Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Honourable members, I will be sharing my presentation this afternoon with Dr. Bob Page, who is a senior adviser on climate change to TransAlta and was formerly our vice-president of sustainable development.
TransAlta firmly supports the purpose and intent of Bill C-30 to address greenhouse gases and other air emissions. We commend the efforts of the committee to develop effective environmental legislation. The results will have a great importance for the future of the Canadian electricity industry.
By way of introduction, TransAlta is Canada's largest investor-owned power generation and wholesale energy marketing company, with operations in a number of Canadian provinces and in the U.S., Mexico, and Australia. Our facilities operate with a diverse mix of fuels: coal, natural gas, wind, hydro, and geothermal. In Alberta we supply approximately 60% of the province's electricity requirement.
Today we wish to discuss our company's perspective on the implications of Bill C-30 and the challenges and opportunities for managing atmospheric emissions.
Let me start by saying that TransAlta believes it is possible, with a rational regulatory framework, to make major reductions in its emissions profile in the decades to come. We are excited about this opportunity from both an environmental and a competitive perspective. If we lay the right groundwork, starting with Bill C-30, the potential is enormous.
Our industry is highly capital-intensive, with large facilities having long lifespans. We provide an essential public service. Provincial governments are the regulators of our industry and in some cases the owners, but there is a diverse array of regulated and non-regulated structures across the nation.
In every jurisdiction, the historic charge to the electricity companies has been to provide secure, reliable, and low-cost electricity to meet growing demand. Canada is fortunate to have a diverse set of electricity-generation fuels, which vary regionally. This also means that some regions are more emissions-intensive than others.
For companies with fossil-fired assets, such as TransAlta, big changes are tied to capital stock turnover. This is my first key point. Our plants have economic lives of 40 to 50 years. These plants are normally very large and specifically designed for burning one type of fuel. They are relatively efficient for their inherent design. Today these plants have limited ability to reduce their fuel use and emissions or to convert to alternate fuels. In the near term, then, emission reductions from existing plants will be finite and small. However, real opportunities come when existing plants are retired, to be replaced with new technology.
As a specific example, TransAlta closed three units of its Wabamun plant between 2003 and 2004 and effectively replaced them with generation from the state-of-the-art Genesee 3 plant, resulting in an improvement of over 25% in greenhouse gas emissions per megawatt hour and a net absolute reduction of 600,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases per year.
I'd like to turn over to my colleague Bob Page.