Natural Resources committee  I'm quite pleased to see that the automobile industry is meeting the challenge of making better batteries. This is, in my view, the future of advanced energy storage. Given the big market for the car, these batteries have been pushed past the limit we have known in the past. As

Natural Resources committee  If there are no longer any long-term incentives for renewable energy, we find it hard to accept that they exist for fossil fuels. We would like to go back to the federal ecoENERGY program. That provided 1¢ per kWh for 10 years. The sum of $1.5 billion was set aside for the progra

Natural Resources committee  I am sorry, I did not understand.

Natural Resources committee  I find them hard to accept, even if the energy is very profitable in the short term. Canadian experience at least shows that there is a pile of money to make with fossil fuel energy. As I have explained, renewable energy is very capital-intensive to start with. We find it hard to

Natural Resources committee  When research projects are being developed, it is important for us, because ultimately we buy the technologies in order to get them working. If a program helps to develop a technology and make it competitive, it helps us to be competitive in turn when we are looking for long-term

Natural Resources committee  Certainly. If Quebec or Canada were able to export technology, it could be available here at a lower price. The challenge for those companies is to get to a point, in terms of economies of scale, where they can be more competitive. Any program that would include the possibility o

Natural Resources committee  As I was trying to explain, our product generates no greenhouse gases. We are committed to having no environmental footprint, and we stick to that commitment. Our projects result in no net loss of habitat. If we use a portion of a river, we create habitat to make up for the impac

Natural Resources committee  I guess that hydro is probably where we can get the best energy for the money. The problem with hydro obviously now is that the best sites have been developed so if the prices of the turbines are still going to be lower and lower, I think that wind has very good potential to be a

Natural Resources committee  That's a complex question, but I'll answer it in terms of the experience we have with wind in Hydro-Québec. We have now close to 600 megawatts of wind in operation in Quebec, mainly in the Gaspé Peninsula. We have been working with Hydro-Québec to try to predict the amount of win

Natural Resources committee  Like I was saying, it's a little bit difficult because we're trying to be at the highest possible level of environmental sustainability. Just as an example, for the federal in B.C., there's no net loss of habitat. This means that we make sure that everything we're doing in buildi

Natural Resources committee  The biggest challenge, as I was saying, is capital-intensive. We have to have vision in order to be able to spend the capital. Those companies, if they cannot sell that technology to the end user, have a hard time committing to developing it in Canada. The problem Canada is faci

Natural Resources committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I would like to thank the committee for the opportunity to tell you about our organization and about renewable energy in Canada. Innergex has been active since 1990. We have been developing renewable energy for a little over 22 years. Also in 199