Sure. Thanks.
Thanks a lot for having me here.
I apologize in advance that I'm flying a little bit by the seat of my pants. I've been on vacation for the last two weeks and I only found out about my invitation here on Friday. I'm still technically on vacation, so I found a spot for my kids this morning, but I wanted to make sure I could be here. But I am winging this a little bit, given those circumstances.
Fortunately, I've had a few years to prepare for today because this really is an area that I've been focused on. My job at the Pembina Institute is to focus on renewable power policy in Canada. How I landed there was I started doing a PhD about eight years ago in remote Arctic wind energy development, and I started asking around the industry what the technical problems are that we need to solve. I'm a mechanical engineer by background.
It quickly dawned on me that technology isn't the problem that's preventing renewable energy development. Policies are getting in the way, are slowing down the development; whether it's in the Arctic or whether it's solar power or ground-source heat pumps, really it's policy that's slowing down the deployment, not the technology. So for the last eight or nine years I've been involved in focusing on policy issues and trying to push that forward.
I'm glad we're having this hearing today, and I think it's great that we're looking at the ecoENERGY programs. It's unfortunate we were not doing this last year, because right now we're in the situation where all these programs are going to lapse at the end of the year. Even if you were going to see a renewal of them in next year's budget, there's inevitably a gap between when the budget is announced and when they're ultimately implemented.
So not only are we ultimately moving toward a gap of some of these programs, but we also missed a big opportunity in the last two years where we had all sorts of opportunity to be spending dollars during the stimulus and now we're going into a situation of budgetary constraints. So I think we missed a big opportunity. Nonetheless, I still think it's important to be focusing on these programs and looking at what we can be doing and what we can be doing better. There are all sorts of programs. I know the ecoENERGY suite has about eight or nine programs within it.
The one program I'd like to focus on today will just be the ecoENERGY for renewable power program. I certainly don't want to exclude the other discussions, but it's just for the sake of time. The reason I think that particular program is important is because it's important to talk about the scale of development that we need to have in Canada over the next 10 years. This government has set an impressive target of trying to get to 90% non-emitting electricity by the year 2020. That's only 10 years away, and in electricity terms that's basically tomorrow. We have to have programs in place that are going to make that happen, and we have to have them in place today if we seriously want to meet that target. That's not going to be an easy challenge to meet.
I think what's also important to talk about is the scale of what's technically possible. We've seen other countries meet this type of challenge in 10 years if the government is determined to do so. Denmark is the classic example: it went from zero or about 2% wind to about 20% wind in about 10 years. Right now the state of Texas has three times as much wind power as all of Canada. So we're talking about technology that can be deployed very quickly and integrated in very large scales, if we want to do that.
One of the problems in Canada, though, particularly with the ecoENERGY program lapsing, is that we don't really have a national cohesive policy any more. I've had manufacturers ask me directly why they would invest in Canada when they have 10 different countries they have to deal with as opposed to one sort of national overview, or framework, I guess, to invest in. So I think one thing that's missing in Canada is to have a national strategy, a federal outlook on renewable development.
There are four things I want to say in terms of where I think we should be going in the next few years.
Obviously a carbon price is the one thing that everyone knows is inevitable and is needed to recognize the fact that we cannot continue to use the atmosphere as a garbage can. But we're not there yet, and we're not going to be there for a few years, and at this stage in the game it looks like we're waiting to see what the Americans are going to do before we get on with putting a price on carbon. So in the interim, in the next four to five years, until that world is a reality, we do need to continue to support these technologies if we want to meet our climate change goals as well as the government's targets for renewable energy.
A national strategy is another thing I think we need, at least. We have a positive example with the Council of Energy Ministers working on energy efficiency. I think a similar example around renewable energy would be something that would be important to look at.
Going forward, I think we also need to be considering strategic investments in the non-low-hanging fruit.
Right now we're supporting technologies through the ecoENERGY program. It supports wind, solar, biomass, and technologies that are fairly commercial and fairly accessible. Those technologies have all been developed--and I'll use wind as an example--in the windiest areas. We're going to need to be looking at programs that support wind in areas that aren't as windy, or areas that are going to need grid extension or a little more support.
I think that's where we need to be thinking about where the programs need to be going in terms of beyond the low-hanging fruit.
Finally, the last thing I think we need to consider is looking at the Arctic and renewable energy in remote communities. We have about 200 remote communities right now, and most of them depend on diesel power. It's incredibly expensive to get power up there, and at the end of the day it becomes unsustainable for those communities. We have Canadian technology that's been developed to look at wind-diesel hybrids, for example, and most of that technology is currently being exported into Alaska.
Sarah Palin, when she was governor, put $250 million into wind energy development in Alaska. They have about 30 projects on the go right now. We have one operating in Canada and one other being developed in the Northwest Territories. Basically we're exporting Canadian technology to Alaska, but we're not using it here domestically. I think that's another important opportunity that we need to consider.
I think I'll wrap it up there. The point I really want to make at this stage is that this is a strategic time to be investing. The scale of investments we need to talk about are beyond the token investments and beyond treating renewables as a fringe or side market. We need to be seriously considering renewables in terms of the type of development they can be: 10%, 20%, or 30% of our overall electricity supply. We can consider renewables as being a major opportunity to get us to the government's target of 90% non-emitting by the year 2020.
Thank you.