Our industry has the unique capability to deploy large amounts of capital decisively but also collaboratively with our community stakeholders. CIGRE could leverage its global community to assist in the technical design and development of this EHV/HSR concept, identify partners fr om the rail/transport industries with whom to develop this concept, establish the collaborative framework necessary to champion and sustain its execution, and help build the political support needed to make this concept a reality for our communities.

We cannot afford to continue faithfully waiting for dissonant and powerless governments around the world to act. While citizens and companies throughout Canada grow increasingly impatient for the federal government to execute (or even to propose) a bold vision to tackle these lingering greenhouse gas emissions, it is our responsibility as professional engineers in the electric power industry to take clear and decisive action on behalf of our communities, neighbors, and (grand-)children.

We could leverage the stability of our industry’s financial resources to provide sustained support and financing for executing large-scale projects on behalf of a vast array of stakeholders. A steady funding stream provides the baseline support and confidence necessary to competently drive projects, attract additional investors/partners, and ultimately sustain momentum and continuity with construction activity. When money runs out, the project halts. When the project halts, costs from delay rapidly accrue. Unfortunately, most past high-speed rail initiatives, thus far, have been paltry, piecemeal, and uncoordinated – not to mention occasionally disrupted by firmly established adversaries entrenched with legacy auto/oil interests.

Our industry’s expertise with land/ROW acquisition would be extremely valuable to routing this future system. Working collaboratively with local communities and landowners – as we’ve always done – our industry could forge a robust alliance with local communities, inviting stakeholders to participate in this conversation to improve their regional economic activities, induce additional investment opportunities, and to keep an eye on the immediate construction impacts to their everyday lives, in order to minimize local opposition and NIMBY-ism and to ultimately respect these folks’ lands.

This concept defines a framework to forge an ambitious new “super-grid” that would not only continue serving our customers’ electric power transport needs reliably in a changing environment, but also to directly improve our customers’ everyday lives, by finally connecting people, places, and assets together with state-of-the-art transport on a unified electrified transport system.

All aboard the “Grid of the Future!”