Indigenous and Northern Affairs Committee on May 11th, 2010

[Bill Eggertson]

We're doing that, and reporting on regulations, good and bad, and what the trends are. Our newsletter was called TRENDS in Renewable Energies. We pick up what happens at the International Energy Agency. We pick up what happens at the U.S. Department of Energy that has an impact on Canada. We get a lot of the reports that analyze, from the Conference Board through to the C.D. Howe Institute. These are some of the recent ones we've done. We get the reports and we do the critical analysis of what this means for renewables in Canada.

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

You talked particularly about the use of solar, geothermal, and wind energy in the north. I was just thinking about those. What kinds of cost differences would you see in installing those renewable energies in the north versus in the south?

[Bill Eggertson]

If you can get the equipment up north, it's cheaper to install.

I lived in downtown Ottawa. We wanted to put in a geothermal loop before we moved out of the city. There wasn't a single driller who would come into the city with a drilling rig in order to install it. They were afraid of the city officials.

Up north it's far less of a problem. You do get some unique problems installing ground loops north of 60 if you're getting into permafrost issues, but there are many geothermal loops up there. Solar thermal goes above ground. You literally take up the metal racks, you take up the plastic coils and the glazing sheet, you use a wrench, and you put it into the ground. It stays there. It's there forever.

Wind turbines have a slight maintenance problem in cold weather. They now have heated blades for cold climates so that you no longer get icing on the blades.

Getting the technology up there, shipping it up, is frequently a problem, but you ship everything else up north of 60 and you use ice roads or barges or whatever.

Getting the labour up there is frequently a problem. Do you have to import southern labour? Can you train northern labour to do it?

Maintenance can be a problem, again, if you don't have the correct people up there to fix whatever problems occur.

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

You did touch a bit on the maintenance aspect, and in terms of these alternative energy forms, one of the questions I would have, particularly for the north, is about reliability. Obviously when you're up in the north in the middle of the night and something goes wrong...then what?

[Bill Eggertson]

Mistakes happen.

Twenty years ago, the technology was far more vulnerable or fragile than it is now. You ow have what is called a plug-and-play solar module. You can take it out of a suitcase, throw it up on your roof, connect it in, and it's ready to generate electricity. You need the inverters and a large number of other components.

In terms of reliability, for the inverters on my house, the mean time between failure is 150 years. The panels that I have on my roof are rated for 15 years at a 5% efficiency drop. If at any point in 15 years the efficiency drops more than 5%, I phone the dealer and tell them to swap it. They are very reliable.

Let's just take solar electric right now. They are rated for hail impact, so you can have big chunks of ice dropping on them. They're tested. Having the right amount of sun in the north can sometimes be a problem. It's not as good as it is in the south, but with solar thermal, if you're heating water.... Why do all Canadians in southern Canada with a swimming pool not have solar water heating for their pools? It's has the lowest cost, yet people put in gas heaters for their swimming pools. We've never understood it. We don't pretend to understand why northerners, who probably have more excuse for not going with renewables than southerners have....

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

If you're using solar north of 60--and of course there's quite a period of time when they don't have a bunch of sunlight--what is the recommended backup system in terms of providing heat and electricity?

[Bill Eggertson]

If your solar was for electricity, then you could use what Mr. Bevington is talking about, a backup generator. It could be a gas or diesel generator or it could be a wood-pellet generator. You don't need electricity between, say, 10 o'clock at night and seven o'clock in the morning, so you shut off the generator. You run it only in the dark parts of the winter when you need the electricity.

You can use wood generation. You could use small hydro, depending on how close you are. They're coming out with fuel cells, which we've argued is a renewable energy source as long as the hydrogen in the fuel cell is stacked from a renewable energy technology and not from fossil fuels, but that's a semantic issue that we have.

That's just for electricity. If it's for heat and you have highly insulated buildings, the heat that you are generating from a geothermal or solar thermal or biomass thermal source should be able to be retained in the house or the building for most of the day.

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

Okay, and if you--

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

That's about it, Mr. Payne. Believe it or not, we're at the end of our time. I'm sorry, Mr. Duncan; we will come back to you.

Members, I think we will have time for three more questions. We'll go to Mr. Russell. Then I think we have Mr. Duncan, and I have hands up from Mr. Clarke and Mr. Rickford as well. You can figure that out. Mr. Lévesque will have a short question as well.

Let's go to Mr. Russell. This is a five-minute round.

Mr. Russell, go ahead.

[Todd Russell, Liberal, Labrador, NL]

Thank you, Mr. Eggertson. It's good to have you with us this afternoon.

I must say some of the statistics you presented were quite illuminating, I suppose. The energy mix and what the energy is used for are similar in a northern context to a southern context, but you say we should all be looking toward using more renewables within that energy mix.

Should the federal government, which has primary responsibility at least in the territories, employ different strategies in terms of incorporating renewables in a northern energy mix, as opposed to some of the strategies that have been applied in the south? They don't always jibe, given geography, shipping issues, and things of that nature, so should we employ some different strategies in terms of encouraging people to move into the renewables, but more so in the north? Could you identify one or two barriers to the renewable energies that would be specific to the northern context?

