Why Energy Nation Is Pivoting to Data Briefs

For the past four months, I’ve been building out Energy Nation as a lightweight, transparent, and auditable toolkit for major project triage. In that relatively short period of time, I have developed, trained, and tested the underlying risk engines, along with overlays that simulate counterfactual “what if” scenarios.

The repositories are now populated with reproducible code, downloadable datasets, journal-style papers, and technical notes. On top of that, dashboards are running both historical and predictive datasets, giving anyone the ability to explore the results directly.

But the reality is that the very people I envisioned benefiting from Energy Nation—strategic planners, market participants, and anyone with a professional or casual interest in major projects in Canada—are not spending their days combing through repositories, tinkering with dashboards, or wading through dense datasets. What they want is clarity, not code.

My Substack posts have helped tell the Energy Nation story so far, but the feedback is clear: long-form essays remain too research-heavy for time-pressed and nontechnical readers. One commenter described the experience as “a bit like long lining a canoe upstream through rapids.” I took that as a constructive reminder to keep things accessible, concise, and immediately relatable.

That said, several hard boundaries shape what Energy Nation can deliver. The Major Projects Inventory (MPI) dataset updates annually, not in real time. This isn’t election polling data or a quarterback’s game-day stats. There’s nothing meaningful to report week-to-week or month-to-month. Scraping websites or news feeds for project announcements could simulate real-time monitoring, but without a calibrated baseline it would be resource-intensive and speculative. We simply don’t know, for example, how a new power purchase agreement or impact benefit agreement would shift the underlying odds of a project’s success. Finally, building out software-as-a-service infrastructure or a staffed analytics shop is neither feasible nor desirable. If Energy Nation is going to continue, it must remain lightweight by design.

That’s why we’re shifting focus to one-minute Data Briefs, with the goal of releasing one per week starting next week. Each brief is data-driven, visually clear, and executive-friendly. Instead of overwhelming readers with sprawling dashboards, the briefs deliver a distilled package: a key insight from the modeling outputs, headline results anchored in auditable workflows and datasets, one or two visuals that tell the story at a glance, and a short interpretation with caveats because nuance matters.

This pivot isn’t about dumbing down the work. It reflects what I see as the realities of reader behaviour, communications norms, and available resources. The goal is to make sure insights actually reach the people who can use them. In short, the briefs will keep Energy Nation transparent but also make it accessible.

We’ve already started building the pipeline to deliver the one-minute Data Briefs. This includes standardizing the template (Key Insight → Metrics → Visuals → Interpretation → Notes), automating chart generation for speed and consistency, lining up core topics, and packaging the briefs into quarterly or annual digests. Substack will remain the delivery method, with briefs as the core deliverable, as well as the occasional long-form article.

The choice of topics will be guided not only by taste but also by current events, ensuring the briefs remain relevant and responsive. We are also experimenting with a side-by-side comparison feature, something in the spirit of Epic Rap Battles, to pit projects, policies, or scenarios against each other in a way that makes differences instantly clear.

Energy Nation has always been about clarity, rigour, and transparency. The pivot to Data Briefs doesn’t walk away from that; it doubles down on it. By putting insights into a format that planners and participants actually use, we can bridge the gap between open data and actionable intelligence.