CANSEC 2026: The Defence Energy Gap Nobody Owns
Ottawa, ON — May 29, 2026
CANSEC is Canada’s largest defence and security trade show — thousands of attendees, hundreds of exhibitors, held annually in Ottawa. SES CEO Rob Gorrie attended for the first time this year. What he found confirmed a market gap larger than the company had anticipated.
The question nobody was asking
The show floor at CANSEC 2026 was dense with autonomous systems capability — drones, remote sensing platforms, edge computing hardware. The technology on display was impressive. The operational thinking behind it was not always complete.
One question surfaced consistently in conversations with drone and remote sensing vendors: how do you repower your system at a remote site without a fuel supply chain? Most had assumed it was the military’s problem to solve. The military, it turned out, had assumed the vendors had figured it out.
Nobody owned it.
The gap
Drone and remote sensing vendors assumed field repowering was the military’s logistics problem. The military assumed the vendors had engineered a solution. The result: accelerating procurement of autonomous systems with an unresolved power dependency at the forward edge.
The procurement reaction
Gorrie spent time across two days with defence procurement leadership, DND civilian leadership, and defence innovation program leads. The reaction to the SES Platform was consistent.
“More than once, I watched someone look at the person standing next to them before saying anything,” Gorrie said. “The kind of look that means: where has this been, and why isn’t this part of our RFPs.”
One conversation with a defence innovation program lead ended with a commitment to revisit every active challenge his team was running and add a single question to any RFP touching autonomous systems and forward deployments: how is this going to be powered in the field?
What this means for SES
SES is pre-commercial. The company’s P1 prototype is in final assembly, with commercial launch targeted for January 2027. That timing aligns with the procurement cycle reality confirmed at CANSEC: defence relationships at the right level are now established, and the doors that open at launch are identified.
The SES Platform is a field-deployable CPV solar power system designed for exactly the operational environments where the gap was most visible at CANSEC — remote sites, forward deployments, and autonomous systems operations where diesel logistics are a vulnerability and grid power does not exist.
NCAGE registered. SAM listed. Prototype in final assembly. One year out.
SES is currently accepting expressions of interest from qualified defence, O&G, and industrial operators for its Q4 2026 pilot partner program.