Thank you very much, Chair, and thank you to the chair and the committee for inviting Natural Resources Canada to come to address you today about integrated community energy systems.
I am very happy to appear here with colleagues from the private sector who also share an interest in this topic.
I'd like to start by defining integrated energy systems, because exactly what we mean when we're talking about this subject is not something that springs to everybody's mind. When my colleagues, Mike Harcourt and the others, speak to this they will be using the same general definition.
Traditionally, when we think of how energy is used or how it is supplied, we look out across the city as we travel through it and we see individual houses. We see schools, hospitals, light industrial parks, and each one of those entities makes their own decisions about how much energy to buy, what sort of energy to buy, and what kind of equipment they use in their organizations. That's the easiest way to make decisions. You just have one entity to deal with and decisions are relatively simple, but there are a lot of inefficiencies in using energy and in supplying energy that way.
There is no use of economies of scale. There is no use of waste energy product or waste products between organizations. We find that if there are entities that are putting in leading-edge technologies or practices, it is often very limited in scale and therefore in impact. What we'd like to talk about is an integrated approach to using energy and supplying energies across a community or across a neighbourhood. By this we mean taking the energy use and energy supply decisions and fanning them out over a number of different uses across heating, cooling, lighting, and getting around or motion. We'd also like to think of it across the sectors I've been mentioning--housing, building, transportation, and industry.
When we integrate traditional energy choices, there are enormous opportunities for savings. We've been looking at energy use with respect to environmental improvement, specifically with respect to climate change, in a serious way for about 10 years, and our approach has been very sectoral. We have industrial programs, residential programs, and building programs, and we're talking about looking at it all together in an integrated fashion.
There are benefits apart from the benefits to the environment, and those include dealing with our land better, dealing with transit choices, dealing with waste and water shortages.
I'd just like to take a bit of a closer look at integrated energy use right now. If we were to look at a community that has....
I'm looking around to see if you have the presentation I'm reading from. That wasn't distributed. No? Okay.