Market Snapshot: Ten years of Market Snapshots, and evolving energy information needs
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Release date: 2024-10-16
Today the Canada Energy Regulator (CER) celebrates a milestone with its 400th Market Snapshot, and marks ten years since the first Market Snapshot was launched in 2014.
Market Snapshots are short, regularly published articles that provide fact-based analysis of the factors impacting Canada’s energy system. Over the last decade, Market Snapshots have become one of the CER’s flagship energy information products, together with Canada’s Energy Future, Provincial and Territorial Energy Profiles, Pipeline Profiles and Canadian energy market and trade statistics, among others.
The topics covered by Market Snapshots have evolved over the years, reflecting changes in Canada’s energy landscape and the energy information needs of our readers. Figure 1 below illustrates this evolution, showcasing the increasing importance of information and analysis related to the energy transition from 2015 to 2023. While Canadians still seek knowledge on energy production, demand, trade, infrastructure and pricing, interest in topics related to energy transition, energy policy, regulation and GHGs has led to these topics making up over half of our Market Snapshots in 2023, compared to just 13% in 2015.
Figure 1: Market Snapshot Topics Coverage by Year
Source and Description
Source: CER
Description: This interactive pie chart shows the changing topic coverage of Markets Snapshots over the last decade. The energy transition, energy policy, regulations and GHG categories have increased from 2015 to 2024.
Along with changes over the last decade in the topics we cover, we have also seen a significant increase in our readership. Views have grown over six-fold since publishing our first Market Snapshot on October 22, 2014, and now make up 27% of all energy information web traffic at the CER. We have also noticed new audiences—Market Snapshots are increasingly cited in online journal articles and academic papersFootnote 1. Other changes include an increasing interest in emerging technologies and analysis that helps Canadians make decisions on energy use at home or at work. In response to these changes, we have adapted—increasing the depth and technical information in these articles to provide helpful information with their needs in mind. Using the findings of a user research project conducted in 2023-24 the CER is further honing these articles for our audience.
Market snapshot coverage extends not only to the energy transition but also to a numerous other energy topics including fossil fuels, products, electricity, trade, and infrastructure. Figure 2 provides an interactive word cloud showcasing topics and commodities from the last ten years. Clicking on any work within the cloud will bring you to a list of related articles.
Figure 2: Word cloud of Market Snapshot topics and commodities 2014-2024
Source and Description
Source: CER
Description: This interactive dashboard shows a word cloud of Market Snapshot topics and commodity categories covered in the last ten years. Please click on any word in the word cloud to bring up a list of related articles and the commodities covered on that topic.
In accordance with its mandate, the CER is committed to providing relevant, unbiased energy-related information for Canadians that helps foster a better understanding of how Canada’s energy systems work and evolve. To this end, we are launching a series of polls over the next four weeks that will provide an opportunity to help us determine the Market Snapshot topics we cover.
We are always interested in hearing feedback from our users so send us yours at: snapshots@cer-rec.gc.ca. Or follow on socials:
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