Natural Resources committee  I would just add that I think if you try to build anything these days, you're going to find opposition. It seems to be that society's turning that way. One cure for that--and again I refer back to the green energy act that was just introduced--is to set out to meet certain setba

Natural Resources committee  On the gas side, currently we do have interruptible rate schemes. A customer can contract for a firm supply, or some portion of that firm can in fact be interruptible on four hours' notice. They would actually load-shut, but they know what they're doing. They're sophisticated cus

Natural Resources committee  I think it'll vary. We have 650-megawatt combined gas plants being built in Ontario, where you see partnerships, where you see OPG partner with TransCanada, for example, as investors in that. I think there's a variety of ways of doing that. In terms of regulated and monopolistic

Natural Resources committee  These are early days, and any time you launch into something as significant and new as this, there are entry barriers from a pure economics standpoint. We're looking for some seed money and some support so that investors like us who are investor-owned are actually willing to st

Natural Resources committee  If you look at the green energy bill, which was just introduced by Minister Smitherman a couple of weeks ago, it does actually envision that system. The Ontario Power Authority right now is looking at what will be the price signal, what will be the guarantee. So Ontario is defini

Natural Resources committee  I think the federal government has a key role in laying out a vision for the country. That vision is important. You can look to other jurisdictions around the world--Sweden, Germany, Japan--who have actually laid out visions about how the country should look in the future from th

Natural Resources committee  Thank you. As I said, I think we have significant momentum with Quest, so any support of Quest would be very helpful. But I think the key is demonstrations of technology. The decision we made on the three buildings, by the way, is to not deploy the same technology in every bu

Natural Resources committee  It is unclear to us, with the funding that has been set aside, whether community energy integration systems would actually qualify for some of the funding that is available through the stimulus package. They tend to talk about renewables, but renewables tend to focus only on larg

Natural Resources committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and thank you very much for the opportunity to be in front of you. I'm very pleased to be here representing Union Gas Limited. We are Canada's largest integrated transmission, storage, and distribution natural gas utility. We serve over 1.3 millio