Thank you, Danny.
Thank you, to the committee, for the chance to speak today.
I'll just quickly tell you about Énergie Verte Benny Farm, which is the not-for-profit, community-owned energy company that has grown out of the Benny Farm project.
We're currently working on three priorities right now. One of them is installing and operating the geothermal and solar system at Benny Farm and selling the energy back to the housing projects to generate income for our activities. We're also working with a number of other social housing groups and tourist facilities and individual homeowners to investigate the potential of implementing similar projects and strategies in their own developments. And our most recent program is a buyers group for homeowners to install solar hot water, which is a new initiative for renovating existing homes.
From this work we've identified a few potential recommendations that could help the committee. I'm trying to be a bit specific here, because these needs that we've found have sprung up directly from helping other housing projects.
Energy mapping of Canadian cities could be a very valuable project to engage in, something similar to the solar map that's been done by Natural Resources Canada to see the photovoltaic potential across the entire country. If we had a database of energy use within different buildings, which engineers could refer to quickly, you could identify the potential of cooperating with other buildings for integrated and district energy systems.
One of the biggest problems with green energy systems is the increased risk. Homeowners and developers take on 10% to 15% additional cost. With that comes an associated risk, and also the risk from the complexity. They need support from the design side as well as from the financial side, and also from the coordination and management side to manage that risk. It's not simply a financial question.
We're working with the provinces and cities on building codes. We have national guidelines for water treatment. When it comes to things like solar energy and other new technologies, the codes can become so complicated at the local level, they can prevent implementation of these kinds of technologies. If we had a national guideline, it would at least give a baseline for municipalities and provinces to work from. At that point they could come up with a streamlined approach.
Support to cover design premiums for integrated energy systems, such as the CBIP program, is a thing to consider.
I would say that another very important aspect is to consider all distributed energy generation as energy efficiency, and not as actual energy generation. It's an upfront cost of energy investment for a longer-term energy saving from these projects. This would help to get around some of the monopoly issues related to Hydro-Québec, as an example, whom we deal with in Montreal, and in other parts of the country as well. How support is given to these projects could look very different from what it does now.
Finally, I would just say that the distributed energy production put into building projects, such as solar, geothermal, and wind, should be considered alongside coal, natural gas, and oil energy production as the baseline, not alongside hydroelectricity. Because of the interconnectedness of the North American grid, it's actually fossil fuels they'll be replacing and not hydroelectricity.
Thank you very much.