Hello there. My name is Tom Heintzman. I'm the director and one of the co-founders of Bullfrog Power.
Bullfrog Power is Canada's renewable energy choice. We provide a renewable energy choice to Canadians coast to coast.
The premise behind Bullfrog Power is relatively straightforward. In all of the other products and services that Canadians buy, they have environmental choices, whether that's transportation, clothing, articles for their house, or food. However, historically they have not had an environmental choice in energy. It's always been “one size fits all”, and you get what you get when you plug in, despite the fact that energy is the biggest contributor to an individual's environmental footprint. So the simple proposition is to give people a choice, just as they have choices in all these other products and service categories, to pay a premium to purchase a green, renewable product.
We inject onto the electricity grid or the natural gas pipeline system as much renewable electricity or renewable natural gas as our consumers use. They pay a bit of a premium, and that premium goes to helping make new renewable projects economical.
New renewable projects across Canada require a bit of a premium. Typically, that premium is paid by a government entity or a utility on behalf of ratepayers. Bullfrog is a voluntary initiative that is additional to and supplemental to these government initiatives. Government initiatives will increase the amount of renewable power by a certain amount through procurement, and the voluntary consumers, who are choosing to pay more, can increase it even further.
This model has been quite successful in the United States. It's estimated that as much as a third of the new renewable power in the United States was funded by voluntary consumers.
Bullfrog currently gives consumers both a renewable electricity choice and a green or renewable natural gas choice. Renewable natural gas is very new in Canada. It's methane that's produced by compost, by your organic waste. We clean up that gas and inject it into the natural gas pipeline to displace conventional natural gas. It's called biomethane, and the facility that is providing it for our customers is the first of its type in Canada. But we expect many more of these over the years to come.
Thousands of Canadians are making the choice to pay a premium and purchase renewable electricity. These include homes from British Columbia to P.E.I., as well as businesses, such as RBC, TD, Unilever, Walmart, and about 1,500 other businesses. These entities pay a little more to buy renewable electricity. They reduce their environmental footprint as a result and they support the development of renewable energy in the country.
That's the background in terms of Bullfrog. I would not be doing my company a service if I didn't give some recommendations as to where we would hope that policy could move. Some of these levers will be next to impossible to move; others are more changeable.
First of all, we're very fortunate to have been able to create a business model that can work coast to coast, but there are a number of impediments to innovation in our space, in the downstream electricity and natural gas markets.
First, provincial regulation of energy leads to a patchwork of regulations and makes scaling a business across the country very challenging. This is a constitutional matter, so obviously quite difficult to deal with.
Second, the turnover in ministries and bureaucracies results in shifting policy that's not conducive to long-term energy planning and investments. Here in Ontario we're on our eighth minister of energy over the course of the last eight years.
Third, utilities, which tend to control both natural gas and electricity markets in Canada, tend to be very change-resistant. Even their economic incentives are not always aligned with innovation.
Fourth, markets in which innovation tends to flourish are not common in the downstream energy space in Canada.
Fifth—and here is a policy recommendation, and I'm certainly not the first to make it—putting a price on carbon would certainly help drive innovation in the renewable energy space as well as in conservation.
Last, our business model is so small that this concept of citizens voluntarily paying to take environmental action is still so unusual that it is not taken account of by regulatory or administrative bodies when they make policy decisions.
As a very small example of this, because of the small size of the voluntary renewable energy market, Environment Canada and Stats Canada will not separate, for the purposes of national reporting, the electricity purchased by voluntary green customers from the electricity purchased by the other customers. As a result, there is a fundamental difficulty in separating those two pools of energy, which makes for double-counting and complicates the reporting, the claims, and ultimately the development of a voluntary renewable power market in Canada.
Those would be five policy observations and comments that I have.