I just want you to comment on the mining industry. It's had ups and down, but it's seeing some increase. There are many proposals on the table for various types of mining enterprises in the north. How do you see the renewables mix with the industrial sector, if you want to put it that way, such as the mining sector, as an example?

If you could answer those questions, I would appreciate it.

[Bill Eggertson]

As a first quick point, I hope the data from the Office of Energy Efficiency are accurate. You're right; I was very surprised at how well northern homes showed. It was not the stereotype I was expecting, but we've used the data for years, and we assume they are reasonably good. I couldn't crunch the commercial data because they group the territories with B.C., so that would have made it meaningless. I could only do the residential market for this. Anyway, I hope the data are correct; they're probably not wildly incorrect.

We've always tried to differentiate between the north and the south. We've never gone at it aggressively; we've always promoted a pan-Canadian approach, because it is Canada, and we hate getting into the debate we sometimes get with Alberta versus the non-energy provinces. We try to avoid that issue by simply saying it should be right for Canada. We have broken with our own policy on occasion to say “northern and remote”, so we group them together. We've never looked at north of 60 as a geographical border. To us, if you're away from the GTA, you're off the electrical grid. You've got the same problems in southern Pelee Island as you would up in Nunavut or anywhere else.

Should there be a differentiation? I think you unfortunately have to have a differentiation. I would not like it as a Canadian, but you have to.

Again, looking at the energy from an energy security point of view, as well as the GHG, the greenhouse gas emissions—I'm very much into climate change—if you can cut down a tonne of carbon anywhere, I say go for it. To me, it's a national priority that the federal government, like the provincial and municipal governments, should be heavily involved in.

And your third point was...?

[Todd Russell, Liberal, Labrador, NL]

What would be one or two of the real barriers?

[Bill Eggertson]

Oh, it was the barriers. Thank you.

[Todd Russell, Liberal, Labrador, NL]

Yes, and then I asked about the mining industry.

[Bill Eggertson]

Yes, then there was mining.

The biggest barriers for all renewables are cost or resource availability. Dispatchability means wind doesn't work at all if there's no wind. When people drive by the CNE in downtown Toronto, frequently the blades on the wind turbine are not turning. It becomes a bit of an embarrassment. It probably shouldn't have been placed there, because people say, “Look--it doesn't work.” In the north, you're right, during the winter you get very little solar insulation going in. You still get the wind.

Resource availability is a problem and the cost is a problem. I'm not aware of how much energy in the north is subsidized, directly and indirectly, but there is some type of subsidy, and if it is subsidized at all, it reduces the incentive, we can say, for that.

Very quickly, with reference to mining, the pulp and paper industry is, I think, the largest user of renewable energy in the world. I forget the amount of energy from our pulp and paper industry, but it's scads. Canada promotes the fact that they burn their own wood chips to generate electricity on site. They've already figured out how to do it. It's a no-brainer.

The mining industry is slightly different. Do what they did in Springhill, Nova Scotia: they flooded the coal mine and they use it as a geothermal heat source for the industrial park up above.

I'm not saying to flood the mine. Sorry, but--

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Russell.

Mr. Rickford, go ahead.

[Greg Rickford, Conservative, Kenora, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Eggertson, for a great presentation. I have some specific questions around renewable energy. I know you're going to become excited about giving the answers, but I want you to speak slowly, because some of the questions are around other parts of northern Canada that are just as remote as those of our friends, with the greatest of respect, who are north of 60.

In the Kenora riding I come from, kilometre for square kilometre we have a critical mass of people living in isolated communities. We are looking more seriously at all of our options besides just establishing hydro lines into some of those remote communities. This is serious subject matter, and I know that at the very least my colleague Mr. Lévesque has a similar riding, with some of the same challenges and considerations.

I want to resist going into geothermal. I think my first question would be this: which of the renewables—perhaps in a ranking, to the extent possible—pose the fewest barriers to being brought to an isolated community?

[Bill Eggertson]

The very quick, facile answer is—

[Greg Rickford, Conservative, Kenora, ON]

The very quick, facile, but slow answer is...yes?

[Bill Eggertson]

—solar thermal water heating.

[Greg Rickford, Conservative, Kenora, ON]

You say it's solar thermal...? Is it geothermal, you say?

[Bill Eggertson]

No, it's solar thermal. Just to make sure that all your colleagues on the committee understand, there are various types, but the easiest way is simply facing a board toward the sun, with pipes, and running water through them.

[Greg Rickford, Conservative, Kenora, ON]

We've heard about this at committee before, it seems to me.

[Bill Eggertson]

That is the simplest, cheapest, least-likely-to-have-a-problem technology to derive the greatest amount of energy for the work you put into it.

[Greg Rickford, Conservative, Kenora, ON]

I'm sorry; there's solar thermal; then, you said...what?