Picking up on your second question first, because it's kind of a lead-in to what I was just speaking about, I think here's what we need from a federal level: vision; leadership; policy support, perhaps with respect to the value of carbon; an increase in the dialogue; and an increase in the communication of the results of some of the successful projects that are already present.
With respect to funding, one barrier we've come across is that most of the available funding is project-specific funding. Really, what most of the projects you've heard referred to today are dealing with are integrated urban energy systems. It's not one project, as we saw from Vancouver. The final slide showed an integration of perhaps seven or eight different projects, really, to turn their entire city into an urban energy system. That's what we're planning for Guelph as well.
To apply for many of the funding programs, we need to de-bundle what we have into nice little packages, which really defeats the purpose of what we're trying to achieve. We're trying to completely change how we look at energy systems so that we change our city into what we call a smart grid.
Throughout our community, we may have a variety of energy sources and a variety of energy sinks, and even at different times of the day. A facility that has a boiler may not be attached to the grid, but after hours when the boiler is not being used to capacity, perhaps it actually provides energy to the grid. We have a whole system of interconnected facilities that are either providing or drawing energy or heat at different points in time. Because it's an urban integrated energy system, the federal programs need to be modified to recognize the benefit of that and the government needs to adapt policy and programs to enable that to happen.