Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and thank you very much for the opportunity to be in front of you.
I'm very pleased to be here representing Union Gas Limited. We are Canada's largest integrated transmission, storage, and distribution natural gas utility. We serve over 1.3 million customers in over 400 communities in southwestern, eastern, and northern Ontario.
One of the things we're trying to do in the area of integrated energy systems is not only talk about them but demonstrate some leadership. This afternoon I'll give you some examples of how we are participating and trying to facilitate some of these new concepts and some of these new ideas into the grid and into the way we think about energy and the way we use energy.
If we can move to the Burlington Service Centre slide, this is one of three service centres we're currently constructing. This one has been completed. It has been occupied for about nine months. The other two--one in Windsor, Ontario, and the other one in Kingston--will be completed later this year. What's unique about these buildings is not that we have chosen a very high standard in terms of their energy efficiency, that being the gold LEED standard, but we have fundamentally changed the way we view the buildings from an energy perspective. These buildings are self-sufficient. They use natural gas to generate the electrical needs of the buildings and the excess capacity is then thrown into the grid. These buildings have systems that exist on their own and are capable of moving electricity back into the grid while using the excess heat that is generated for the building.
What's important about this is that it's a fundamental shift in the way we think of energy systems, and this is the best example I can use. In these types of buildings, typically we would build back-up generators. These are important buildings; they have planning and dispatch functions, emergency functions, so we would build back-up generators in these buildings in the event of power outages. These buildings do not have back-up generators, because the grid is the back-up generator. Because these buildings generate their own electricity, you reverse the whole thinking in the way you design and build these sites.
We're very pleased also to have joined Burlington Hydro in their just-announced GridSmartCity initiative, which is a 10-point plan on how renewables, conservation, and systems like this can coexist within the grid and fundamentally rethink our whole approach to the way our energy is used and supplied within the community.
The next slide talks about the City of Guelph. As was mentioned earlier, the municipalities are stepping up their focus and attention on community energy plans. I'm very pleased to say we've participated with the City of Guelph and I consider the City of Guelph as one of the leaders in this area. They have been very proactive. They have really challenged the status quo and have aggressively pursued ways of rethinking how energy is created within a community, how it is distributed, and how it is used. The best example is that the University of Guelph is currently looking at building a fairly significant co-generation plant that will not only meet its own energy needs but will supply electricity into the grid and meet the needs of the city in that way.
These are very exciting opportunities. The role we play is that we can bridge some knowledge gaps, because other communities within our franchise area are having similar discussions. We can bring those common ideas and discussions to the table collectively and share our learning with these municipalities and then jointly look at what from the total tool kit works for that community, because as was mentioned earlier, this is not one size fits all. Every community has different characteristics—there are urban, there are rural—and therefore, you have to pick what technologies and what applications really make sense for that specific community.
Let me go to the next slide, on biogas. This is another recent development, at least within our franchise area. This is where we have the opportunity of turning agricultural waste into energy. Most of the discussion up to this stage has been to the effect that biogas would be generating electricity at the location where it gets turned into energy.
Well, we have technology now that can actually turn the biogas into pipeline-quality natural gas, and therefore it becomes a clean source in the natural gas pipeline system. Again it's very early, but it's very exciting. We're getting a bit of momentum going on this, and certainly we're keen to advance these ideas, because this provides us with a clean energy supply into our pipeline network.
I'll go to the next slide and speak a little bit about our international presence, which was mentioned previously.
I'm very pleased to say that the Canadian Gas Association is an active member of the International Gas Union. The International Gas Union is a worldwide non-profit organization that has 72 charter members. For all intents and purposes, all of Europe participates, Asia participates, as well as the Middle East and Russia. It is a worldwide organization. I currently have the privilege of acting as the vice-chair of a special task force on research and development in the natural gas area for this organization. What this gives us is really a window into the entire world, on what is being developed and advanced in the different regions of the world. It gives us access to tremendous information and knowledge.
The most exciting accomplishment in the IGU was back in 2003 in Tokyo, when we, along with eight other countries, were in a design competition on sustainable urban systems. I'm pleased to say that Team Canada was awarded the grand prize. Our submission was called Citiesplus, and with it we were awarded the first prize for being visionary in the way we think of urban systems and how those systems will be integrated. Vancouver was the city used as our study area, where we developed the concepts around what a city like Vancouver would look like 100 years from now.
I'll move on to the next slide, about taking the tool box to Canadian communities. In summary, what I've said is that integrated energy systems is about using a variety of applications that are suitable to the community and that make sense for the application. It's not one shoe fits all. The factors again include whether it is a rural community or an urban community, an existing community or a brand new community, and what the land use and zoning are. The tool kit has a sufficient variety of approaches that it can apply to all those scenarios in some meaningful and productive way to make our energy use much more efficient and also to reduce the level of emissions that currently we emit through the use of energy.
Finally, I'll go to the role of the federal government. I was in at the ground level when the idea of Quest was being talked about, and I participated in the first Quest meeting. It is simply astonishing what momentum we've been able to garner in just two short years. We have significant momentum from a multi-stakeholder group of organizations and individuals, and it is absolutely important that we continue to push Quest forward.
To do that, there needs to be some alignment in policies between the federal, provincial, and ultimately municipal governments, an alignment that makes them consistent with this concept of integrated energy systems and does not provide barriers to advancing these ideas.
We need to ensure that technology funding supports the development of integrated community energy systems. And it's very important that we recognize that integrated energy systems will offer a tremendous opportunity not only for employment development and for bringing communities and community organizations together. It's very important that we view the value this will have to our communities and that we therefore provide some incentives and funding towards development of the tool kit that I called for before.
Program funding to support integrated systems needs to be front and centre. The clean energy technology fund and the Building Canada fund criteria should be structured in a way that supports these sorts of projects and investments, because they are fundamental to how we'll redesign the way we view energy and consume energy within our communities.
I thank you.