Environment Committee on Dec. 12th, 2017

[Frank DesRosiers]

Yes. I think the proper system—

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

What are we doing to look at other new ways of running a grid, perhaps a grid that's not based on wires?

[Frank DesRosiers]

The principal issue that the utilities are facing is having to deal with intermittent power that comes along on the power grid: wind, solar, or other sources of power that come and go, depending on the wind or solar intensity. That creates some major issues when you're getting to a level of penetration that is rising and rising.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

I totally get that, but are we looking at ways to distribute electricity through the grid other than conventional ways of doing that with copper wire, aluminum wire, or whatever?

[Frank DesRosiers]

We don't invest a whole lot into R and D for transmission grids. Canada is already fairly advanced in this area.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

We're advanced in terms of the fact that we have a grid set up and a network, but if, for example, the grid idea started to shift away from utilizing just copper and aluminum wiring, then we might need to start changing our ways of looking at that as well. Isn't that right?

[Frank DesRosiers]

I'd say the principal focus is more on smart grid and energy storage right now, and less so on—

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

With regard to energy storage....

[Frank DesRosiers]

—the wires and stuff.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

I'm sorry for cutting you off.

[Frank DesRosiers]

That's fine.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

With regard to energy storage, I think that's very important, and I'm glad to see that there is investment there.

That storage is as it relates to the grid itself, right? Are we doing any investing as it relates to storage that is then used in electric vehicles, for example?

[Frank DesRosiers]

The two are very much linked. We are looking at different storage solutions, whether they happen to be very short term—literally seconds—or hours, or days, or even months because we have seasonal storage solutions. Canada is actually one of the world leaders in this area.

It connects also to the issue of usage. For instance, when you're looking to have thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of electric vehicles on the grid, it will undoubtedly create pressure on the system, so that's where a lot of our dollars currently are going. The utilities are working closely with us to try to figure out what that would mean across the entire system.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Does some of the investment that we're doing end up in building technologies that are used in electric vehicles?

[Frank DesRosiers]

Less so in the vehicles themselves—

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

It's more on the grid side.

[Frank DesRosiers]

We gather the data. For instance, we've been working with FleetCarma, a company based in Ontario, on a project whereby we now have the ability to collect data for individual cars, and we're able to analyze it and see the impact across the entire grid. That's the kind of thing we would be doing.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Thanks.

I also see that when it comes to vehicle technology there's $182 million specifically to demonstrate and deploy infrastructure that supports charging and the other types of vehicles that lower emissions. Does that mean electric charging stations everywhere?

[Frank DesRosiers]

Principally.

Both in budget 2016 where $62 million was announced and in budget 2017, there were measures to increase the amount of fast-charging infrastructure in developing new technologies to ensure faster charging but also charging solutions for, say, condo units. Not everybody lives in a separate house so we have to develop suitable solutions for that.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Yes.

On the building code side of things, I just moved into a brand new condo here in Ottawa that was finished this year. There are no electric charging stations in it. Why doesn't our national building code, which the Ontario building code is drawn from, talk to that specifically if we're going to be investing in this? We have a building built in 2016 and it has no electric charging.

[Joyce Henry]

I'll certainly take that comment back to the National Research Council and to my provincial and territorial counterparts and the experts who feed into that. The building code was updated and released in 2015.

The electric vehicle market is a very dynamic market right now, a really fast-approaching market. I'm not sure that would have been taken into account when they were doing the 2015 code.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Hopefully, we'll look at it more.

Linking the two topics that I brought up, one was storage and one was increasing electric charging stations. The two work against each other. If you figure out the storage problem, you're not going to need a lot of electric charging stations.

As a matter of fact, and perhaps you can comment on this, I've heard a lot about electric charging stations. The reason a lot of stores won't put them in their parking lots is that they don't anticipate that 10 or 15 years from now people are going to need them. All the charging you'll need to do will be done at home.

Why are we investing in electric charging stations and supporting the technology when the research shows it's not going to be needed? Is my information wrong?

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

Be very quick.

[Frank DesRosiers]

I don't know what the future is going to look like 10 years from now, as it is changing very rapidly. Based on our extensive interaction with the industry, with consumer associations, and surveys that we've seen, clearly the issue around range anxiety is a central preoccupation of consumers. They're concerned about the price of those cars, making sure they are affordable and reliable, but also that they are able to do a longer journey to visit family, friends, go to work, or whatever. Having a principal source of power in their home to recharge their cars seems to be the practice, based on the usage across North America and the world, but still having access to those remote charging—

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

I don't want to discourage you but I've been driving an electric car for 10 years, so I very much support it. I'm just trying to flesh out some of these things.

Thank you.