Paul Marot, the Founder and President of Virelec, identified a growing demand in Canada's power industry for unbiased, fully-engineered protection and control systems in the early 1990's. The demand was fuelled by the release of digital IED's, which changed the landscape of power system secondary processes. The previous generations of electromechanical and static analogue devices were technologically limited and inflexible, reducing the users' choices in applying the devices and designing the system. The powerful new digital devices broke the rules; a single IED provided a number of applications and could be configured for different power system parameters. The selection process became simple, but the engineering process became far more complex to allow the IED's features to be utilized. Also, the traditional barriers between the protection, control and communication systems had to be overcome, because the IED's now provided all these functions within a single box. And on top of all these changes, the utility engineers still wanted to use different IED's for redundancy and security reasons, effectively limiting the IED vendors' ability to provide complete systems.

Virelec was created in 1995 to fill the gap, to provide complete power system protection and control systems based on the users' choice of IED, by providing the demanding engineering process and ensuring that all the benefits of the new technology were exploited in the systems. The company established its engineering and manufacturing facilities on Glen Erin Drive in Mississauga, and had to move to larger premises in 1999 and again in November 2006 to accommodate the growing number of staff and the increasing demand for panel assembly and wiring. Virelec also identified the need to provide SCADA systems as users saw the benefit of communicating with the IED's being installed in their substations. A VAR (value-added reseller) status was secured with the powerful GE Energy Systems platform in 2000. Virelec was also awarded VAR status by GE Multilin, primarily for the SR and UR ranges of protection relays.