Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you, everyone, for having us here today. Obviously this is a very important study, one that's near and dear to our hearts. I'm certainly happy to be here to talk about some of the questions you have on the supply side and where Canada ranks in these and where we might be going.
You have in front of you the slide presentation we have by way of background. The first slide or two are on SDTC. Suffice it to say SDTC is a commercialization instrument for clean energy and clean technologies. It focuses on all the primary economic sectors in terms of the types of technologies we invest in. So it's kind of a broad perspective on the technology scenario here in Canada and certainly as that applies internationally as well.
I'd like to draw your attention to slide 4, which really talks about the clean technology opportunity for Canada and about where some of this is going. As you see, today it's about a $1-trillion market. It's about as big as the defence market globally, and by 2020 it's looking to grow to about $3 trillion. Canada already has today a $10-billion opportunity in that, and it is looking to grow to $62 billion in revenues. So this sector we're calling clean technology and clean energy is a very substantive economic generator. A significant number of jobs are created out of this and a significant amount of economic growth is created out of this sector. There are 52,000 jobs today—and I'll get into that in a minute—which should grow to about 126,000 jobs by 2020. So clean energy is a very important topic.
I'm glad to see that this committee is diving into where the priorities need to be on the supply side and where Canada can really play a leadership role and continue to play a leadership role.
If we flip to slide 5, we'll look at what this means to employment in Canada. You'll see there are two graphs there. The first graph shows clean technology as a sector. If you collect all the clean technology and clean energy folks who are out there working, you'll see that this is a sizable sector. It's as big as the other primary economic sectors in Canada, and certainly as large as the aerospace sector itself. However, the jobs aren't just in a convenient single slice of the economy; they're actually distributed across it. The green bars or the light bars on the top of the graph on your right-hand side of slide five show how clean technology employment is spread out throughout oil and gas, throughout mining, throughout aerospace, and so on. So these are jobs throughout all the important economic sectors throughout Canada.
If we move to the opportunity spaces, to where Canada does well, it's really hard to pick a single sector. Naturally Canada has strengths across the board. I'm not here to be all-inclusive and to say we need to do everything. That message is there for sure. Canada has strength in a number of these sectors, but importantly, as you dive into these sectors, there are some areas of priority, some areas of focus where we can really shine above the rest of the global economy.
If I start with our aspirations to be a clean energy superpower, Canada and Canadians are already arguably in this space and have the aspirations to continue to be. SDTC's portfolio consists primarily of energy technologies. Eighty per cent of what we invest in touches on energy in one form or another, whether it's exploration, energy production, transportation efficiency, generation, or so forth. We work with the major players in those sectors—what we call “go-to-market consortia”—to realize these technologies. Without them you really don't have a channel to market. So those become a really important element in the overall innovation equation to ensure we have healthy relationships with the major players. You can see the types of folks we do work with. Their logos are at the bottom of the screen.
On slide 6, if we're looking into the traditional sectors, you'll see that efficiency and productivity is a theme. It's a theme that we keep pushing. Companies like Synodon have focused on a remote sensing technology for pipelines. Obviously natural gas pipelines are a very important topic. All pipelines seem to be very topical these days. Being able to detect the robustness, the security, and the integrity of these pipelines provides these operators with a social licence to operate. It provides them with a surety that these things will function. If they don't, we'll detect them early. Those are the types of enabling technologies that give Canada that advantage in being able to produce those traditional energies.
Similarly, there are companies like N-Solv partnering with Suncor for solvent-free bitumen extraction. There are certain types of solvents that reduce the amount of water consumption. The ability to reduce water for steam-free extraction is an important element if we want to improve the efficiency of the oil sands.
It is not a question of yes or no to oil sands. It's a question of where in the oil sands we can place the most emphasis to have the most impact, and these are some of the technologies that enable that to happen.
If we go to slide 9 on the new generation technologies, we're looking at different types of resources, different types of feedstocks such as waste and other renewables. This is an important area. Companies like Nexterra are partnering with large entities like General Electric, developing a distributed power-generation architecture based on biomass. As you get into the distribution side of your study in the next segment, you'll see that the choices between centralized and distributed become more and more prominent. These types of technologies enable those choices.
RER is looking at leveraging global river resources. These are things you can implement today to realize energy technologies in the market for global advantage and advantage back to Canada economically as well as the environmental benefits we get from using more renewables.
Finally, there are more examples of renewable energy dealing with grid reliability issues. These are predicated on the changing network we have out there right now for power generation as well as on the way we're going to change distribution, and so whether you're up in remote communities or you want to be off the grid or if you're right in the central part of the grid, as we start introducing more and more generation technologies, elements like grid control, grid stability, and storage, these are the technologies that become the prominent piece.
Just as a small example of where the priorities can play, if we look at the speakerphones that we have around the conference room today, the value in some of these speakerphones is not in how many of them you produce or in the microphone. It's actually in a little chip that does echo cancellation inside. So if we look at these renewable technologies in a very similar light, we're not necessarily looking for the whole big system. We are looking for the most benefit, the most revenue, the most profits that occur from the equivalent of that little echo-cancellation chip in each one of these sectors. That's what SDTC is trying to suss out of the market today. We are looking at the wind sector, the solar sector, the oil and gas sector—all of these—to find the key elements that are going to enable our social licence to operate.
Moving forward, we look at economic competitiveness. This is always a challenge, because as Canadian companies, we've been dealing with thousands of these companies, over 250 in our portfolio in consortium, which, when you add them all up, is into several hundreds of companies. They typically raise, on average, half to one-quarter as much money as do their counterparts globally when they develop new technologies. I use the American example here.
It is not the better technology that wins; it's the last dollar in. So what we really need to be sophisticated about is making sure we are attracting that last dollar in, through better management teams, more integrated packages, the ability to pick that echo-cancellation chip in each of these sectors. That will really enable Canada to be competitive in these sectors then.
If we look at the two programs we've created—these are on slide 13—you'll see that raising financing and getting customers, obviously, are the order of the day for any of the technologies, whether in traditional sectors or renewable sectors, whether you're dealing with the supply side or the distribution side. Being able to address those two elements is of prime concern for most of these entrepreneurial companies, and so SDTC has created two programs. One is technology adoption, which is rolling up the sleeves, partnering with the multinational firms that have access to the market, and the second one is enabling follow-on financing. As venture capital fades away into later- and later-stage rounds, the ability to track that capital becomes more and more difficult, so a focused effort on being able to track that private sector investment in these companies is important.
I will leave it at that.