Thank you for the question.
I think you're referring to a combined heat and power initiative that's under way with the Saskatchewan Research Council. One of my member companies is SaskEnergy, and they're one of the key funders of that initiative. Another company, SaskPower, the electrical generation and transmission and distribution company in Saskatchewan, is also involved as a key funder. NRCan is the third funder of that initiative.
The technology that is coming forward is for micro combined heat and power, which is an incredibly efficient technology, allowing for the better use of natural gas as a resource and allowing for the offsetting of potentially significant amounts of electrical generation in the province of Saskatchewan as this technology moves forward. It's early days. It requires a lot of investment to ensure that the technology can be developed properly, to ensure that deployment applications can be tested properly to see if they in fact will work in the micro applications. This requires resources. NRCan is at the table now. As this initiative moves forward, more resources are likely to be required.
I mentioned our ATI initiative. The reason for that initiative is to be able to pull resources in order to proceed with efforts to deploy this kind of technology. We believe the Government of Canada has a vested interest in being at the table for those sorts of efforts.
Many questions today have been around the challenges of balancing priorities and how as a committee you come forward with specific recommendations. You obviously have public policy objectives you are trying to meet. I would argue that some of those objectives are the delivery of environmental benefits, including reduced emissions; driving innovation, in order to see Canada be a leader in technology; and driving productivity. Initiatives like this combined heat and power program can actually deliver on all three.