Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Canada Investment Summit quietly brought clean energy right into the middle of the investment conversation, says senior financial analyst Sandra Odendahl of Catalyst Climate Capital.
While the summit received some criticism for prioritizing age-old patterns of resource extraction, Odendahl said 40 of the projects in Carney’s 167-project dealbook aim to either cut or remove emissions, and tens of those are in clean energy.
“I think our leaders are starting to finally connect that clean energy and clean technology are not just climate issues anymore,” Odendahl said. “They are connected to things like productivity and competitiveness, diversification, sovereignty— all that stuff that has come to the fore in the last year and a half.”
Citing future electricity demand for technologies like artificial intelligence, Odendahl warned that, “unless we want to go back to the days of smog and huge emission ramp-ups, that electricity should be clean.”
It also “needs to be reliable and it needs to be affordable,” she added. “So there’s a case for clean energy.”.
Clean infrastructure is now seen as central not just from an environmental perspective, but through an economic lens, Odendahl said. As Canada tries to diversify into new export markets like Europe, those developed markets will be concerned about the carbon intensity of their supply chains.
“I think we are well on the way to governments and investors understanding that clean energy is not a separate environmental category, but it’s actually a foundation for an economic structure that we’re going to have to live with,” she said.
That means Canada must now scale up support for its early-stage researchers and innovators. “It is very tricky in Canada to keep companies here, to make them want to grow here,” she said.
“It doesn’t mean the government has to fund everything, but they have to make the conditions attractive for investors who need to have the risk managed.”
The government can play a role in reducing risks that private capital can’t absorb, Odendahl said.
But that can be easier said than done: while Canada’s clean energy investment tax credits (ITCs) were meant to deploy almost $100 billion over 10 years from 2024 to 2034, the Canada Revenue Agency reported it had only received about 1,700 claims worth about $1.6 billion through March, 2026.
“It’s clear that the programs are being used, but the ramp-up has been pretty slow,” she said.
Odendahl added that, while the ITCs are a great idea, they often arrive too late to help smaller start-ups finance their projects. Larger companies may be able to get bridge financing, and they can also accommodate complicated rules and large administrative burdens that are beyond the capacity of many firms.
