Environment Committee on Oct. 4th, 2022

[Monique Pauzé, Bloc, Repentigny, QC]

A researcher and academic who testified, among other things, about the efficiency of energy-efficient buildings reminded us of the absolutely colossal amount of funding that Canada has doled out to oil and gas since the 1970s. She believes this trend needs to be reversed as soon as possible. Excluding the 400-some technologies identified in the ETP Clean Energy Technology Guide, this lady stated that 38 of these technologies were ready to be brought to market. With proper support, they could be scaled up immediately.

If you had to select some clean technologies to prioritize in the development of policies and programs, which would they be?

[Natalie Giglio]

That's a big question. I would say that carbon utilization as an entire industry, where you take that CO2 and turn it into value-added products.... It can go into concrete, fertilizers, chemicals, beyond just infrastructure. There are many companies out there that have great ideas and need the platform to bring CO2 into those valuable products.

[Monique Pauzé, Bloc, Repentigny, QC]

How much time do I have left, Mr. Chair?

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

You have 40 seconds left.

[Monique Pauzé, Bloc, Repentigny, QC]

I'll make another brief comment, then.

If we redirected funds to renewable energies and energy efficiency, spending in the area is liable to increase 100-fold overnight. Obviously, I'm basing this comparison on what's been invested in fossil fuels.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you very much.

Ms. Collins, the floor is yours.

[Laurel Collins, NDP, Victoria, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

My first question is for Dr. McPherson.

The importance of our electricity grids is something we've heard about from a number of witnesses. We need to move toward electrification to reduce our emissions. You identified interprovincial grid connections as a key piece of this. You spoke a bit about the role the federal government can play. The American Inflation Reduction Act has been mentioned a number of times today. The U.S. is investing billions in renewables, grid infrastructure, and storage.

In some ways, it feels like Canada is positioned really well, with abundant non-emitting sources, albeit in different regions, but it feels like we're falling behind. It feels like grid connections aren't moving forward as quickly as we'd like to see.

Can you talk a bit more about what you think federal leadership would look like, in terms of both the scale of funding and working with the provinces and indigenous governments?

[Dr. Madeleine McPherson]

That's exactly right. We're positioned really well in many ways. Many of our provinces are already largely decarbonized. In some ways, we're ahead of other jurisdictions that are still working on decarbonizing their power systems. At the same time, we obviously have provinces that still depend a lot on fossil energy, or fossil sources, for electricity. What we really need at this point is to be strategic about using the assets that we already have to help decarbonize the power systems in the provinces that really need to get there.

Coming back to Brian's point on EVs, and some of the other conversations that we've been having around electrification, it really only works when our power system is decarbonized. There aren't a lot of carbon benefits, or decarbonization benefits, from driving an EV charged on a power system that is really fossil-intensive. At the same time, many of those provinces that have fossil-intensive grids have really excellent wind resources. Again, we're kind of lucky in that way.

It's a question of getting those grids off fossil fuels first, which means a lot of wind deployment—other technologies, too, but a lot of wind deployment. The variability of operating that grid really can be helped by transmission linkages with the other provinces.

Federal leadership in that space really looks like helping the provinces talk to one another to really figure out how to have that different rate structure between different provinces. Some are vertically integrated, and others are open markets. A lot of discussions need to happen to help get the provinces to do that interprovincial transmission connection. The federal government could play a role in helping to have those conversations and bringing the provinces together to do that.

[Laurel Collins, NDP, Victoria, BC]

Currently, the rate of growth for renewables in Canada is among the lowest in the G20. It seems like you're saying that regardless of the energy mix, as we move forward, our electrical grids are going to be a key part of reaching our targets.

Do you have a sense of the scale of investment that you would like to see from the federal government in order to support both our move toward renewables, wind power, and others, and this critical piece of building out our transmission lines and interprovincial grid connections?

[Dr. Madeleine McPherson]

Yes. The highest rate of renewable deployment that we've seen in Canada is about 10 gigawatts. That happened between about 2011 and 2015. That was sort of our record for wind and solar deployments. Moving forward, what we'll need to see, on average, is about 50 gigawatts, or about a fivefold increase, in addition to previous deployment levels.

The good news is that wind—and to a lesser extent solar, but wind in particular—is already competitive in market forces. Private investors are already doing a lot of the investment in that, so I think signalling, as far as the deployment of wind goes.... The price on carbon really helps to make wind more competitive, but I think de-risking those investments and making the permitting processes for those investments, particularly in wind...would be really helpful.

