As was mentioned, my name is Andrew Robinson, and I am the executive director of the Arctic Energy Alliance. I grew up in Makkovik, in Labrador, which means I've been living in the north for most of my life.
I've been with the Arctic Energy Alliance for the last five years, the last two years as the director. We are a small, non-profit organization that gets most of its money from the territorial government. We have a vision that the NWT will become a leader in sustainable energy use. Our budget right now is around $2.5 million a year, so that gives you an idea of who we are.
I'm going to talk about working with people who live here. A lot of economic development focuses on big projects, which end up bringing in mostly people who live somewhere else. But our mandate is to focus on people who live here, so that's what I'm going to concentrate on.
Our mandate is also to look at energy costs and the environmental impacts of the energy use. So we look at how people heat their homes, how they heat their businesses, how they get the power to keep their lights on, and how they can move from A to B without affecting the environment too much or spending more than they can afford.
There is a high cost of doing business in the north. It is related to the high cost of heating oil, diesel, and gasoline. Down south you have a natural gas grid, which has relatively cheap heating energy in it, or you have cheap electricity. We don't have that. We're all on imported oil, and that makes things expensive.
It's the same with electricity. The costs here are much higher than they are anywhere else. This is related to the high cost of fuel, plus what you call economies of scale. Small communities have to pay for large numbers of generators to cover a small population. You end up having to pay a lot per person.
One of the biggest issues we look at now is climate change. When we started as an organization, our focus was on the cost of energy. Now it's on climate change, because we see it as becoming a bigger issue than the high costs. With the exception of Yellowknife, most of the Northwest Territories is built on ice. I don't know if you've ever been to Tuktoyaktuk, but there's a community freezer under the ground where they store frozen things. They can do that because it's ice. When you're down there, you can shine a light and see that the ground, the earth, is this much ice and this much dirt and then another layer of this much ice and that much dirt. It makes a nice pattern when you shine a flashlight into it, but it's ice. Tuktoyaktuk is built on ice, and so is most of the Northwest Territories.
When you look into the future, which is part of what we're mandated to do, you can see that with climate change the north is going to melt, and so is the ice that most of the north is built on. This is going to have a huge impact on the cost of business, the cost of living. You can imagine what happens when the ice melts under a tank farm. It's going to tip over or break and you're going to have a massive problem trying to clean it up. It's already happening. We've seen it with sewage lagoons, roads, airports, houses. Things are starting to tip over, and it's destroying the infrastructure. Whatever you do, when you invest in business, you're going to have to deal with that in the north.
These are the issues that I see, and we've tried to come up with some solutions. It's interesting, the Northwest Territories is leading the way in a lot of things. It would be a good idea to invest more in energy-efficient infrastructure. Too often we see things that have been built with a short timeframe in mind. You build something fast now because it's needed now. As an organization, we come in and deal with poorly built buildings and infrastructure that is not energy efficient and costs a lot to operate. When building infrastructure, it's important to take the time and spend the money to build for the long term. It's important to remember that the people who live in the place are going to have to pay for operating the equipment or infrastructure.
It's the same for the climate change that I mentioned. We're going to have to look at investing and building for an unknown future. Again, whatever infrastructure, whatever project is going to be built.... Climate change is not going to make this place a warm, sunny, happy place that's nicer to live in than it was before. It's going to be a wet, muddy mess, because everything is going to melt and you'll end up with mud. You're going to be trying to build in mud. That is going to be a challenge. We have to start to think about that if we're going to be doing projects in the north. How are we going to build on unstable ground as it is disappearing?
Likewise, as the others mentioned, in terms of the kind of stuff we're talking about, building basic infrastructure on the ground, the local people can do that. We don't need to import a lot of high-skilled people. We do need to invest in local skills, trades--and university education--but for local people. I think we do see that happening.
One example is that the housing corporation here has now adopted the EGH 80 standard for all new housing. They've also committed to bringing existing housing up to that standard, and that's excellent. Right now they're investing in new housing that's built well, and they're doing it with local people so much that most construction companies that we've seen are extremely busy.
There's a similar thing that's quite interesting. I don't know if you know this, but in North America, Yellowknife is the capital in using wood pellets for heating commercial buildings. There's nowhere else in North America that has this number of units. Again, that's credited to the Government of the Northwest Territories. They've started to switch to using wood pellets that come from northern Alberta to heat.
They're cheaper than heating oil. They're much less environmentally damaging if you have a spill. They're considered carbon neutral. They're basically made out of waste sawdust, so they don't have a climate impact. Here you have the north showing the rest of the country that it is possible to build an infrastructure that doesn't use fossil fuels, and it is cheaper to run.