Hydro One Limited opens Orillia warehouse, completes C$120M facilities build
The 120,000-square-foot hub consolidates stock from Barrie; the Oct. 7 opening notice gives no Orillia rate-base allocation.
Ines Halvorsen
On Oct. 7, a 120,000-square-foot provincial warehouse opened in Orillia, completing an approximately C$120 million facilities investment by Hydro One Limited TSEH, according to a company release carried by OrilliaMatters. The C$120 million covers the warehouse and a regional operations centre, rather than the warehouse alone. A 2023 Hydro One announcement described both buildings as part of an agreement with the City of Orillia to build three facilities, without stating a term.
The opening completes the construction milestone the company laid out when it broke ground in September 2023. Hydro One initially expected the operations centre to be operating by March 2025 and the warehouse by May 2025; its current account says the operations centre opened in March 2026 and the warehouse on Oct. 7. Those dates put the two openings after the earlier schedule, although the release does not assign a cost to the interval.
For shareholders, the C$120 million is a combined investment figure in the opening notice, not a stated addition to regulated rate base in that notice. Neither the opening notice nor the 2023 announcement allocates the spending between the buildings, or identifies the amount entered into transmission or distribution rate base. The February 2026 results likewise give no Orillia building-level allocation, so the three cited documents do not support a warehouse rate-base estimate.
The warehouse sits beside the regional operations centre and consolidates inventory previously held in Barrie, according to the opening notice. Hydro One said vertical lifts nearly double storage capacity. The facility holds equipment and materials for maintenance, storm response and grid construction across Ontario.
Warehouse Consolidates Provincial Supply Operations
Hydro One said the Orillia location now houses its provincial warehouse, regional operations centre and grid control centre. About 250 people work across the three facilities in grid operations, distribution lines, forestry, engineering, supply chain and logistics, the opening notice said. The headcount applies to the group of sites, not solely to jobs added by the warehouse.
"A strong supply chain starts with investing in the infrastructure, people and partnerships that keep our province moving," Lindsay Zylstra, Hydro One's vice-president of supply chain, said in the opening notice.
The company's 2023 plan specified a 29,000-square-foot regional operations centre for line and electrical maintainers and a 120,000-square-foot warehouse for materials used in grid work and outage response. The earlier announcement also said the buildings would sit near the grid control centre. That control centre is part of the Orillia group, but the C$120 million figure disclosed in the opening notice is for the two newer buildings.
Hydro One's February 2026 results reported C$2.901 billion of assets placed in service during 2025. In 2024, the companywide total was C$2.463 billion. Those additions are an accounting measure distinct from the Orillia construction total. The results attributed part of annual revenue growth to rates approved by the Ontario Energy Board, but gave no separate Orillia rate-base amount.
The Oct. 7 notice is the last dated Orillia milestone in the three documents cited here. It gives no date for a building-level cost allocation or rate-base disclosure, which investors would need to calculate the warehouse's regulated contribution.
