Natural Resources Committee on Feb. 26th, 2009

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Which communities and provinces, then, would you say are leading?

[Kenneth Ogilvie]

Well, you've heard from Mike about several in B.C.

[Michael Harcourt]

Perhaps we can go through some of the B.C. projects.

It would be good for you to have a look at the Dockside Green project. It was done by a private developer, picked by the City of Victoria, on an old brownfield site on the inner harbour of Victoria. It has integrated all of the things that we've been talking about. It is on a smaller scale what we'd like to see happen on a much bigger scale.

Another example is Maple Ridge. It has a Smart Growth plan under way, and is starting to move into this in a more detailed way.

Whistler and Vancouver's southeast villages, where the 2010 Olympics are taking place, are moving into this integrated approach. That includes a very significant input of geothermal, of LEED gold buildings.

As well, a very good set of initiatives is taking place in north Vancouver with a district energy system for Lonsdale Quay, which they're now going to expand out into the city centre. There's also Dawson Creek. This doesn't have to happen in big cities. This could happen in any community.

Those are just some examples of what's happening in British Columbia. There are other examples starting to form up throughout the country. That's where we're focused this year, on provincial or regional or municipal early initiators, people who are pioneering this approach. We're hoping that gradually we can have hundreds and hundreds of communities in Canada taking this approach.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

I actually would like to talk about some of the projects. Mr. Lee might have some specifics.

You had mentioned, I think, that there are a number of ways to save energy. Is there anything coming out that shows a couple of things that can be done? You said it's fairly easy to reach that 50% mark, but what are the ways to do that easily and quickly? As people begin to change their thinking and their ideas about these energy partnerships, what are the simplest things that can be done?

[Kevin Lee]

Energy efficiency is the first obvious step for all of these things. We're seeing that the energy efficiency measures are the first components as we push toward greater levels of performance. You can get those at the individual building or house-type level. Once you go beyond that, though, it gets into the district level of things, and that's very much what we're looking at here.

It really comes down to smart planning. Much of what's come out from the savings we see when we're looking at how to do integrated communities is the same type of thing that came out from the building science, if you will, on how to do better buildings: do your planning upfront. Make your smart decisions. It's not about specific technologies, per se. It's about taking a look at your situation, your uses, and your applications, and using the right technologies and the right mix to get the savings and hit the targets you're looking for.

In terms of the different technologies that you go with, beyond the basics, certainly, we're seeing the opportunity to use renewables combined with storage systems, as a big piece, and to use district systems that enable you to use any heat source, be it waste heat, be it bio, or be it renewables. There are all kinds of different ways. And then you also have the capacity to switch back and forth between them, depending on what makes the most sense. The planning aspects also enable the transportation elements to come into it.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

I'm going to run out of time, I think, but does your group or does the government have any focus on rural areas? I'm from a rural area. We're at the end of an energy grid. There are a couple of things about rural areas. Often they're easier to deal with in terms of planning and those kinds of things. They can make changes a little more quickly than can some of the urban areas. You have “urban” in your name. Is there any aspect of rural in what you're doing? And I guess the same goes for the government. How do you define “rural”?

[Kevin Lee]

Certainly on our community energy solutions road map we're looking at communities of all sizes. We don't worry about whether they're considered rural or urban from a definition perspective. We see this as an opportunity for every community. In fact, for example, in rural communities, often the biggest energy user is the local arena. And we have some great arena technologies that are starting to come up. With that, you can start using waste heat that comes off arenas to heat houses around the arena and the local area, that kind of thing. So we see this as being applicable from pretty much the smallest single-industry community right up to the largest cities in Canada.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

We've had suggestions to use windmills to counteract some of the energy costs in our arenas, but we have an energy provider that has a monopoly and that doesn't seem to be all that interested in making it feasible for smaller communities to do that.

I want to ask about the role of utilities. Do you find that some types of systems are far easier than others, or that some places are easier to deal with? Do you have any comments on that?

[Michael Harcourt]

Some of our participants are the Canadian Electricity Association and Canadian Petroleum. I was just appointed with Ken to the Canadian Electricity Association's public advisory panel on sustainable electricity initiatives.

There is a growing interest in the major utilities and in moving in the directions you're talking about. Some examples of rural communities taking this on very aggressively, very actively are starting to form up.

Regarding the definition of rural, according to Statistics Canada, it's under 10,000 people. As for what's rural and what's remote, we're talking about being within a half an hour or an hour's commute of an urban centre, which is more than 10,000. We're very interested in small, rural, remote, and aboriginal communities as well as the large cities.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

What portion of your resources are you committing to that?

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Mr. Anderson--

[Alan Tonks, Liberal, York South—Weston, ON]

He can have part of my time.

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

That's very generous. Thank you.

