Thank you very much.
It's a very interesting question, because in Quebec we have two particular challenges. One is that our energy costs are far too low. It's interesting that the federal stimulus package doesn't easily address some of the local challenges we have on trying to bring forward geothermal and solar hot water to some form of equivalency that is necessary, given the fact that our electrical costs are so low.
At the moment, in order to try to get around that, we have some subsidy programs, but we find that the subsidy programs are what we call one-term subsidy programs. They actually help capital costs. They don't actually understand the long-term costs of running equipment related to district energy systems.
One of the models we tried at our Green Energy Benny Farm is to make enough profit and to hold onto enough money from not giving all the savings to our residents--which goes against the whole principle of affordable housing--to make sure we can do the long-term maintenance, have some risk management and some risk capital, in a certain sense, and make sure the whole system doesn't close down. We need some understanding that right now, particularly in Quebec, we sell the energy to the States at twice the cost, but locally we don't charge for it at the right cost. That right now is a big blockage.
Ontario is an example. You can sell solar energy, and the government will pay you about ten times what they'll pay us if we sell some extra energy to the grid in Quebec. One of our other products following Benny Farm will be a new sustainable community of about 3,000 or 4,000 units. We're trying to work with an organization out of England called BioRegional One Planet Living, which involves trying to live within your ecological footprint. We almost have to start buying energy from Ontario in order to work on our project in Quebec. I think that highlights one of the problems we have at the moment.
It's actually an ethical question. I think Alex very clearly stated that we should be looking at the fact that every time we use a kilowatt of electricity for heating, we're missing the opportunity to displace coal to our neighbours to the south, and even to the west, because even in Ontario there's a cocktail formula that's not pure on electricity. In Quebec, technically speaking, we only have nine grams of carbon in one tonne of energy. That's really a problem, and the package didn't seem to address that issue.