Episode 112: Technology, sustainability and energy efficiency with Emily Heitman

We don't have to be thought of as a high cost country with the technology and innovation that's available between automation of facilities, between the tools around robotics and modernization of facilities. Industry in Canada can be very cost efficient and we do have the ability to have predictive analytics tools that help companies avoid costly disruptions. (soft music) Welcome to the Flux capacitor, a podcast about the future of electricity. I'm Francis Bradley of Electricity Canada. This is number one one two episode 112 of the Flux capacitor. I've been chatting with the industry's business leaders, thought leaders, new market players and stakeholders, the folks that have been pondering the future of how we create, move trade and use energy and what the future changes will mean for electricity companies, regulators, society and customers. I hope these conversations are given you the listener a sense of the conversations that are taking place in the sector. My guest on the podcast today is Emily Heitman. I am the president of Schneider Electric Canada. Emily joined me for a conversation about technology, sustainability and energy efficiency. We talk about challenges to the sector, including fragmented policies and aging infrastructure as well as solutions, including digital tools for energy management and reporting and incentives for green investments. Emily emphasizes the importance of balancing sustainability with profitability and the need for modernizing supply chains in a time of geopolitical uncertainty. We close the conversation with Emily's recommendation for an addition to the Flux capacitor book club. Here is my conversation with Emily Heitman recorded on Zoom on May 15th, 2025. (gentle music) Emily, welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you on and great to chat with you today. - Thanks, Francis. It's nice to be here. - Let's start off just for the listener, Schneider Electric Canada. Give us a thumbnail sketch of Schneider Electric Canada. - Sure, so Schneider Electric is actually a French company had recorded in Paris. We call ourselves one of the most local of global companies because we operate in our countries around the world with local manufacturing, local sales and operations to be able to support the places that we work and live. And because we're in the space of energy and electricity the needs and demands of every country are unique. We make everything from electrical equipment to software and services to be able to serve the homes, the cities and industries and to power them with energy efficiency and resiliency. Gotcha, okay? So let's talk about some of those unique characteristics of Canada and how you see how we are unique given that you're part of a multinational organization. So you get to see it from a different perch. So how do you see Canada in the overall energy picture? - Absolutely. I regularly talk about how Canada is uniquely positioned to become a superpower or to be a showcase of sustainability to the rest of the world. Because we do have some unique situations that already put us in the forefront of being able to lead this effort. We have 82% of our electricity coming from non-emitting sources between our hydroelectric power and our nuclear power that's available to us. We also have a third, we're the third largest in the world of critical mineral reserves like nickel, cobalt, graphite. So we're very vital to the clean tech supply chain as well. So we have a lot of untapped potential when it comes to both natural resources to lead in green energy. That being said, we do have some obstacles as well that are keeping us from being able to progress. - Yeah, so untapped potential. That's because there are obstacles. So what do you see as those obstacles? - I'd say one of the biggest one. And I'll talk to one, let's say policy and then two are aging infrastructure. So first, one of the things that we've talked about in the recent federal election is varying federal, that we don't have necessarily one federal policy across many different sectors. But in particular, in energy, we do have a fragmented set of provincial policies that give different incentives or restrictions when it comes to investing in green energy when it comes to reporting your carbon emissions, that sort of thing. And so what I see as really lacking is one federal policy that unites us driving us towards that future state. And then the second when I talked about is our aging infrastructure. We do have an outdated infrastructure that is in need of updating. And you see the utilities starting to declare they're going to be making investments in this. But current state, it is struggling to accommodate both the growing electrical demands and the seamless integration of renewables into the system. - Yeah, those are two formidable barriers to save at least. Many to let's unpack them a little bit. So on the first one, on the policy one, this of course is one that we've been talking about at electricity Canada for quite some time. So I absolutely share your concern about that kind of fragmented approach to policies. But what does that solution gonna look like? You did know that there was a lot of talk on the campaign trail about some of these issues. But it's one thing to identify what the problem is. The solution may be a little bit more challenging in terms of being able to marshal the, and create a coherent direction between one federal government and 10 provinces and three territories. And then of course the myriad of regional and municipal requirements that we're seeing. Is it all about showing leadership at the national level? And is it all on the government or is there something that those of us in industry should be playing as well? - Well, I think you tapped into something that's really important, which is we all have a part to play. So the government can require information reporting. They can require or they can offer incentives but also businesses, citizens, municipal's, across the board have to make the investment to be able to provide this to be able to upgrade our infrastructure across the board. We talk about the aging infrastructure but then a lot of our electrical