Go ahead, Mr. Anderson.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Well, this is Mr. Tonks' time. I know he's very interested in this subject. So I'll just ask one question. What percentage of your resources are committed to rural activity?

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Mr. Cleland.

You have an answer to the previous question as well, I believe.

[Michael Cleland]

I'm sorry, I'm not sure I can provide you an answer to that one. I guess maybe the right answer to it, though, is to the extent that we can engage more people in rural and small communities, that's how many resources will go into it. Part of our job is to get out to as many people as we can. The first step in that is getting more people working with us at the provincial level. It's driven by, as Ken put it, the bottom up.

Let me just come back to the point about the role of utilities. I'm tempted to say that the easiest ones to deal with are the gas utilities, but you might not believe me. My point here is that I think the utilities have a really important role, both gas and electric. Part of it is adjusting their operating practices. That's sometimes easier for some than for others, but it's part of the game.

The other one is that utilities can mobilize investment, they can mobilize capital, and they can mobilize a lot of expertise to make this happen. I think it's the role of municipalities to push it. It's the role of the building and the development community to come in and start saying, “We want to build these things”, and then, behind that, for the utilities to say, “Okay, we'll come in and build the systems to do that.” If the utilities see an economic opportunity, they'll do it.

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Thank you, Mr. Cleland.

Mr. Tonks, start the five-minute round--using the remainder of the five minutes.

[Alan Tonks, Liberal, York South—Weston, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

I hope the committee is as hopeful as I am personally with respect to the direction that is being taken here on integrated community energy systems. I'm extremely excited about this.

First of all, to our representatives from NRCan, is there specific seed money that would help with strategic planning circles involving utilities, involving private sector developers who may own a very large piece of land, particularly in an urban area but also perhaps in a rural area, bringing them around the table to develop a strategic, high-value-added, sustainable development energy plan for a particular development? Does a program exist through NRCan to that effect?

[Carol Buckley]

We don't have a dedicated program of that nature at this time. We have provided that service to some extent with one of the examples that my colleague was talking about earlier. In fact, we sort of wrote a book about it so that other communities could learn from the lessons we went through in that particular case. That was one of the roles that we felt would be useful, making it more replicable for other communities.

In addition to that, the Government of Canada endowed the Federation of Canadian Municipalities with $550 million. A portion of that is earmarked for community energy studies. The communities and municipalities can use those funds, when they get access to them, to put together the kinds of plans that will help them build more sustainable futures.

Those are two things that are in existence at the current time.

[Alan Tonks, Liberal, York South—Weston, ON]

I guess what I'm trying to explore is whether there are different phases. There's the conceptual phase and then there's the appraisal with respect to returns, on both investment and energy, retrievable both in the short term and in the long term. I'm just so aware of how diffused those are. At some point they have to be shepherded together.

I'll give you an example, if I may. There's a 65-acre site that used to house the Canadian Kodak company in my particular riding. There is a tremendous opportunity to link into the Toronto Transit Commission's development of...not into the grid itself in terms of the subway, but in terms of the maintenance facilities that are going to be part of that development, with central heating opportunities, geothermal and so on. But the developer owns the property, and the city is somewhat engaged with residents and so on.

Is there any way that could be brought together? And could that be done as a result of this dialogue with QUEST? Could there be sort of a template, a series of pilot projects across the country in very highly visible areas--particularly in my area of York South--Weston?

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Alan Tonks, Liberal, York South—Weston, ON]

This would just capture the imagination, and could make such an impact on the more than 50% of energy consumption that those spark plugs we call our cities in fact are using.

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Mr. Ogilvie.

[Kenneth Ogilvie]

Yes, that's in fact precisely where we're at with QUEST as we talk to the provinces and hear about the kind of growing interest in provincial QUESTs. Everybody's saying the real needs are to start deploying these things in real projects to show what they can do, to get the metrics and the measurement down, to prove out the reductions in cost and energy that come along with it, and to share the information.

British Columbia does have a bit of a lead in some aspects of this, but when I went out there a few weeks ago, all they want is more information. They're looking for it from across the country. Everybody wants case studies. Everybody wants a central information capacity, which QUEST is trying to set up, has set up through the Centre for Energy in Alberta as a website, and will increasingly use. That's where people are at. They don't want to study it to death because all of the technologies and all of the concepts are there.

It's really about packaging it. The community has to want it. We talk about going down; it has to go right down. Whether it's a rural community or an urban community, they have to want it and they have to get it, so somebody needs to have some resources to go out and communicate with them. For those communities doing this work, the person doing that work is overloaded, even in Dawson Creek, with requests to go to other communities.

We need to build capacity quickly to help those communities that have an organic interest in doing this but then face real barriers. Sometimes it's just a few dollars or the lack of an expert in the town to actually give them the advice they need.

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Thank you, Mr. Tonks.

Mr. Allen, for up to five minutes.