Good afternoon, everyone.
My name is Marco Presutti, and I'm the Director General of the Electricity Resources Branch. I'm pleased to be here to share my perspective.
My branch is responsible for the electricity-related policy issues. We're also responsible for a number of federal programs that support the development of new energy infrastructure across Canada, including in the north.
One of our current areas of focus, on which we're working to support the government right now, is helping rural and remote communities reduce their dependency on diesel fuel and helping them to move toward newer and cleaner sources of electricity generation. To put the challenge into perspective, there are about 200 communities in Canada that are not connected to the North American electricity grid and are entirely dependent on diesel fuel for electricity. Most are located far from large population centres, of course. It can come at great expense to try to build transmission infrastructure to get electricity to these communities.
We're focused on these communities for a number of reasons. It's expensive to transport diesel fuel to them and to service them. It poses a number of risks to human health and the environment. We're talking about spills, greenhouse gases and air pollution from combustion. Also, the government has made a strong commitment to support indigenous communities. Two-thirds of the target communities here are indigenous. We know that energy projects can have a wider array of socio-economic benefits. Ownership of these assets can be a key part of self-determination.
Through budget 2017, the government launched a new program that's led by our department. It's called the clean energy for rural and remote communities program. It has about $220 million over six years to fund energy infrastructure projects that reduce diesel dependency in communities across Canada. It supports a number of federal priorities, including clean growth, climate change and indigenous reconciliation. We're not the only funding source. One of my colleagues has already talked about the others. The Arctic energy fund and the northern REACHE program are other important ones.
In terms of the program and where we're at, it's early days. We launched the program in the new year. Since then, we've received and reviewed about 130 project proposals. We've shortlisted 43 of them and we're considering them for funding. We're now conducting the due diligence to make sure we've picked the best projects across the country.
What I can tell you is that we've seen strong demand for the program. The program is oversubscribed. We have more proposals than we're able to fund. We're also very happy that 93% of the projects we're reviewing are targeting indigenous communities, and many of them are led by the communities themselves.
We're also happy about the types of new and innovative technologies that are being proposed. We're looking at demonstrations and deployments of small-scale hydro, biomass, wind and solar.
We have a continuous intake process for applications. The initial projects that we're funding are not the only projects. We're still looking at other projects. We have a small amount of funding, about 5% of the envelope, for community capacity. That's to ensure that communities that are less advanced, less prepared to present projects, have some funding to put their proposals together and work with us.
I'll keep it short. I'll conclude by saying again that we're very encouraged by the first wave of project proposals we've received. We're doing our homework to make sure they're solid. We know this is a long-term endeavour. The program is not going to eliminate diesel use in Canada—that's a much bigger challenge—but it's going to make an important contribution, a down payment, if you will.
Thank you.