infrastructure across the country are in buildings, which is not, which isn't the private sector. So one example of where I've seen some good work going on and that we've highlighted here at Schneider is that in Vancouver there's been a new by-law over the last year that requires buildings, which by the way, buildings I think represent over 30% of carbon emissions in our infrastructure to just start with reporting their carbon emissions. Now in order to do that, you have to have access to the information. So that does require some investment, right? A lot of our emissions coming out of the buildings, for example, could be coming out of the HVAC system. So if you have the digital software attached to your electrical infrastructure in your home in your building and your factory, now you have the information available to be able to report, but then then you turn around and now that's giving valuable information to a building owner or a business owner to be able to make decisions around their energy usage. So to me, what it could look like, and I'm not going to define necessarily utopia in federal legislation, but it could look like reporting requirements. It could look like incentives for just simply investing in energy software that allows owners of buildings to make valuable decisions that reduce emissions in the future. It could be incentives to offload some of the capacity on the grid by allowing or incentivizing new industry manufacturers to put solar panels on their roofs as an example, to be able to say offload some of the demand that they may require throughout the day on their local utility. - Hmm, interesting. Okay. And the other topic was aging infrastructure. And one of the challenges in that space is the ability, I've heard from my members of working with regulators to make sure that you're able to get the kinds of upgrades that are required into rate base. Are you hearing that from your clients? We are going to be back. We're hearing clients who are saying, we could expand into Canada. We're a global company. We have clients all over the world who are actually asking us how we'd like to put a battery energy storage factory in Canada. How can you connect us to the local utilities or local investors to be able to do so? We may have customers in other parts of the world interested in investing in Canada, but then we've seen them come to Canada looking for power availability and being rejected by the local utility. We've seen some customers saying, I can build, but I'm going to have to build my own transmission lines. So there's power availability, but I can't connect to the grid because it's just not something that the utility can do in short order. So for us, we don't just want to boost our, the green energy and the sustainability of this country. We also want economic development in the country as well because I think this is good for everyone. But if businesses cannot get power or they cannot connect to a source of power, then we are limiting our economic development as well as the innovation that comes with that economic development as well. Right. Emily, one of the things that I ask folks that come on the podcast is about their journey and I make the same lame joke every time. And so here goes, when you were a kid on the playground, did you always dream of becoming president of a company like Schneider Electric? What was your journey like to the role that you've got today? Well, no, I did not dream of it. But I'm thrilled I am. Probably like a lot of an engineer by degree, like a lot of engineers or you know, you grow up playing with Lincoln logs and Legos for those of you who remember what Lincoln long thought. But so I always knew I liked building things. I thought maybe I'd be an architect, but as I remember distinctly, and I love to tell the story, I remember distinctly watching Sesame Street. Did you ever watch that Francis? My younger siblings did. But yes, I was aware of it. And watching a milk bottling factory with robots and conveyors and everything being completely automated and being fascinated even as a young girl. So when I became, I'm an industrial, not an electrical engineer, I love building things. I love manufacturing. So that's how I got into the industry was through our manufacturing plants. And then eventually working right my way up to here. But in the end, always working in this electrical industry and becoming more and more passionate over time about electricity, about energy sustainability and efficiency. Great. Hey, I often hear people talking about the challenge around balancing reliability, sustainability, and the cost, the customers as a trilema, like a dilemma, but in fact, three pieces. I heard somebody last week at a conference saying, we need to turn that on its head and start looking at this. Instead of a trilema as a trifecta, as we win, if we get all three of them. You've talked about sustainability. Our sustainability and profitability mutually exclusive or is that a dilemma or is that a false comparison and the two can work together? Well, I think it is a false narrative in that I firmly believe that sustainability should improve your bottom line. And the innovation is there. I think there was a time where innovation and technology was catching up and there was this perception that well, in order to be green, you're going to have to reduce your profits, have subsidization, et cetera. But if you take a step back, and I think I like that you called it a trifecta, if you take a step back and look, just look at Canada alone. If 70% of Canadian carbon emissions come from energy and we know that we waste as a country 50% of the energy we generate, then we truly believe that that solving for energy efficiency is both important for our capacity problem, our carbon emission problem and our cost of energy problem. So if a business can reduce their energy consumption through energy efficiency, they also reduce their carbon emissions because they're not using as much energy as they initially were. It puts less strain on the grid to as we put demand there. And then also as far as every one of us knows, lowering your energy consumption, lowering your power bills, and as good for your operating costs. So I think that what we at Schneider