Thank you very much for the question.
There are two worlds within wind: large wind and small wind.
Within large wind at this point, we do have tower manufacturers. There's one in Saskatoon and another one in Gaspé. We have blade manufacturers. We have nacelle manufacturers. Content requirements were put in place, particularly in Quebec, for example, which required that 60% of all the project expenses be incurred in Quebec.
That's generated quite a lot of the nuts and bolts of the machines, but Canada also has considerable expertise just in terms of integrating wind. In terms of providing services to the wind industry, we have some of the world's leading experts in wind resource assessment, forecasting, etc.
Canada is very well positioned. Right now, about 4,000 people work in the wind energy industry in Canada. So that's large wind. And generally, for the content that you'll find in any given Canadian project right now, about 30% to 35% of the turbines or the project cost is Canadian.
But what we've seen in the States recently is that they have an incentive that's equivalent to about three times more than what the ecoENERGY program is worth. That has driven an incredible growth. Over the last year in the United States, we saw the start-up of 51 new wind turbine manufacturing facilities. There now are about 50,000 or 60,000 people working in the wind industry, because industry responded to the long-term signal that the U.S. government gave them, and they started planting. They said, “The government's in this for the long haul and we're going to start putting in these facilities because we know that the turbines we put out are going to find a market in the United States for many years to come”.
In the world of small wind, things are quite different. As I mentioned, it's a little-known fact that half the world's manufacturers of these medium-sized wind turbines are Canadian. I think of it in the same way as how Denmark, 15 years ago, had a small niche in terms of making turbines. They really pushed on it. Fifteen years later, they are now one of the top world producers of large wind turbines.
I think we're at the same place now. We have manufacturers like Entegrity Wind in Charlottetown, AOC, Energie PGE, Wenvor, and WES Canada. We have some strong manufacturing capability. They're now exporting almost all of their turbines, because that's where the market is. If we can kick-start our domestic market, just as they did in Denmark 15 years ago, we think these manufacturers will be well positioned at a point 10 to 15 years from now, when the market booms and all of a sudden there's this incredible need to electrify remote communities for the almost half of the world's population that doesn't have electricity. There's a huge possibility there now.