I think what we're going to see is that as soon as those provinces get to 30% or 40% penetration of wind on their systems—if we look at other jurisdictions—they're going to start running into operational issues around variability. That's really where that transmission interconnection piece comes into play. The reason I'm pushing more on the transmission piece right now is that we're seeing that this will be an issue on the horizon.

The process of building interprovincial transmission is just so time-consuming, especially if we want to do it properly and if we want to do it in collaboration with indigenous communities. It's a lengthy process. That's why we really have to start on that now.

[Laurel Collins, NDP, Victoria, BC]

Thank you so much.

How much time do I have, Chair?

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Your time is essentially up. You have about 10 seconds.

[Laurel Collins, NDP, Victoria, BC]

Okay.

It just seems that those interprovincial connections are critical to reducing Canada's emissions and keeping the global temperature rise below 1.5°C.

Thanks so much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

Mr. Carrie, you have five minutes, please.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I'd like to start with Mr. Kingston.

Coming from Oshawa, I know the auto industry is hugely important for my community. There was a disappointment with some witnesses last week; we had some great Canadian innovation, but they basically went south of the border because there were no programs to support their particular companies here in Canada.

I want to get back to this whole idea of charging stations. You mentioned that, using the best estimates that are out there with the world leaders, we would need about four million charging stations. That doesn't take into account that it's actually pretty cold here. I've driven electric vehicles before, and sometimes at this time of year it starts to go down. So it may be even more, but even with those numbers, I estimate—and I'm not the greatest at math—that we need only 3,997,500 more charging stations to meet our goals, and we've been doing this for five or six years.

Have you seen any government plans that will allow us to meet those goals in the time frame that the government has actually set for industry?

[Brian Kingston]

As it stands right now, no, I haven't. The government's current plan is to build 84,500 chargers by 2027. Only 2,500 are operational. At the current rate of build and deployment, it seems highly unlikely to me that we'll get to that 84,000 target by 2027.

If you consider a fully electrified fleet, if we hit those targets 100% by 2035, that's nearly 39 million vehicles on the road by 2050. That's when you're going to require, if you use the 10:1 ratio, four million public chargers. That doesn't even include the estimate for multi-unit residential chargers, which are critically important to this. People who live in apartments and condo towers will need to be able to charge at home. The government's own assessment is estimating 5.6 million MURB ports, and I am not aware of any plans to build that out. That's going to be hugely expensive. It's possible, but it's a big lift.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

Well, that's disappointing to hear. As I said, we had some bad news last week.

Listen, you guys are numbers guys. How much would four million charging stations cost at today's estimates?

[Brian Kingston]

I wish I could give you a good figure for that, but I don't have one. What I can give you is the estimate that NRCan has put forward to build the public charging network that it thinks we need, which I would argue is a little bit too small. They're estimating that it will cost $20 billion over the next three decades to build that number of public chargers. My estimate is four times that. Using very back-of-the-envelope math here, we're talking about $80 billion.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

I'm thinking we might need a few more. I'd go five times, so I'm thinking maybe $100 billion for that. I just wonder who's going to pay for that with no plan.

We talked a bit about the grid. We've heard witnesses talk to us a little about the grid. I live in Oshawa, Ontario. There are some challenges with the grid. We've heard that in some communities you can plug in 10 of these electric cars and it will cause a brownout.

Do you have any idea what it would cost to upgrade our grid? Let's just look at Ontario. Do you guys have any numbers for us? We need to plan these things as a responsible government.

[Brian Kingston]

Unfortunately, we don't, and this has been something that we have been asking for. All of the local distribution companies are developing plans to accommodate more electrification, but as far as we're aware, nobody has pulled together a macro estimate for Ontario or for the broader Canadian economy of what we will require in every single jurisdiction to accommodate more vehicles.

It's safe to say that it's going to be in the billions, but there's no transparency or clarity on what that looks like or who's planning for that build-out to accommodate a higher uptake of EVs, and that's critical. We can build all the public charging ports we want, but if we don't have the transmission lines and the generation capacity, we'll be in a difficult position.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

Yes, I can see that.

We had some ideas from witnesses that I thought were good ideas. One of them was that the government adopt a procurement process that would support different industries.

Do you know of a federal government plan right now that would assist the industry? In other words, does the federal government buy a lot of electric cars right now? If it does not, does it have something to do with there not being enough charging stations to plug these into to get the work done?

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

You have 10 seconds, Mr. Kingston.

[Brian Kingston]

We've been asking the government to be a leader in this and to procure more electric vehicles if it wants the Canadian public to follow suit, so we'd like to see more.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

Yes, that makes sense.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Mr. Duguid, you have the floor.