Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, for the invitation to speak.
Today I will be speaking specifically about innovation in the electricity sector.
ENMAX is a for-profit corporation wholly owned by the City of Calgary. We are in three core businesses. One is the generation of electricity through the ownership of coal power purchase arrangements, natural gas, wind, and micro-generation facilities. We also own regulated wires in the city of Calgary, both transmission and distribution wires. We also supply end-use customers in Alberta—industrial, commercial, and residential customers—with electricity and natural gas.
We have revenue of approximately $3 billion a year, 1,700 employees, and approximately 830,000 metered customers in Alberta. We are in business across Alberta, not just in the city of Calgary. We own or control over 2,000 megawatts of actual electricity generation in the Alberta market today.
I'm going to touch on two examples of what we consider to be clean, cost-effective, efficient, and reliable electricity generation projects that we are pursuing in Alberta at the present time.
The first project I'm going to speak about is the Shepard natural gas-fired combined cycle generation plant, which is an 800-megawatt natural gas-fired plant that is scheduled to commence operations at the beginning of 2015. It is approximately 50% built at the present time. We have just entered into a partnership with Capital Power Corporation, which is another Alberta-based corporation, to which we have sold a 50% interest in the Shepard facility.
This facility contains world-class technology, the latest Mitsubishi natural gas turbines, which are both efficient and clean. We measure efficiency and cleanliness in relation to generation fundamentally by two measures: one is the amount of natural gas that it takes to produce a megawatt hour of electricity, which is the efficiency measure, and the environmental measure is normally criteria air contaminants and greenhouse gas emissions. This is certainly a world-class technology in relation to those emissions.
In addition to producing electricity, the design of the plant involves the availability for the use of low or medium pressures of steam to be used to provide heating and cooling for new developments in the Shepard area, which is a very large industrial park in the southeast portion of Calgary where the plant has developed.
Ultimately, we are hoping to transition the waste heat through cooling towers to use the waste heat to support commercial processes and heating processes. The facility is also quite innovative, in that it will use reclaimed water from the city of Calgary's Bonnybrook Wastewater Treatment Plant. The water source for this natural gas-fired cogeneration plant will not come from a river, but rather from a waste treatment facility for make-up and boiler make-up water. It is located close to Calgary, and the benefit of efficiency in that regard is the transmission infrastructure that's needed to support the movement of the electrons that it produces to the end-user is obviously less than if it were located in a remote portion of Alberta.
That is a key facility for us that we have presently under development.
The second facility I would like to speak about today is the Bonnybrook Energy Centre, which is also a natural gas-fired combined cycle generation plant. It will be located within a few kilometres of downtown Calgary. The innovative element of this project is that the waste heat from this gas-fired plant will be used to heat buildings in downtown Calgary. In fact, the Calgary district energy centre is already built and operational. It is located about two blocks north of the Saddledome, on 9th Avenue. Right now, through natural gas-fired boilers, it is producing hot water that is used to heat city hall, Calgary's Bow Valley College, and a number of other high-rise buildings in downtown Calgary.
The ultimate vision for this combined facility is that the power plant that will be built in the Ogden area, about two kilometres from the existing district energy plant, has piping from it to the district energy plant, where the waste heat from the natural gas power plant will be piped to the district energy centre and distributed to buildings in Calgary. The present capacity of the district energy plant is ten million square feet of office space.
Those are the two projects. There are other projects noted in the materials I submitted that ENMAX considers to be innovative, but given the time constraints, I won't touch on those in my presentation.
With respect to the question of how the federal government can assist in innovation, I would remind the committee that Alberta is a competitive electricity market, so investments are driven by competitive market pressures, and shareholder money is at risk. My key message for the committee in relation to that is that regulatory certainty and a reasonable expectation that there will be recovery of investments and a reasonable return on investments is critical to the development of new generation in Alberta, especially in a competitive energy market.
A fine example, in our view, of recent legislative steps taken by the federal government in this regard is the coal-fired generation of electricity regulation, where the federal government has made it very clear what the expectations and requirements will be for the future of coal-fired generation in Alberta, and it has provided industry in Alberta with a very clear picture of the retirement schedule of those facilities. That is critical to supporting the development of the types of innovative technologies that I've just spoken about, because now companies like ENMAX understand what the supply portfolio will look like in Alberta long into the future and can plan accordingly for the development of new generation to meet those supply requirements.
The final component of my submission relates to the future challenges to innovation. There is one more piece left that the federal government is involved in that impacts the electricity sector significantly, and that is the regulation of criteria air contaminants. Our message here is that the Alberta government in particular is already involved in the regulation of criteria air contaminants, and we would very much urge the federal government—which we're pleased to see is actually happening at this stage in the game—to continue to work closely with the Alberta government to ensure that any regulations relating to criteria air contaminants do not stall the progress on innovation and do not make projects uneconomic that otherwise are economic.
Thank you again for allowing us to make a presentation. I'd be happy to answer any questions.