Canadian electricity rates are among the lowest in the world. That does not mean your bill is easy to understand or easy to reduce. Pierre-Olivier Pineau has a specific reason for that: the poles and the wires that deliver electricity to your door are a fixed cost, and those costs do not shrink when you do.

What makes this stranger is that efficiency gains have a habit of cancelling themselves out. Use less, add another device, and the grid absorbs roughly the same load it always has. Pineau calls it the rebound effect, and it is a pattern built into the way modern households actually behave.

The shift coming with EVs and battery storage changes the equation in ways worth paying attention to.

Topics: Canadian electricity bill breakdown, electricity network costs Canada, time of use rates, energy efficiency rebound effect, vehicle to grid technology

GUEST: Pierre-Olivier Pineau | https://www.hec.ca/en/profs/pierre-olivier.pineau.html

Originally aired on 2026-04-21