calls for an integrated regional electricity system capable of meeting population growth, electrification and industrial demand while supporting exports.
  • Create one fully integrated Atlantic electricity market, governed by a Regional Independent System Operator, with responsibility for coordinating planning, investment, system operations, cost allocation and interprovincial power flows.
  • Plan and build generation, transmission, storage and interprovincial infrastructure regionally, rather than approaching those investments separately. The report specifically connects electricity planning to economic development, industrial strategy and major-project growth.
  • Use natural gas as transitional energy while longer-term regional generation and transmission investments are developed, recognizing the time required to bring major electricity infrastructure online.
  • Create an Atlantic Electricity Investment and Sinking Fund to finance shared infrastructure, with a goal of mobilizing more than $25 billion in regional electricity infrastructure investment by 2035 while protecting affordability.
  • Make Indigenous leadership, rights and economic participation integral to energy investment, including ownership, benefit-sharing and other forms of participation.
  • Create an Atlantic Canada Clean Technology Zone to support investment and commercialization in clean fuels, storage, grid technologies, industrial decarbonization and related supply chains.

Energy-related natural resource development

  • Develop a coordinated energy and natural-resources growth agenda, aligning electricity generation and transmission with mining, critical minerals, forestry, bioenergy and offshore resources. Atlantic Economic Panel
  • Expand offshore and onshore natural gas development where it can improve competitiveness, industrial capacity and long-term economic returns.
  • More specifically, it calls for a regulatory environment that enables responsible exploration and development of onshore natural gas in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, as well as responsible development of offshore and onshore oil and gas.
  • Encourage development of offshore and onshore wind opportunities across Atlantic Canada.
  • Create a regional critical and strategic minerals strategy, including regulatory certainty, better geoscience data, access to capital and prioritization of projects.
  • Build a regional forestry and bioeconomy strategy, connecting biomass, bioenergy, bioproducts, advanced wood products and manufacturing.
  • Co-develop an Indigenous economic partnership framework for natural-resource development, with participation in ownership, investment, procurement, employment and governance.
  • The Panel sets a very ambitious overall target: increase the value of Atlantic Canada’s natural-resource economy by at least 50% by 2035 and mobilize more than $100 billion in new investment across energy and other resource sectors.

More information can be found at www.aep-peca.ca