Good afternoon, everyone.
I would like to start off by saying that I prefer to make my remarks in English this afternoon, in order to speed up the discussions with the other witnesses. However, I would be pleased to answer any questions you have in French.
My name is Martin Lee-Gosselin. I'm recently retired from Laval University, where I hold an honorary appointment. For the period of 2006-2010, I'm also visiting professor at Imperial College, London.
I come to you as one of a panel of researchers today, and I think we will deliver rather different messages from some of those you've heard before. My particular area of work is user behaviour, consumer behaviour, particularly in the context of planning and particularly transport planning. I've also been responsible in the first part of this decade for a large international program of research in 16 universities looking at user behaviour as an input to the simulation of land use, transport, telecommunications, equity, and sustainability relationships.
I'm particularly interested in understanding how people respond to new technologies and policies and deal with unfamiliar situations like energy shortages. Today, all of this comes together in decision support systems, and we address two types of vulnerability: the acute problem of energy supply perturbations, including price perturbations, and the chronic problem of unsustainable development and climate change. I would also mention that I've been involved in the organization of the QUEST workshops.
Now, energy efficiency is a tough one for decision-makers to handle, in part because the scientific evidence, like the community energy systems we're studying, is unfortunately siloed. We had a workshop here, a joint U.K.-Canada workshop, in 2006 to look at the scientific requirements to move integrated urban energy systems ahead. Although I would be happy to supply to you some results of that, they're rather technical; they have to do with data and modelling. I also wanted to mention that this group, some of the brightest minds involved in modelling energy use, said that we, the researchers, are not doing a very good job of telling the story to the decision-makers about what the results mean.
Somewhat in that spirit, I just want to share six thoughts with you, which you may want to dig deeper into if you wish, rather than try to replicate some of the other kinds of testimony you've received.
First, here's a thought on integration itself. The urban world looks pretty seamless to most of the people who live in it. When people are preoccupied with getting access to day care or to shops or health services or employment, the world looks pretty seamless to them, and they don't see the large number of professional interests that unfortunately are not talking to each other very well. But even though it looks fairly seamless to them, they, themselves, have their own silos. They don't see the connection necessarily, for example, between taking a car a short distance to go and buy a loaf of bread and turning down a thermostat. Increasingly, we hope these things will be on the radar in the same way for the consumer.
The second point is that we're often wondering whether communities are going to be willing to look at what happens in their community through an energy or sustainability lens. Probably most people won't do this in the abstract. But one of the things we have learned from research is that when you have multiple innovative opportunities such as are now being offered by energy efficient products and services, there may be an opportunity here to resonate with people who are ripe for change, who are ripe for a shift in the way they live their lives.
One of the things we've learned from longitudinal data is that when people change things, they often change a whole lot of things at once, and indeed there's some delay in changing things that to an external observer look like they ought to have been changed a while ago. So there may be some good news here for creating the kind of environment we're talking about with integrated urban energy systems.
My third point concerns the wisdom of the consumer. When electric cars were pronounced widely as being rejected by the consumer, what was being said was that most people recognized that electric cars, as they existed, particularly in the nineties, were not a very good substitute for conventional heat engine vehicles. They were a lot like microwave ovens, which were originally a flop because people expected they would displace a conventional product. Consumers, in their wisdom, thought of very creative ways to fit those battery electric vehicles, poor as they were, into their lives. We have some research on that from California and France.
I believe that Canadians will invent new ways of living in the face of energy efficiency opportunities, and we need to catch up with their thinking.
My fourth point is that it's really central to give feedback to people. We need to know how we're doing. The same technologies you've already heard about, which allow for smart grids and peak pricing--and by the way, I'm not just talking about peak electricity pricing, I'm talking about congestion pricing in vehicles--could eventually provide consumers with a one-stop balance sheet that reveals their household's recent and cumulative energy performance and cuts across the rather artificial boundary we have now between building energy use and vehicle energy use. This is particularly true, but not essentially true. It's not necessary that they have vehicles plugged in at home, but that sure would make it more interesting.
It's possible that this sort of information would be far more compelling to consumers than the calculation of payback periods. It could help them choose between different uses of energy. Similarly, communities need a synthesis of such balance sheets to know how they are doing.
My next to last point, and with all respect to one of the members who warned me that I shouldn't be asking for money, here are some priorities that from a decision support perspective I think are the sort of business the federal government should be in.
There are three priorities. First of all, there is a really important federal role that has existed since 1991: to provide a national clearing house of energy end-use data--to monitor it, model it, and to provide evaluation. It draws on university expertise, and in particular I'm thinking of the three data and analysis centres in B.C., Alberta, and Quebec.
Second, there is a need to increase the variety of experiments in integrated community energy systems, the test cases at appropriate scales. Complicated things can only be done on a relatively limited scale if you want to encourage, without getting tied up in institutional problems, the entrepreneurship and creativity of Canadians to take risks, to learn what the errors are, and to help build that narrative about what is worth doing.
Third, I believe the federal government should be providing the conditions for some of the beachhead innovations you've heard about, such as low-carbon vehicles or distributed energy production. I'm not picking those in particular; they're only examples. But that's only if the experience of actual implementation is evaluated as part of an integrated approach. These are not silver bullets. They are potential help in relieving the roadblocks in integrated urban energy efficiency.
To conclude, ladies and gentlemen, I believe we should be in the incubation business. Canadian communities have done this for years with small and medium enterprise. Why can't we use the same model for integrated urban energy systems? The impressive variety of stakeholders who have lined up with the QUEST venture should nurture and interpret and publicize a variety of integrated energy management packages that meet the needs of different sizes of communities and different regions of Canada.
The research community is ready to help. It is a source of innovation--for example, at Imperial College, we have the urban energy systems project, which is trying to develop integrated energy, waste, and other systems. Finally, the researchers are a source of the very evaluation methods without which we will not know whether the initiatives being incubated are of any use.
Thank you.