Good afternoon.
First I would like to thank the chair and the committee members for the invitation to Siemens to testify on this very important topic.
My name is Faisal Kazi. I am the CEO of Siemens Canada. Today I have with me Mr. Rocco Delvecchio, the vice-president of government affairs, and Theresa Cooke, the vice-president of business development for Siemens Canada. Theresa is specifically responsible for developing our e-mobility business, so her participation is very relevant here.
For those who don't know, Siemens is one of the largest engineering and technology companies. We operate in more than 190 countries. We have been in Canada since 1912 providing solutions in almost all Canadian sectors in the fields of electrification, automation and digitalization. Our affiliates and Siemens employ around 5,000 people across Canada in more than 40 offices.
Canada has a very ambitious and challenging goal to be a net-zero economy by 2050. In this context, we must say that the greening or the decarbonization of the transportation system will play a very important role as the emissions from this sector are roughly one quarter of the total of Canadian greenhouse gas emissions. Thus, the move to zero-emissions vehicles is central to greening the transportation sector. We believe that hydrogen fuel vehicles may play a role in the long term, but the most viable short-term option comes from electrification.
To electrify the transportation sector effectively, we would need to take a complete system perspective and ensure that all required value-chain elements scale up together. In our briefing, we have outlined the value chain for delivering transportation, how it is impacted by electrification and the top challenges that need to be addressed in order to bring electrification of transportation to scale in Canada.
I'd like to take this opportunity to highlight a few of the elements that I feel are important. The first one is the charging infrastructure. The charging infrastructure and the electrical infrastructure behind the charging infrastructure must be a forethought and not an afterthought. We believe we must put in place a robust, efficient and intelligent charging infrastructure, both to ensure the reliability of the critical transportation systems but also to optimize the business cases. This is extremely important when it comes to large-scale fleet electrification like public transit or trucking fleets. We welcome the leadership of the Canada Infrastructure Bank for putting mechanisms in place to help finance this critical component.
The second element I'd like to raise is about making this infrastructure intelligent. We believe that charging infrastructure must be intelligent, which means it has to be connected to platforms that allow them to be optimized and integrated into the grid, what we call a smart grid. Dynamic optimization of charging will enable both fleet owners and electrical utilities to manage and distribute loads, charge in off-peak hours and lower the overall cost of electrification.
To maximize efficiency and reliability, charging depots must be optimized as connected grid energy assets. The depots can be electrified using microgrids that are powered by distributed renewable energy systems such as solar panels and batteries. Such an approach will not only reduce the overall costs in the system, but the depots can really act as resiliency blocks in the electric grid, which is becoming increasingly vulnerable as weather-related events like ice storms are increasing.
In order to have intelligent infrastructure, everything has to be connected. Like all connected systems, cybersecurity will play a very important role to ensure the integrity and the security of the operations but also to ensure that the transactions are also secured. This would be a key element to ensure that all these transactions, operational transactions and financial transactions, are secured.