The future of power: How can Canada build a bigger, better grid?

Experts say Canada's electrical grid needs some serious investment — and reinvention — if it's going to both expand massively in a bid to fight climate change and become more resilient to natural disasters.

Post-tropical storm Fiona, which left hundreds of thousands of people without power in Atlantic Canada, is just the latest in a long series of natural disasters which left Canadians without electricity.

"I learned how to go camping again. You just kind of get used to it. You understand there's people out there that have had a lot worse than we have. So we just sort of wait for our turn for the power to come back on and get back to some semblance of normal," said Lee Fleury, a P.E.I. resident left without power for over a week in Fiona's wake. Many people in Atlantic Canada still do not have electricity.

But Canada needs a new normal if it's going to both significantly increase energy production and secure it against potential disasters, two experts told CBC Radio's The House in an interview airing Saturday.

LISTEN: How Canada can build an electrical grid for the future:

Bruce Lourie, president of the environmental organization the Ivey Foundation, said Canada will need to double or triple electricity capacity by roughly 2050 to keep up with growing demand — in part spurred by new electrification pushes for things like electric vehicles.

"Electric cars, electric heat pumps in homes, more electrification in industry. So it's a big, big task ahead of us," he told host Catherine Cullen.

Canada has long enjoyed a relatively green electrical system which gets over 80 per cent of its power from non-emitting sources. But Lourie said Canada still faces a challenge in rapidly expanding the grid.

"In part, I think that's made us a little bit complacent," he said. "So I don't know if we're really set up for this big task ahead of us."

Part of that task also involves making sure that the grid is more resilient against natural disasters of the type that left hundreds of thousands of people in Atlantic Canada in the dark after Fiona.

"What storms do really is point out the vulnerabilities of the system. So the vulnerabilities are there. The storms just make it very real and make the impact felt by the local people who lose their power," Lourie said.

He said Canada must invest in projects that "harden" transmission or create "micro grids" of smaller, independently powered systems.

Kristen van de Biezenbos, an associate professor at the University of Alberta specializing in energy law, said one focus for resiliency-boosting efforts would be to bury power lines rather than have them strung along poles.

But paying for those changes could be "a bit tricky," she said, since private provincial utilities (such as Maritime Electric in P.E.I. or Nova Scotia Power) may have incentives different from those motivating Crown corporations.