Utilities
This sector comprises establishments primarily engaged in operating electric, gas and water utilities. These establishments generate, transmit, control and distribute electric power; distribute natural gas; treat and distribute water; operate sewer systems and sewage treatment facilities; and provide related services, generally through a permanent infrastructure of lines, pipes and treatment and processing facilities. — Statistics Canada, NAICS 2022A
- Establishments · CanadaA
- 1,416
- Under 10 employeesA
- 53%
- Establishments · USA
- 20,425
- Employment · USA
- 645,214
- Payroll · USA
- $78.7B
Size and shape
How many businesses there are and how small they are. Fragmentation is the first thing an entrant — or anyone selling software into this industry — needs to know, and it is one of the few things that is actually measured.
Canadian establishments by number of employeesA
Of 1,416 Canadian establishments with employees, 53% have fewer than ten — mostly small operators.
Where they areA
Largest four provinces by establishment count. Establishments with employees only — sole operators with no payroll are not in this table, so in trades and personal services the true number of businesses is higher.
Measured, not forecast: the share of US establishments opening in one year that were still active later. It counts good operators and bad ones together, which is exactly why it is the honest answer to “what are the odds”. It is for the whole sector rather than this market, and the ten-year figure comes from an older cohort because no younger one has reached ten years.
Market screens and studies
Market-entry records filed along this branch of the hierarchy. A record at or beneath this code is about this industry; one above it is about something wider that contains it.
Electricity replaced compute as the binding constraint on AI buildout, and the one credible independent tool was acquired out of the market in March 2025.
A gas utility is the kind of business everyone would like to own: a captive customer base, an allowed return, and nobody building a second set of mains down the same street. That is exactly why it cannot be entered. The franchise is exclusive by territory, so the only door is buying one, and the price is public. Enbridge paid US$14.0B — US$9.4B in cash plus US$4.6B of assumed debt — for three US gas utilities, about 1.3 times their rate base [A], creating a platform of roughly seven million customers; its Ontario utility alone serves over four million. A regulator sets the return on rate base, and the buyer pays a premium to rate base — the arithmetic only works for an owner whose cost of capital is lower than the allowed return, which is a description of a pension fund or an Enbridge, not an entrant. The small end of the count is not an opening either. Alberta has 89 of the 292 establishments, which lines up with the 82 member utilities of the Federation of Alberta Gas Co-ops — 54 co-ops, 16 towns and villages, 5 counties and 7 First Nations [B]: member-owned or municipal, and not for sale. The one part of the code without pipes, gas marketing, needs a provincial licence to sell to small consumers and resells a commodity against the utility's own regulated supply. Utility billing software is screened separately.
Water is the one utility Canadians have decided not to sell. Statistics Canada's inventory of core public infrastructure counts 3,325 water treatment facilities in the country in 2022, of which 2,776 — 84% — belong to municipalities, plus 1,648 wastewater treatment plants in public hands. Against that, this whole industry group has 374 businesses with employees, and 161 of them have one to four. So the asset is not for sale, and the entrant's only product is a service sold into municipal procurement: twelve to twenty-four month cycles, RFP-gated, scored on references an entrant does not have, and awarded by a council that answers to ratepayers rather than to a return. The American comparison shows what the alternative model costs to build. American Water Works, the largest listed water utility in the United States, grew in 2025 by closing 18 separate acquisitions of regulated systems for US$83M in total, adding about 20,900 customers between them — an average of roughly 1,160 customers a system, bought one council vote at a time, on top of a US$5,121M revenue base built over 140 years. Even that pace is now being abandoned for scale: in October 2025 American Water agreed an all-stock merger with Essential Utilities. The business here is aggregation at utility cost of capital, and it is a thirty-year project, not an entry.
Software serving this industry
The vertical software markets filed along the same branch — who sells to these businesses and who they would have to displace — and then the generic categories every business buys whatever it does.
The buyer is a regulated utility that procures by RFP on a five-to-ten-year cycle with rate-case scrutiny of every dollar, so the sales cycle is measured in years and the reference list is the product. Itron's $2.4B is mostly devices and outcomes rather than CIS licences, which says where the money actually is: in the meter, not the software. Adjacent to the grid-interconnection study at 221121, which reached the opposite verdict on a narrower wedge.