Electric like to say, we say electric plus digital equals sustainable. And the reason why we say that is the more electric, we can make this world, the less we're relying on fossil fuels. But the more that we use digital technology to optimize our electrical usage, the more sustainable we can be in the future. And the more energy efficient we are, the more we start lowering costs. And I can give you examples of companies that we've worked with that have seen both an improvement in their sustainability and as well as an improvement in their bottom line. - Hey, you know. - You're doing for the planet, should be with your pocket both. - For the listener, why don't you just give us a case study of one of those, that'd be great. - Sure, so Edmonton, I'll give an example in Edmonton, we worked with HSBC. They had a office tower that was aging in the city. It was, we were able to transform through our Eco Structure platform, which is a digital platform that harnesses and really both monitors and manages your electrical systems within your building. We were able to use this system to transform that aging office tower into an energy efficient building. It was both at the end shrinking its carbon footprint, but also cutting energy use and lowering their operating costs. We have another example here in Toronto, where we worked with a major bank that was wanting to reduce their emissions across all of their buildings. So they said, we want to reduce our emissions by 2030. How can you help us do this? Same digital software that we've installed to be able to, not just give visibility to the waste that was being used, what's energy waste. Running air conditioning in the basement in the middle of the night. It's right on when nobody's in a part of the building. It's pretty obvious stuff, but instead of manually having to walk around and turn off, turn on and off things that are consuming power, there is digital platforms available to be able to automate that monitor and manage it. This bank was able to save close to 13% in energy. It's a very high-resistant energy consumption as well as reducing maintenance cost by $200,000 just in year one. It's proven that the ROI is there, and so much of this is just simply digital technology that is available right now to be able to help users reduce that energy consumption and then alleviate some of the strain on the grid as well as they aim to upgrade at the same time. Right. I mean, you're seeing a lot of demand for greener, smarter, infrastructure. So how's that changing Schneider Electric, how are you changing to meet what is clearly a trend that you're seeing from customers? Well, we do believe that we need to lead by example. We're an old company. We've been around since the age of Napoleon, which is a really, really funny story. If you go back in the history there, but over the last, say, 100 years, we're just building equipment. Over time, as we look into the future, we've been acquiring and integrating new software companies into our operations to be able to meet the solutions of the future. So we can integrate them into our own operations as we are a manufacturer. We're decarbonizing our office buildings, we're decarbonizing our factories, and then as everyone knows across the scope one, two, three, right, we also need to build in decarbonization for our own supply chain and the communities in which we live. So we're helping our customers and our suppliers integrate the green solutions that we've already been able to put into our own operations. So our global sustainability goals are tracked. We report them quarterly in our own sustainability impact report. And then in Canada itself, we're aiming to cut emissions at our local sites by 90% by 2030. So we have the digital tools to track on, we're putting in electrification and efficiency and we're making tough choices when it comes to our own building infrastructure. So we're on track, scope one emissions are down 60%, and scope two are down 63%. So we have to lead by example, and then we can also prove, we're seeing those savings, we're seeing those cost cutting impacts coming across the board as well. Okay, you mentioned supply chains. That's been a topic of a great deal of discussion and a fair amount of angst, really, since, you know, kind of even a little bit to a certain extent before COVID-19, and then since COVID, just overall concerns about supply chain of just about any kind of equipment that's used in this sector. How are you seeing the supply chain today? Are we making progress in terms of being able to untangle some of the challenges that we've gotten in the supply chain space? We are making progress. Certainly COVID was a very painful event. We put so much strain on our supply chain across the world, as we know we're very globally dependent as, you know, across all of North America. We have a dependency across the world to be able to work with our suppliers and create a more efficient low-carbon supply chain. So when we have, I would say on the whole, we've seen improvement in just overall capacity, but part of that has also been an investment that we've seen in digitization and automation in supply chain. Using technology, we can see real-time optimization resources, we can track logistics, and we can see the carbon footprint across our own supply chain and those tools are available now, but it also gives us a higher sense of reliability. We know that we, you know, I talked about our EcoStruxure Automation Expert, our EcoStruxure Tools, we have something called EcoStruxure Automation Expert that helps not just our own factories, but any of our industrial clients automate and optimize their energy use across facilities. I was in Hanover Fair a few weeks ago, I think many of you may know that, you know, Canada was the partner for Germany this year at Hanover Fair, and there was a lot of interest in investing and also attracting investment into Canada by industries. And one of the things that we were promoting at Schneider was that, you know, we're not, we don't have to be thought of as a high-cost country with the technology and innovation that's available between automation of facilities, between the tools around robotics and modernization of facilities. Industry in Canada