Thank you. I will start right in and go to the first slide about Terasen Inc. at the top of it.
I'll start by giving a little background. We're a natural gas and alternative energy utility in British Columbia. We have about $4 billion invested there. We're part of the Fortis group of companies, and the head office is in St. John's, Newfoundland. Fortis owns electric and gas utilities across Canada.
We serve over 900,000 customers in 125 communities, so we have a very broad footprint across the province of British Columbia. And we're regulated in our operations by the British Columbia Utilities Commission.
On the next slide, “The Players”, I'll get in a little here, and when we start talking about what we call district energy systems, or things like the Quest-type program, we break things into two components here, looking at what we call the actors, on this slide, or who the on-the-ground proponents and players are, and who the enablers are below that, supportive with different components.
When we talk about enablers, we're talking about the groups that set the policies, perhaps help with seed funding, and drive awareness and initiatives from that level of things. So we see the federal and provincial governments on that side of things, NGOs, and energy regulators in that same framework.
From an actor's side of things, which gets down really into the municipal governments, you're talking about areas within a municipal surrounding supported by builders and developers, the folks who are putting new infrastructure on the ground, utilities, who build, own, and operate energy systems, and obviously technology providers, and that goes from people doing R and D to people manufacturing and developing new technologies, such as solar panels, and so forth, across the board.
Let's move on to the next slide and talk about what the gas utilities bring to the table. When we think of gas utilities, we think a little more broadly than just our gas load by talking about ourselves as a piped energy utility. As we go through this, you'll see a lot of the energy forms move through pipes, quite often through a water medium, for the energy systems within the buildings.
What we look at is that the utilities obviously have operating expertise, scope, and scale within their various areas across the country. We're able to drive a pretty broad set of solutions. We have the expertise there to drive them across the whole service territory, so we're looking at the options that are available in various communities and really trying to optimize on a broader scale than by each community itself trying to optimize what's available for it.
We see that within that we're all private sector entities, investor-owned utilities, and it's really about bringing private sector capital and expertise to bear for this. So it relieves governments of the need to fund this infrastructure. There may be some component of that, but moving away from funding that new infrastructure. It may even release capital from existing buildings with the acquisition of energy systems, say boiler systems, for example, in a hospital, that can be built out into a district energy system in a town or a city. It enables governments to meet their climate change objectives, and those vary across the country, obviously, in different areas and within different municipalities, but it moves them along that path.
Through the regulated environment, we think we bring fair and competitive energy costs. So you have the regulated environment. There's oversight on what the costs are, how those rates are developed, and how they're charged out to the various customers.
There's a transparency that comes through the regulation, so there's the ability for any of the consumers, taxpayers, and various bodies to intervene in regulatory proceedings and gain insight into what's going on.
And I think most importantly, in the world we're in today, there's mitigating the risk of failure of the investing entity. Through the regulated process, there's great transparency on the capital structure of the entity doing the investing and, in fact, rules and regulations around what that capital structure has to be, and very much transparency into that, even through the process of issuing debt from an investor-owned utility, which falls under the scrutiny of those regulators as well, within the province. So it brings, we think, a good framework and foundation for the ability to develop these district energy systems.
Moving on to the next slide, “Alternative Energy Options”, this will give you a snapshot of a few of the different components that would go together, and these wouldn't necessarily all go together in one system. When you go across communities, there are going to be different opportunities within each community. There may be multiple opportunities within a city, and different mixes of the tools or energy components will be mixed and put together in order to develop an overall integrated energy system. What people call alternative energies here then get melded together with both the natural gas and electric grids, which provide the reliability and the support for these. Some of these are intermittent uses, so you have the back-stopping of the electric and gas grids and, as Ms. McKenna mentioned, also the ability to take energy off these--say on biogas, for example--or to take electricity out of theses systems as well into the grid.
Moving on to the next side, I'll touch on just a few practical examples from our experience. I won't go into great detail on these.
We have a number of projects under way in British Columbia, some that have been operating for a couple of years and some under development. The one in front of you here, on brownfield redevelopment, is in Coquitlam, British Columbia. It's redeveloping an old industrial site. We put the project together, a private developer is doing the development, we're working with them on the energy system, and the City of Coquitlam has provided the support from a zoning perspective and is helping us move down the path to make this come together. It will be a multiple-use, residential, commercial, industrial complex, with a mix of energy sources. There's a local recycling plant that has waste heat that will be incorporated, a geo-exchange or geothermal application, possibilities to add a biomass boiler and natural gas into the grid, and potentially even solar-thermal, those types of things, on each building--so a mix and match of where things go. This will be built out over a period of time, obviously as that neighbourhood develops.
Moving on to the next slide, it's another snapshot, a multi-unit residential complex on Vancouver Island. I won't spend too much time on this, but it's really a ground heat extraction system integrated with natural gas to be build out in a multi-family complex over a period of years.
The next system is an infill development in Victoria, British Columbia. It's an old retail building owned by the Hudson Bay that's being converted to condominiums. There are office complexes and a local hockey rink near this. What's contemplated there is a geo-exchange system on this condominium complex, and over time we'll build out and attach a variety of government office buildings, a skating rink, and other residential and commercial developments into an integrated district energy system within the city of Vancouver. So it's a mix and match of these.
We have smaller projects in smaller centres in British Columbia as well and have projects ongoing in cities in the north, in the central part of British Columbia, and the Lower Mainland-Vancouver area, all putting together different components of these types of systems.
I'll move on to the last slide, the community energy systems. I think this knits together the concept here, but really what we're looking for when we do these is this. You need one or more thermal energy sources, the ability to get heat out, because that's the bulk of what we're providing for heat and hot water. That thermal energy is transported through pipes and via water and you get the mix of end uses, which is what really drives the things. So if you have the combination of heating and cooling opportunities within that complex, then you're driving opportunities to optimize the whole system.
What we find when we put these together, really looking across the spectrum, is different solutions for different communities. So if you're going to be in British Columbia, Saskatchewan, or Ontario, there's a different climate, different types of industry and complexes there, and a built-to-suit solution for every community and every opportunity.
