If you’re running a company today — whether you operate a warehouse, a manufacturing plant, a data center, or a growing office footprint — energy is quietly becoming one of the most consequential line items on your balance sheet. That was the clear message from a recent panel discussion hosted by the Brampton Board of Trade, titled « Powering the Transition, » which brought together voices from across Ontario’s energy ecosystem: a municipal utility, an energy intelligence firm, a natural gas distributor, and a community energy nonprofit.
Moderated by Tony Iacobelli, Executive Director of the Centre for Community Energy Transformation, the panel featured Raman Bansal (Manager, Alectra Energy Solutions), Sean Mirrahimi (Managing Partner and CRO, Edgecom Energy), and Cody Wood (Supervisor, Energy Policy Planning at Enbridge Gas). What emerged was less a discussion about climate idealism and more a candid, numbers-driven conversation about grid capacity, financing gaps, and how founders and operators should be thinking about energy as a strategic input rather than an afterthought.
Here’s what founders and business leaders should take away from the conversation.
Demand Is Exploding — and Capacity, Not Cost, Will Set the Pace
The panel opened with a sobering reality check on where Ontario’s grid actually stands. Bansal laid out the scale of what’s coming:
« In Ontario alone, by 2050, there’s going to be 65% more demand required. »
That single stat framed nearly the entire discussion. This isn’t demand growth from population alone — it’s being driven by electrification of transportation, decarbonization initiatives, the explosive rise of data centers, and increased industrial load, all happening while businesses simultaneously try to manage and reduce their own energy costs.
To meet that demand, the capital requirements are staggering: « If you look at the ISO report, there’s $400 billion that’s required to be invested into the transmission upgrade to meet that demand. And $120 billion on the distribution side alone. And this is where you see Alectra utilities and other utilities come forward and continue with the investment. So Alectra, alone, is investing $300 million every year in renewing the existing infrastructure and also supporting the growth. And Alectra has just submitted a new rate application, requesting an additional $3.2 billion. That is to support the growth we think we’re going to be hitting in the next few years. » said Bansal.
The takeaway for founders: cost and reliability used to be the two variables businesses weighed when making energy decisions. Now there’s a third, harder constraint. As Bansal summarized it: « It may start with cost. It may start with reliability. But capacity will define the pace of electrification. » If you’re planning a facility expansion, a fleet electrification project, or a new energy-intensive process, you need to start engaging your utility on timelines much earlier than you might expect — capacity, not just budget, may be your limiting factor.
Energy Efficiency Is the "Unsung Hero" — and the Cheapest Option You Have
With rates poised to rise on both the natural gas side (due to anticipated LNG export pressure) and the electricity side (due to the need for new generation), Tony Iacobelli framed energy efficiency as the most overlooked lever available to operators. It’s « kind of the unsung hero of the energy system, » he noted — often ignored, but capable of avoiding real costs, especially the cost of new centralized generation.
Bansal reinforced this point later:
« Start small, generate savings quickly, then reinvest those savings into future upgrades. The cheapest energy is the one you don’t use. »
For founders operating on tight margins, that’s not a sustainability slogan — it’s a straightforward capital allocation principle. Efficiency upgrades reduce your exposure to rising rates before you ever have to think about generation, storage, or complex procurement.
Data Without a Plan Is Just Noise
One of the more practically useful threads in the discussion came from Sean Mirrahimi of Edgecom Energy, whose business focuses on energy monitoring and optimization for large commercial and industrial customers. Mirrahimi was blunt about a trap many companies fall into: they invest in sensors and monitoring infrastructure, generate mountains of data, and then have no idea what to do with it.
He described launching an AI-powered energy data intelligence platform and immediately fielding a call from an attendee representing a room of seventeen energy managers — all of whom, in his words, didn’t know what to do with the data they already had:
« He called me right after the webinar and asked for a meeting. There were 17 energy managers in the room, and they all admitted they didn’t know what to do with the data. » His conclusion was rooted in an old line from a retired colleague: « He used to have a saying that you can’t manage what you don’t measure. »
But he was careful to add the corollary that too many companies stop there — measuring without ever translating the data into decisions.
For founders, the lesson is clear: don’t invest in monitoring infrastructure as an end in itself. Before you deploy sensors, define what decisions that data needs to support, and — critically — tie those decisions to the incentives of the people who will act on them.
Misaligned Incentives Kill Energy Projects Before They Start
Mirrahimi pointed out that operations managers are typically incentivized purely around production output and uptime — never around energy cost, emissions, or consumption. As a result, even good energy data rarely gets acted on, because the people closest to the equipment have no reason to care about it.
His advice was to work backwards:
« Before you install any meters, set expectations and timelines. Start with your main meters, focus on the largest energy consumers using the 80/20 rule, and determine how you’ll turn the data into actionable insights. » As he summarized it, doing this properly is » how you set yourself up for success and create a roadmap that delivers—not just an aspirational plan. »
If you’re a founder and your facilities or operations leads have zero energy-related KPIs, that’s likely the single biggest reason your efficiency initiatives stall.
