I'm glad you raised the question, because often when we're discussing renewable energy, we just focus on the financial side. It's easy to lose sight I think of other dimensions that are important.
Certainly, in some of these technologies, getting proper standards developed so that they can be certified can be very important. I know through the REDI program.... We haven't talked much about geothermal; I'll give an example of the geothermal industry today.
We have a partnership arrangement with the Canadian Geo-Exchange Coalition, which is an organization of five utilities. Actually, this is an industry that had large subsidies thrown at it by provincial governments in the 1980s in Ontario. There was a very bad experience with some shoddy systems being installed and poorly trained individuals, so the organization is determined to do it right this time. With help from the federal government, I think we invested about $4 million and the utilities invested $7 million. We've been working on trying to develop proper training programs and a system of certification so that consumers will have confidence that the systems they install will work properly.
So I think it's important as we consider various barriers in the way of renewable energy technology that we don't lose sight of some of the non-financial barriers that really have to be addressed. We need properly trained people. We need consumers to have confidence in the technologies, and they need to work well.
The worst thing we could do is throw a bunch of money at technologies and then have them.... Particularly, we're talking about the residential sector for solar. If you have a bunch of homeowners who are encouraged by government incentives to install systems that don't work that well, it would create some real problems down the road. So I think it's important that we continue to work on some of those institutional, training, and standards barriers.