Thank you, everybody, for inviting me. It's my second time here with you, as I was here last year in June.
Talking more specifically about solar energy in Canada, I think there's enormous potential. Most of don't think there's enormous potential for a northern country like ours, but there is and it is untapped. I would like to show you today what this potential is, what technologies are there, and whether we can do something to improve our situation relative to the rest of the world.
I was asked first to show you what I've done in the past personally. I'm an engineer, and I lived in Austria from 1991 to 1995. That led me to learn a lot more about solar energy because it is widespread over there. Following that passion, I did a master's degree, specializing in that very field of solar heating, at the University of Melbourne in Australia, and then I started my own company in 1998. That leads to about 15 years' experience on the ground for solar energy projects, mostly solar heating, and I will tell you a bit more about that later. Over the years I was also involved very much with the Canadian Solar Industry Association and the various committees of the department. We do work internationally as well in the Caribbean, Europe, and also in Africa.
I'll go on to the next slide. I don't know if you can count the number of zeroes followed by kilowatt hours, but if you look at the amount of solar energy we get on the planet in 20 minutes, the sun gives us as much energy as the whole world spends in 20 minutes. That's basically what it amounts to.
Is there an abundant resource there? There is. To tap into this abundant resource there are three technologies. Sometimes we tend to mix them up, but the first one is photovoltaics and it makes electricity. So that's one technology: “photo” for light and “voltaics” for producing electricity. Then there's water heating. Of course we can heat water, and also we can heat air with the sun. Basically, those are the three main technologies.
If you look at how it applies in Canada, here you have the energy needs of typical Canadian homes. You will see that most of the energy that we need from one ocean to the other, of course with variations, is for space heating. Again, it will vary from province to province, but it accounts for about 60%. This is where solar air heating or water heating can help. There is 22% now going to water heating in general. If you look at the bottom, you'll see that lighting and using computers and appliances accounts for about 20%. That's where each technology can fit it in: photovoltaics for making electricity, and solar space heating by water or air.
Specifically for space heating, do we have good conditions or not? The answer is yes, and it's climatic conditions that we're talking about. The graph is pretty clear, for example, when you look at numerous cities in the world and then Canadian cities. On the axis below, the further right you go the more heating needs there are and the colder it is. The further you go to the right, the more heat you need.
The axis, going up, shows winter radiation. The further up you go, the more sun there is in the winter. For example, in Helsinki, Oslo, and Moscow you can see they need a lot of heat, just like us in our major cities, but they don't have as much sun as we do. If you look at Flagstaff in Arizona, there is a lot of sun, but they don't need as much heat as we do.
The upper right-hand side of that square is basically where we stand. Toronto and Halifax are good, Montreal is even better, and Edmonton and Winnipeg are probably the best spots in the world for solar heating. I think that is something very important that we need to keep in mind, to have a worldwide perspective. We're probably, along with Siberia, the best place in the world to have solar heating.
If you look at the unit cost of each of these technologies.... It was meant to be a PowerPoint presentation, so you can see the little arrows coming down, but I think it's fairly clear the way it is. On the one side I put PV, for photovoltaics.
Sometimes we tend to mix up the technologies and say it is expensive. If you look at solar electricity, the current state is that it costs 30¢ per kilowatt hour to make electricity with solar. If you look at all the other technologies--SDHW, which is solar domestic hot water, solar pool heating, solar air ventilation, and passive solar--they're all under the 5¢-per-kilowatt-hour mark. That's using, of course, the method devised by Natural Resources Canada here to calculate the cost per kilowatt hour. They basically take all the energy produced by the collector over 20 years. The initial cost, divided by all the energy produced, gives you a cost per kilowatt hour. That's it. They put a maintenance cost on that, an interest rate, and all accounted for, that's what we come down to.
That is with current technologies with no subsidies. So the only barrier to the full expansion of solar technologies, basically, is the initial investment hurdle. That's all there is to it.
I often use the analogy, for example, of a major dam in Quebec. If we build a major dam and it costs $2 billion, the day the dam is finished, do we charge every single citizen in the province $15,000 to get the dam into operation? We don't. We just transfer the cost over the next decades, and what we get is a fixed cost per kilowatt hour.
Solar energy is the exact opposite. Customers who want to go for it have to basically pay up front and then benefit from the savings.