Renewable-project software is not one market but four layers, and every layer already has a funded owner. The customer is the solar, wind and storage developer or independent power producer (this NAICS); the residential and commercial design layer also sells to solar installers, who sit in 238220/238210. Installer design and proposal is owned by Aurora Solar. Aurora raised a $250M Series C led by Coatue in May 2021 at a $2B valuation and a $200M Series D co-led by Coatue and Energize Ventures in February 2022 — more than $520M in total [B: Canary Media; Aurora's own release] — and bought HelioScope's developer Folsom Labs for the commercial tier in 2021 [B]. The challenge comes from two directions a newcomer cannot copy cheaply: OpenSolar gives the software away (free to installers, earning from finance and partners; US$20M from Titanium Ventures and Google in October 2025, 28,000+ pros claimed) [B; C], and Enphase owns Solargraf, using it to pull installers toward its hardware [B]. Enerflo sits beside them as the sales-and-install operating system for residential solar sales organisations [C]. Utility-scale design has consolidated. PVcase took a $100M Series B in 2023 (Highland Europe, Energize) [B]; RatedPower went to Enverus in 2022 [B]; Terabase raised $130M led by SoftBank in March 2025 ($200M total) to tie design (PlantPredict) to construction software and robotic assembly [B]. Operations and asset management is the most locked-in layer and the most concentrated. Power Factors has been Vista-owned since 2021, rolled up Greenbyte and 3megawatt, and says it now covers 310 GW; Mubadala bought a minority stake in May 2026 [B]. Raptor Maps ($35M Series C, December 2024) owns drone inspection and the solar digital twin [B], with Zeitview and SenseHawk alongside. Development, diligence and finance workflow is the open layer — and it is filling. Euclid raised a $20M Series A led by Venrock in September 2025 and claims 12 GW onboarded [B; C]; Odyssey raised $74M of equity and debt in September 2026 for emerging-market distributed solar, where it is the platform Nigeria's DARES programme mandates [B]; Paces sells siting and permitting data; Frigg matches small projects with investors on grant-stage funding [C]. Incumbent vulnerability decides it. The installer tier has a $520M-funded leader under price attack from a free product and a hardware maker; utility-scale design and asset management are owned by a SoftBank-, Highland- and Vista-backed set; and the development-workflow gap that looked open in 2023 now has Venrock and development-finance money in it. Market size and vendor revenue UNVERIFIED — every vendor is private or inside a parent. How this differs from its neighbours: 221121 (grid interconnection and large-load power) is queue and site intelligence sold to data-centre and large-load developers, where Enverus/Pearl Street lead; 2211 covers utility metering, billing and customer systems; the 541620 records cover carbon, ESG and efficiency reporting. This record is the project software that designs, sells, builds, finances and operates the generating asset itself.
And what every business buys · 25 generic categories
Sold to every industry rather than this one, so they are filed against the software industry's own code. The same few vendors recur across most of them.
Companies in this industry · 37
Every company this research names that is filed here or beneath — the operators, and the vendors that sell to them — largest disclosed revenue first. The rank is within the company’s own six-digit industry.
| Company | Filed under | Revenue | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| SAPPrivate | Electric power generation, transmission and distribution2211 | $21.7B | 1/11 |
| ItronNASDAQ:ITRI | Electric power generation, transmission and distribution2211 | $2.4B | 2/11 |
| EnbridgeTSX:ENB | Natural gas distribution2212 | — | 1/5 |
| American WaterNYSE:AWK | Water, sewage and other systems2213 | — | 1/4 |
| AnzaPrivate | Other electric power generation221119 | — | 1/17 |
| ATCO GasPrivate | Natural gas distribution2212 | — | 2/5 |
| Aurora SolarPrivate | Other electric power generation221119 | — | 2/17 |
| BidgelyPrivate | Electric power generation, transmission and distribution2211 | — | 3/11 |
| EnerfloPrivate | Other electric power generation221119 | — | 3/17 |
| ÉnergirPrivate | Natural gas distribution2212 | — | 3/5 |
| EnerveePrivate | Electric power generation, transmission and distribution2211 | — | 4/11 |
| EPCORPrivate | Water, sewage and other systems2213 | — | 2/4 |
| Essential UtilitiesWTRG | Water, sewage and other systems2213 | — | 3/4 |
| EuclidPrivate | Other electric power generation221119 | — | 4/17 |
| FortisBCPrivate | Natural gas distribution2212 | — | 4/5 |
And 22 more on the companies page.
Who works here
The occupations employed in Utilities, most concentrated in it first. The share is measured against the whole sector, not this industry — the published cross-tabulation stops there.
Tagged to this industry
Concentrated in this sectorA
These jobs are mostly done here. An operator in this industry is competing for them against others in the same industry, not against the whole economy.
And the jobs every business has
Found across at least fourteen of the twenty sectors. In a small establishment several of these are usually one person, or an outside provider.
Inside this industry
1 row sits directly beneath 22, and 20 in all once every level is counted. Each has a base report of its own.
| Code | Industry | Establishments · CA | What is known |
|---|---|---|---|
| 221 | Utilities | 1,416 | Utility Metering, Billing & Customer SystemsRenewable Energy & Solar Project SoftwareGrid Interconnection & Large-Load Power Intelligence+2 more |