I guess it's what you as a committee can do, but as a government as well. I'll give an example. Two or three years ago in Quebec, as part of the energy strategy, the Quebec government basically told the building managers in the public sector that whenever they were going to do a retrofit or build a new building, they would have to consider geo-exchange as one technology.
What I would say is that if we are to spend billions of dollars over the next five, ten, or twenty years in rebuilding the infrastructure or redeveloping brownfield areas in large communities, and smaller ones as well, maybe we should ask about or put some rules in place that would force municipalities to consider integrating technology to optimize the use of energy on their territory. That would certainly help in building better infrastructure.
One of the impacts of that is in regard to the payback period that we were talking about in the previous question. When you look at one technology on its own that has a ten-year payback and at another technology on its own that has a ten-year payback, maybe if you were to combine them, the payback would be down to seven or eight years. Maybe with another technology, it would go down to six years. I think there is something there to think about.
We should be trying to think about energy systems when we invest in infrastructure, rather than saying that you have to redevelop this when you're going to build a gas pipeline, for example. It's really a matter of looking at making the rules stricter, I would say, particularly in large urban areas where they can absorb those things.