can be very cost efficient, and we do have the ability to have predictive analytics tools that help companies allow avoid costly disruptions to their operations through constant monitoring of their electrical uses. And today we should be avoiding outages and any types of disruptions to supply, and also with tools that are available today reduce excess inventory and waste. So there was a lot of, to me, untap potential in modernizing our supply chains, and we can't at a completely a part of that. Interesting. So when you were at the Hanover Fair and in other conversations that you've been having, to what degree is the, how should I put it diplomatically? The trade challenges that we're facing these days with the rise of tariffs and actions that have been taken by the administration in the US. How are you finding that in terms of is it causing angst, is it causing indigestion for for you and for, you know, for other people that you're dealing with. What are you hearing both from within the Schneider family and from your clients? I think it's putting a lot of strain on our, let's say, or it's causing us to call to action, let me say it that way. I say it's causing sure there's always angst when there's uncertainty in the market, right? We've all seen that there's been back and forth around, you know, the market ups and downs over the last couple of last couple of months. And so it does create a certain level of uncertainty around what, what is the economy going to be doing? What is this, what spending are we going to be seeing as a result of some of the uncertainty caused by, let's say the geopolitical situation. That being said, it's also causing us to have to rise to the occasion as an industry. This isn't the first time that we've in or as business people, let's just say business leaders in general. This isn't the first time we've seen uncertainty or downturns in the market up swings. Certainly we went through COVID and saw major swings over the course of 2020. And so what it's causing us to have to do is be extremely adaptable, very innovative, checking the market all the time, real time, and also staying calm in this in the, in a very unsteady environment and saying, what do we know is going to be constant in a time of, of so many uncertainties. We know that what won't change is the need for more housing in Canada. We know that there's a housing shortage for, for, with all of the rapid immigration. We know that there is already a strain on the demand for our utilities and that we need double the demand by 2050. So there's a need for investing in our, in our overall infrastructure, electrical infrastructure. We know that there's more needs and investments going on in transportation. And then we also know that our buildings still need upgrading across the country. So where we want to make sure that we're, we're playing apart as build as business leaders and as industry segment owners. We want to lead an innovation, create creative solutions and actually take the opportunity, I think, for Canada to say, you know what, we can move ahead in this race to sustainability, to be able to be an example of showing, this is both, we can be both cost effective and, and green at the same time. So for me, you, I go back to that conversation about sustainability and profitability, or the never right now profitability matters. So creating clean energy and then utilizing clean clean energy improves our competitive as this is a nation, but it also moves us ahead in both efficiency and reducing costs in general. So for me, this is, this is an opportunity, I think, for us to stand up and be, be that showcase to the world of what sustainability looks like given the demand we already have on our system that we have to solve for. Fantastic. Emily, I always finished the podcast with the, with the same request of my guest. And that is, I'm always looking for a book recommendation. And we, we assemble it onto our, onto our book list. And so for you, if you were to recommend a book to read to the listener, what book would that be? I would say thinking fast and slow. I don't know if you read that is by Daniel Conman. It's around the concept that we have two modes of decision making. One is more that good reaction. It's more emotional. It's quick to action. And then we have the second mode of, of think of decision making, which is methodical, logical and analytical. And this book really tackles, how do we do, how do we bring them together? So if I think about the conversation we just had. And how we need to solve in a very unusual moment in time for both clean energy, as well as profitability and cost efficiency, marrying those two modes. We can't afford to be too slow, but we also can't afford to be too reactive and emotional. We have to be able to, to marry that sort of fast and slow part of our mind when we come, when it comes to decision making and solving for, for pretty complex problems. All right. So actually, this is not the first time that that's been recommended. I think this is the second, but it was a number of years ago. And so your recommendation is thinking fast and slow by Daniel Conman. And it moves back up to the very top of our reading list. So with that, Emily, thank you very much for taking the time to chat. I really appreciate it and look forward to continuing the conversation. It was great to be here. Thanks. For those that have been with the podcast since the beginning and those that are joined along the way, thanks for listening tune in for future episodes. And please take the time to rate the podcast on whatever platform you're used to listen and let me know what you think of the flux capacitor. You can find me through our website at electricity dot CA on LinkedIn and on Instagram as the Brad Bradley, the website for this pod is the flux capacitor dot CA. And it includes links for this episode on the show page, this being episode 112. And while you're there, check out the book club page, which provides info on and links to the books, which have been recommended by guests on the flux capacitor. including Emily's recommendation, thinking fast and slow. by Daniel Kahneman. And let's continue the electricity conversation on our Facebook page on Instagram and at electricity.ca you