Short in the system
Prince Edward Island faces some hard decisions in its energy future

Despite emerging sectors in aerospace and bioscience, seafood remains the second biggest export product for Prince Edward Island, behind only agriculture, with more than $400 million worth in 2024. Exporting seafood requires significant processing, even when much of the product being exported is live. Products move along conveyor belts, are shelled, cut up and packaged by machines, and stored in specialized tanks where the water is pumped, filtered and oxygenated.

“To run our cookers, to run our steamers, our packers, our water pumps for our live storage, our freezer, cold storage service units… all these things require electricity,” said Bob Creed, executive director of the P.E.I. Seafood Processors Association.

That comes at significant cost. Processors with annual sales in the $50 million range can be looking at electricity bills of more than a million dollars a year.

For generations, Islanders have taken electricity for granted. You flick a switch and, barring a storm-induced blackout, the lights go on.

In the fall of last year, Maritime Electric, the province’s main electric utility, warned Islanders no longer have that certainty. Rapid population growth, combined with a move towards electricity for home heating and transportation, is pushing the capacity of the Island’s electrical grid to its limit. The consequences of this, Maritime Electric CEO Jason Roberts said, could be seen as early as the coming winter with rolling blackouts. In these blackouts, the utility would purposefully turn off the power in selected areas for a few hours at a time in order to prevent an overload of the system that would knock out power to the entire Island.

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