Surprisingly, some countries have really taken a major lead in the world, and not the sunniest countries, as you will see. This curve here shows the progression of solar domestic hot water systems in Austria and in Canada. Some of you may remember that in the 1980s there were generous subsidy programs in Canada, so basically an industry developed up until the mid-1980s, and I think the magnitude of this industry was an $800 million turnover in North America; the same curve of solar applies for the U.S. So we were ahead of European countries at the time. And then the subsidies just dried up.
But in countries like Austria, and Germany later on, they kept going. But you see the curve for Austria here, a country of 7.5 million people, with about two-thirds of the sunshine we have; it developed into a multi-billion dollar industry.
If you happen to go to Frankfurt in mid-March or to Intersolar in Freiburg, Germany, at the end of June, where we're going to be an exhibitor...you're talking about a major industry. We're talking about trade shows that look like the heating and cooling industry in North America. It's huge.
Most of us, I find, don't realize that it's become a multi-billion dollar industry over there. Countries like Austria, Germany, Sweden...France is now picking up. Spain is doing really well, and Italy is really going up.
If we look at another technology called photovoltaics--again, just giving information on the three technologies--and if you look at OECD countries, we rank at number 15 in Canada on a per capita financing basis for IEA, International Energy Agency, countries. The International Energy Agency is a branch of the OECD. This is where we stand on a per capita basis.
On the next slide, to tell you about the magnitude of what they do in Germany, if you go to solarbusiness.de you will get this graph, which does show that currently there are more people employed in the renewable energy industry in Germany than in what we call traditional or conventional energy sources, for example, coal and nuclear.
For solar and the rest of the renewable energy technologies, including wind, biomass, heat pumps, and things of that kind, there are about 130,000 people employed right now in Germany for this. If you go there, again you will see that we stand where they stood in 1975, before they really started building up a consciousness about adopting solar on a large scale. In terms of dissemination, of course, technology is available here, but in terms of proliferation, this is where we stand. We're about 30 years behind.
If you look at the economic benefits of having decentralized power with solar energy, you will realize that if you put collectors everywhere, that creates a lot of jobs per gigawatt hour or per energy unit produced. There are tables like that including all energy technologies. If you compare with nuclear, for example, or if you compare with hydro, or if you compare with thermal energy, you create about 4,000 jobs per 1,000 gigawatt hours of solar energy produced as opposed to 72, for instance, with nuclear. So there is a lot of job creation there, and they benefit from it a lot in Europe.
This is a map of the Canadian natural gas network, basically to show that from the source to the end-user there's a long distance, whereas if you look at this lower slide, if you put a solar collector on any given building it does produce heat on the spot; it's energy saved right on the spot. It doesn't need wires, power lines, pipelines; it's really where energy is used. To simply give you an idea, on each one of your homes you get as much solar energy as you will consume in a year. Simply calculate the number of kilowatt hours per square metre for your home times what you use--look at your electricity bill--you will find that there is as much as two to three times as much solar energy in your home than what you actually consume in gas or electricity.
Of course, that eases pressure on the network. It could be for the grid or gas lines. Each energy unit produced, of course, can be exported.
And if you look at national security issues, solar energy presents no danger. You don't need to fear an attack on one single central station whereby the whole country would be immobilized. Being decentralized, it's of course a major plus with respect to national security issues.
What I wish to raise as a conclusion is that basically, if you compare it to other countries and you compare even within the energy industry, there's chronic underfunding for solar energy. You can correct me if I am wrong--you probably know the numbers better than I do--but you're looking at maybe $40 million for the next four years in solar energy development. I think it's about $1.5 billion or $1.4 billion that we spend on helping the fossil fuel industry, basically also keeping in mind that it's also solar energy but stored in the planets for thousands or millions of years.
To create new technology and also for the proliferation of existing technologies, not only does research and development need to be done, but existing technologies also suffer from lack of incentives, and again, to overcome this initial investment barrier, Canada certainly could and should lead the world--especially for space heating, as I've tried to show you. It fits very well in a global renewable energy mix with wind power, geothermal energy, and with biomass as well. Solar fits in. It's easy to integrate. And of course, it's a sure bet to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Every single solar collector out there that does bring in 700 kilowatt hours per square metre is a net saving in greenhouse gas emissions.
I do hope this gives you some insight into promoting this rather unknown and untapped technology.
Thank you.
