Enbridge Gas president on sustainability, reliability — and why your gas bill has gone up

“We talk about it at Enbridge Gas all the time as the three-legged stool, and trying to keep it in balance, because if you pull any one (leg) out, you’ll fall over,” she says. “That’s what makes my job not that easy.”

That balance is also a moving target, Harradence says, shifting with the economy, culture and weather-related realities.

The Cape Breton-born 16^th generation Canadian was raised in Ontario and followed her father into engineering, studying at Queen’s University before returning to New Brunswick to earn a law degree.

After starting her career at a Halifax law firm, Harradence joined Shell Canada in Calgary, where she remained for 16 years.

In 2014, Harradence joined Union Gas parent company Spectra Energy as vice president of operations, environment, health and safety for its western Canadian operations before Spectra was acquired by Enbridge in 2017.

Founded in 1878 with 12 gas-powered street lamps in downtown Toronto — some of which still stand near Saint Lawrence Market — Enbridge became North America’s largest gas utility following the $19 billion acquisition of three American providers in 2023.

Today, Enbridge Gas — a subsidiary of Calgary headquartered Enbridge Inc. — supplies natural gas to 7.1 million customers in Ontario, Quebec, North Carolina, Idaho, Ohio, Wyoming and Utah.

The company employs some 7,000 people, including nearly 4,200 in Canada, and heats 75 per cent of Ontario homes.

The Star recently spoke with Harradence from Enbridge Gas headquarters in Toronto about balancing energy prices, sustainability and reliability, how the company became the continent’s largest natural gas utility, and the underground storage facility that keeps prices low and supply stable in the depths of winter.

What inspired you to study engineering and law?

I was pretty good at science, and my dad was an engineer.

I kept coming up with other ideas of things I could do, and my mom kept saying, “what kind of job are you going to get with that degree?” And finally, I went, “OK, I’ll study mechanical engineering.”

That summer I had a summer job cleaning contaminated sites in Toronto and found that super interesting, and decided I wanted to practice environmental law.

When I graduated, I wound up working at a law firm in Halifax that represented architects and engineers. I travelled all over, but in my late 20s I was looking for more work-life balance and decided to try in-house council, so I took a job with Shell.

That seems like a big leap from environmental law.

I would never describe myself as an energy activist so much as viewing the environment as very important.

My father worked on the retail side and got me that summer job doing environmental cleanup for gas stations that were being sold.

I remember him saying, “rather than having to clean things up, we should find ways to not make a mess in the first place,” and that stuck with me. I was interested really in driving things in a way that doesn’t make a mess.   

How did you end up back in engineering?

I worked as a lawyer for Shell for about a year, but in the late ‘90s they were desperate for engineers.

The whole industry had been in a hiring freeze for nearly a decade, and I was negotiating the construction contracts that became the oilsands project. I helped as a project engineer for several years to get that project built.

I had many roles, but my last job there was running Shell’s Sarnia Refinery. I was there until 2014 when Spectra, a U.S.-based company, approached me for a role in their Western Canada Midstream business, which was a bunch of gas processing plants and the pipeline that runs through B.C.

Spectra owned those plants, Union Gas, and a bunch of pipelines in the U.S., and within two years of joining they were acquired by Enbridge in 2016. That deal ultimately closed in 2017.

How has Enbridge evolved since?

Enbridge was primarily an oil pipeline company before that. They had a bit of a gas pipeline, but they also had the old Consumers’ Gas here in Ontario, which they bought in the early ‘90s.

Consumers’ Gas was founded in 1848 with 12 street lamps in downtown Toronto. At that time, we weren’t heating homes, we were lighting lamps with what was called “manufactured gas.”

Then in the 1950s Western Canadian natural gas came into Ontario by pipeline, and we no longer had to manufacture gas. That was a big deal, because it was cleaner, more affordable and more reliable.

After Enbridge purchased Spectra Energy, I wound up going to the U.S. to work on their gas pipeline system, and when I came back in 2022, they had merged Union Gas and legacy Enbridge Gas Distribution into Enbridge Gas.

Then in 2023 we acquired several utilities in the United States, which made us the largest gas utility in North America, servicing 7.1 million customers across seven provinces and states.

Are some moving to more environmentally sustainable alternatives, like heat pumps? 

We like hybrid heating. We think it’s a good idea.

A few years ago, we were seeing a lot of people interested in heat pumps and using gas as a backup. Right now, folks are more focused on affordability, so having redundant systems doesn’t work for them. 

If you take a long-term view, hybrid heating makes a lot of sense. The technology just isn’t quite there to ensure your house stays warm on the coldest days. It depends on all sorts of factors, like how old your house is, but you typically need a gas furnace for backup.

In Canada your heat pump can typically manage your cooling needs, but it’s tougher for it to manage those minus-30, minus-40 days.

Enbridge was criticized last year for not letting customers get off gas.

We took that issue very seriously.

We have hundreds of thousands of customers who move every month, so when someone calls to say they want to turn off their system, we assume they’re moving, and someone is going to call us in a few weeks to restart it.

We don’t send people to cut it off and take away their meter. We’ve since worked with our customer care teams to ensure we’re asking better questions to understand when someone wants gas off their property.

Why are heating costs going up?

A lot of it is due to factors beyond our control, like the weather and the strength of the Canadian dollar.

Your gas bill has two chunks to it; what it costs to deliver the gas, and the cost of the gas itself.

In Ontario we do what’s called a rate case every five years, and our last one was in the fall of ’22, which we presented to the Ontario Energy Board in ’23. They determined what the rate increase would be starting in 2024, and that’s tied to inflation for the next five years, but the rates are set, and the increase is what helps us maintain our infrastructure.

As for the gas prices, we don’t set them, we just pass them on to the customer. We don’t make money when prices go up or lose money when they go down. That said, we do try and keep costs as low as possible.

For example, we have the Dawn Hub near Chatham, which is our 288 billion cubic foot (BCF) underground gas storage facility. For reference, on the coldest day in Ontario we might move six or seven BCF. It allows us to buy natural gas in the summer when prices are lower and distribute it in the winter when prices are higher, while ensuring reliability.

American hubs like Chicago or New England might see prices increase by $10 to $25 for a million BTUs on those really cold days; ours went up fifty cents, because we already paid for it. Nobody in North American has anything like the Dawn. 

How do you balance environmental sustainability, reliability and cost?

There’s big demand for energy in the province; according to the Independent Electricity System Operator it’s going to increase 75 per cent by 2050 thanks to things like EVs and AI. We believe in an all-of-the-above strategy when it comes to energy in Ontario.

We need more renewables, but we also need something to back up solar and wind from a resilience perspective.

We just don’t have the battery capacity to keep homes heated when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. The engineer in me loves nuclear energy, but that takes a long time to bring to market.

On the coldest day of the winter last January, we moved the equivalent energy of six times the capacity of Ontario’s entire nuclear fleet. We provide two thirds more energy on an annual basis than electricity at 25 per cent the cost, so it’s a hard thing to say ‘no’ to, especially when we’re worried about affordability.

Another part of that is people’s concern over jobs. Keeping energy costs low is what helps Ontario compete in sectors from AI to automotive manufacturers and steel plants.

We fundamentally believe in giving our customers choice.

If you’re able to be a little less concerned about affordability you can make some different choices.

If affordability is what matters to you most, let’s make sure you have options that are reasonable and responsible, too.