The POWER Interview: Innovation, Market Incentives Can Drive Electrification

The push toward electrification involves new technologies and strategies, including as a way for an enterprise to decarbonize its operations. It also can provide savings for a business, with more energy-efficient processes leading to lower energy costs.

Electrification can be coupled with digitization, which enables solutions to optimize energy usage. Several companies have made electrification part of their portfolios when it comes to serving the energy industry and supporting the transition toward cleaner forms of power generation.

Stantec, a global company involved in sustainable engineering, architecture, and environmental consulting, is among those groups, with the company focused on “Providing sustainable and reliable energy solutions for our clients and communities, whether through the construction of new facilities or improving the safety and reliability of existing systems.”

Dane Labonte, an energy management consultant at Stantec, has more than a decade of experience with addressing sustainability challenges in the energy sector. Labonte advances projects that implement microgrid technologies and deploy clean energy resources to reimagine energy systems.

Labonte recently provided POWER with insight into electrification, noting how the strategy supports sustainability while controlling energy costs and promoting power reliability.

POWER: How important is electrification to reaching decarbonization goals, whether for a municipality, commercial and industrial enterprise, utility, or other enterprise?

Labonte: Electrification is about offsetting energy coming directly from fossil fuels with electrons. And it’s a key strategy to support decarbonization across sectors. Depending on the generation mix providing the electrons, the amount of decarbonization may vary. But wherever a customer has electrified their energy usage, they stand to benefit from future deployments of clean generation resources.

While offering huge decarbonization upside, electrification is not going to be practical for all energy uses. Difficult to retrofit systems, grid capacity constraints, and energy density requirements, among other factors, will make some energy uses difficult to electrify. However, over time, innovation and evolving market incentives will shift the calculation on what’s practical.

Learn more about electrification by reading “Industry Experts: Market Forces Still Support Electrification,” a feature article in the April 2025 issue of POWER.

POWER: How should entities look to accomplish their electrification goals? What technologies (for heating, cooling, etc.) should be embraced?

Labonte: Depending on the specific entity and their processes and operations, the scale of the transition and availability of market-ready electrification solutions will vary. Many entities can benefit from electrifying fleet operations or considering heat pumps for heating and cooling needs. For many applications, these can already be considered proven technologies. However, it is still worth assessing the alignment with specific needs and environmental conditions.

POWER: What should drive electrification? Should it be government policies, economic benefits, environmental benefits, or something else?

Labonte: Ultimately, I expect it will be a combination of these factors that inform the shift toward electrification. There are millions of independent actors reacting to their own specific circumstances. We should expect that early adopters will have different drivers than those electrifying later. The biggest driver for a successful transition towards electrification will be innovation that brings cost-effective solutions to address customer needs.

POWER: In the current political climate, at least in the U.S., should we rely on government policies to push electrification—or should adoption be driven by market forces?

Labonte: Government policy, both carrots and sticks, has a role to play in shaping the market and catalyzing innovation and investment. This can be critical for overcoming inertia that maintains the status quo. But government priorities—and, in turn, policy—can shift from one election cycle to the next. As a Canadian, I hesitate to speak to the specifics of the U.S. political climate. But if decarbonization solutions are cost-effective and meet customer needs, they are certainly less susceptible to changing government support.

POWER: How can electrification technologies help utilities manage electricity, and support grid flexibility?

Labonte: Electrification presents utilities with an opportunity and responsibility to reinvest to resiliently meet growing demand. There will be a tension between containing costs and ensuring reliability. It’s important that utilities be tasked with exploring alternatives approaches for achieving their goals. Creating customer incentives that promote demand flexibility or that coordinate customer-sited distributed energy resources could offer cost-effective solutions that encourage electrification and support grid operations.

—Darrell Proctor is a senior editor for POWER.