That's right; it's an electric car. Hydro is working on a hybrid electric vehicle pilot as well.
I'm going to skip the “Utility of the Future”. You can read about it. It's just more on distributed generation and how municipalities could become their own generating plants.
I'm also going to skip over the hydrogen-assisted renewable power slide, which is number 10. That's an interesting project, which we can tell you about later, in the remote community of Bella Coola.
Why don't we get to the last slide, which has the recommendations? This is what we really want to leave you with.
I want to underscore that the federal government already has a number of programs that are helping us to advance renewables and are also providing opportunities to advance technologies. However, I think more leadership can be given at the federal level, and I'd like to talk a little bit about our thoughts on those opportunities.
We think it would be useful if we could apply an energy lens to all infrastructure spending, and that's looking at the Quest approach thinking about that when we think about the way we're building our roads or communities or hospitals. If we can get in at the ground level, we can build greener buildings or more efficiently run buildings. Look at creating flow-through share provisions for the class 43.1. Already on the tax credit side we have a depreciation through the Canadian renewable energy and conservation expense. It's at the pre-development stage; this looks at allowing a flow-through similarly, but it would go to the third party. If a third party were working with a municipality or another entity, it could take that tax advantage even though it wasn't the entity that had the facility. I think you could see creative partnerships with the private sector and local level governments to create solutions in those communities.
Concerning the green infrastructure fund, I think it's fabulous that there's this much money set aside. I guess our question is how it is going to be dispersed, what it is going to be linked to, how it is going to be coordinated. We suggest that it should be targeted to integrated community energy systems and to planning and infrastructure.
We of course would like to see increased funding for R and D and technology innovation. I know there are a number of programs. There's ecoENERGY; I'm not sure what the future holds for it. I know CANMET does some work, and NRCan does some wonderful work. We've had partnership opportunities with NRCan and have been able to do tidal feasibility studies up in the Queen Charlotte Islands. We'd like to see that continue.
That kind of touches on my last point, which is around the coordination of federal, provincial, municipal, and regional programs. When we looked at that feasibility study up in the Queen Charlottes, it brought together the Province of B.C., the federal government, and B.C. Hydro coming to look at a solution for a community that's currently on diesel and that's off-grid.
The other thing we could look at is encouraging our international partnerships and best practices. Canada is lagging behind in terms of technological innovations, particularly around the creation of sustainable communities and the way we use and treat our energy. We need to look to some of the leaders--and a lot of them are in Europe--to build those relationships and learn from those practitioners.
Finally, I want to underscore again that we need to work to implement practical solutions and quick wins to demonstrate that this can work, it can be cost-effective, and it can result in both energy savings and dollar savings in the long run.
Thank you.