The Business Case Has to Be ROI-First, Sustainability-Second
Perhaps the most striking reframe in the entire conversation came from Mirrahimi discussing how the narrative around sustainability has shifted for the executives writing checks. After two decades in energy sales and operations, his view was unambiguous: « I’ve been doing this for over 20 years, and I’ve yet to meet an executive who looks at how many trees they’ll save before looking at the cost. »
His broader point was that sustainability itself hasn’t lost importance — it’s been reframed:
« Sustainability has shifted from an ESG conversation to a byproduct of good projects. It’s simply good business practice, and if you’re not doing that, you’re not going to be competitive. »
In other words, businesses aren’t funding decarbonization for its own sake anymore; they’re funding resilience, cost control, and competitiveness — and lower emissions come along for the ride. As he put it: « Twenty years ago, energy was an inevitable cost of doing business. Today, it’s a controllable input. »
That’s a meaningful mental model shift for founders: stop pitching energy projects internally (or to investors) as sustainability initiatives with a payback period attached. Pitch them as capital projects that happen to reduce emissions. The order of operations matters for getting the budget approved.
Bansal echoed this from the incentive side, noting that program economics have improved substantially — incentive rates that used to sit around $800 per kilowatt are now roughly $1,800 per kilowatt, and per-kilowatt-hour incentives have doubled as well. New programs, like the IESO’s Peak Performance Program, now let facilities aggregate assets like HVAC systems into demand response programs, creating additional revenue streams beyond simple efficiency savings.
Deep Retrofits Are Stalling at the Financing Stage — Not the Audit Stage
If your company has commissioned an energy audit and then let the recommendations sit on a shelf, you’re not alone. Iacobelli noted that across multiple retrofit accelerator programs he’s studied, there’s a consistent drop-off between businesses completing energy audits and businesses actually executing on the recommendations.
Mirrahimi’s explanation was pointed:
« I think the fundamental problem with energy audits is that they have been historically compliance-driven, not outcome driven. This means that when you get an audit from a company, a third party comes out, they do a bunch of measurements and they give you a report. A lot of the priorities that they set out in that report is based on the sustainability impact that that particular audit is going to, or that particular recommendation is going to achieve. They rarely address return on investment or the capital required to implement recommendations. »
And there’s typically no budget or executive buy-in secured before the audit even happens: « An energy manager commissions an audit without executive buy-in for what comes next. There’s no budget for implementation. »
The deeper issue, in his view, is that financing for energy projects still gets evaluated like a conventional loan — collateral, financial statements, and traditional risk models — rather than being structured around the energy savings the project itself generates. He was candid about the gap on the finance side too: « 90% of the financiers I’ve spoken with are interested in energy projects, but many don’t understand concepts like peak demand, demand response, or energy arbitrage. »
For founders seeking capital for efficiency or electrification projects, this means two things: build your business case around savings-backed financing structures (shared-savings models tied to project performance rather than your balance sheet), and be prepared to educate your lender or investor on the mechanics of the program you’re tapping into — because many of them, per Mirrahimi’s estimate, genuinely don’t know the vocabulary yet.
Coordination Across the Energy Ecosystem Is Actually Improving
Cody Wood from Enbridge offered a useful systems-level view. He pointed to Ontario’s recently released Integrated Energy Plan as a signal of coordinated planning across gas, electricity, and other fuel sources, and cited a concrete example: Enbridge and Alectra are now actively sharing growth forecasts in Brampton, one of Ontario’s fastest-growing communities, specifically so both utilities can build infrastructure « in the right place at the right time. »
Wood also made a strong case for natural gas’s continued role in the transition:
« Natural gas is extremely resilient. It’s in the ground. It’s working for us. It’s just there plugging away, doing the heavy lifting. It provides what we like to call 6 nines of reliability. So it’s 99.9999% reliable. »
He noted it currently supplies about one-third of the grid’s dispatchable generation capacity, able to ramp up and down as needed: « Natural gas supplies about one-third of the grid’s dispatchable capacity and can ramp up and down as needed. » For energy-intensive operators like the glass manufacturer he referenced in the audience, where downtime isn’t an option, that reliability profile still matters enormously, even as electrification accelerates elsewhere in the business.
Across every panelist, a consistent theme emerged: energy is no longer a background utility cost you can ignore until the bill arrives. It’s becoming a strategic constraint (capacity), a financing challenge (savings-backed capital), an incentive design problem (internal KPIs), and — increasingly — a genuine source of competitive advantage for companies that get ahead of it.
As Bansal advised: « Don’t wait. Don’t treat energy as a side project. Build it into your operations, your capital allocation, and your sustainability goals so you’re ready for what’s coming. »
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