Natural Resources Committee on May 31st, 2018

[Bruce Cameron]

Absolutely.

[Ted Falk, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

I'll give you one example.

I come from a business background, and in my industry I deal with the gravel and aggregate business. We may have to report in yards or in metres, metric tons, standard tons, all these different things, depending on which jurisdiction is asking for the information. The frequency of the information is scattered as well. There's very little consistency.

Do you think there should be a role, maybe through Stats Canada, where one central agency collects the information? I think this could help business tremendously. They would gather standardized information and disseminate it as people need it.

[Bruce Cameron]

I used the example of Petrinex in western Canada as a place that has standardized all these things. I'm with you entirely on the idea of standardization.

In a lot of energy use data, there is an evolving standard called a “green button”. It has a funny name, but it is no different from an ISO-724 or whatever kind of standard. It specifies how you report the information. It has built-in understandings that “this column means this”. Presumably if you report in yards, a factor will convert it to two decimal places, or whatever, to cubic metres.

The technology is there, the ability to have standards. It's the willingness to undertake a project like this. I will choose my words carefully. This is not the highest profile kind of...if you're going to a minister and saying that this is an exciting concept and I need $3 million to standardize the reporting of energy data across the country. Put this as the priority of things you'll be able to take home to your constituents.

[Ted Falk, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

Wouldn't that be money well spent?

[Bruce Cameron]

Of course it would be well spent.

[Ted Falk, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

The return just in productivity and efficiency in the business community would be enormous.

[Bruce Cameron]

Absolutely. I think you take the point that it really takes a lot of people to put a lot of attention, effort, and profile into a subject that is not going to get high-profile headlines. But it is the right thing to do.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thanks, Mr. Cameron.

Mr. Cannings.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

Thank you both for coming back here. This is very informative for our study.

I want to start off with the personal information and the granular data that deals with that. You point out that personal information should be protected. I think we would all agree. Then your presentation goes on to say that consumers should have the right to decide if they want to share their personal energy data. I'm wondering if you could comment on that. If you rely on people to give permission, and some people do and some don't, it introduces a huge bias in things. We saw that with the long-form census. In my previous life, I dealt almost entirely with voluntarily gathered data, and we had to tie ourselves in knots to get rid of the bias as best we could in that data.

I'm wondering if there's a way to have that granular data, where the personal information is stripped off—the exact address, names, whatever—but you still know what kind of house they live in, the general neighbourhood they live in, those sorts of things that deal with the personal information, the privacy issues, but at the same time get rid of this bias. You mentioned ecobee, with 30,000 people, but all those people have said yes to that. They're all people who want to get involved with it. So if you think they're normal people, you're very wrong.

[Bruce Cameron]

Here's the thing. I have a Nest. If I had ecobee, I would be out there saying, “Here, have my information.”

There are a couple of things here, and you've touched on something that is very important. There is the data, and the data is just about energy consumption. What you really need to do is pair the data with an address—that energy consumption happened at that place. Then you need to add in the data of what that place looks like, for example, the property assessment information about it being a 2,500 square foot dwelling that was built in the 1940s. If you then begin to ask how that pattern changes over time and everything.... You have to be dealing with private information to start making sense out of it, so you need a safe place to do that work where you're still dealing with private information.

An individual user of energy may not give consent. What you need is that framework that says if you're going to play around with personal information, you do it in a safe place. Stats Canada is a safe place. The utilities are safe places. Quite simply, they have the data anyway, because they have to create bills. You create that safe place, and then you tell people that the data will be protected, and that the people who will be looking at that data will have the highest level of secrecy and be held to the highest standards. Once you have all this information, you don't need to report it out as an individual. You can report it out as a neighbourhood, or as a town or a village. You can then start saying that all of the houses in this community that were built in the 1940s are using a certain energy profile. That is why it's really important to have the big picture and the data in that safe place, so it can be analyzed.

The value of the independent, volunteered data is that you can probably start teasing out of people how many people are in the home, how many of them are teenagers. That makes a difference. You then begin to move into a whole lot deeper analysis that, quite frankly, might be a little creepy—having people doing a lot of that stuff without volunteered consent. But as soon as you can start getting that, you can start getting energy patterns. They may not be absolutely normal, but if you're getting people who have different family types, you can begin to make some sense out of that.

There is a lot of work and useful things that can be done from both approaches.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

I appreciate that we need a safe place in which to do all that. I just think we need to get around who's actually reporting. I'm not a statistician myself, but I know it's helpful if we have data that's not biased to start with.

Like pretty much everybody who has come here, you talked about how fragmented the data is, and how it doesn't talk with each other very well. I'm wondering what course you would recommend the government take to get past that problem. Do we need another pan-Canadian framework on energy data, where the provinces just all sit down in a room and indicate the kind of data they want, and everybody signs on to an agreement? How difficult or simple would it be?

[Bruce Cameron]

I would say that in theory, it's absolutely the right thing to do. In theory, it would be a really good foundational accountability kind of thing. In practice, it's going to be a real challenge, partly for the reasons I alluded to earlier. It's hard to get political capital and attention on these kinds of fairly boring things. If there was some federal leadership—a national approach, a reaching out to the provinces to come on board and collaborate and sign up—that kind of a co-operative, collaborative approach may very well have more legs over time. As more people see the benefits of it, instead of a risk attention capital and everything else, they see the clear investment and return, and that they should be on board.

It's more something that you try and set up, and start providing leadership on the standardization. You then provide a framework for more and more people to sign on, because it's a much more efficient way of doing it. I gather it was for the same reason that British Columbia joined Alberta and Saskatchewan in reporting; there's a very clear business case. We need that kind of a start to demonstrate that this works and has value. More and more people will then sign on. There are a number of provinces that are really quite keen to do it, because they're running into gaps today. That could be a start.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

Thanks, that's it.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Mr. Serré.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I will ask my questions in French.

Thank you for coming to meet with us. Your testimony is very important to our study.

In Canada, we are very proud of our energy system. Our country is a global leader and one of the best producers. In addition, we consume a lot of energy. As Canadians, we should really be proud of this system.

The committee is looking into the potential creation of a national centre. You said that this may not be necessary. You talked about independence. On the other hand, some witnesses have told us that it should have been done many years ago—30 or 50 years.

We are talking about a centre, and I think the government can probably choose one of the following three options. First, it could dedicate significant funds to the creation of a national centre, like the United States did. That country invested US$127 million, or about CA$150 million. So the government could invest in a centre.

Second, we could maintain the status quo. That is what all the other governments have done over the past 50 years. Neither the Conservatives nor the Liberals have created a national centre.

Third, we could invest a bit of money in some departments.

Do you think that, if the federal government invested funds in data collection, the private sector would benefit? Would the private sector save money that way?

[Bruce Cameron]

I think it is possible, through the standardization, to reduce the cost on business. We've discussed a number of kinds of intuitive senses; if I'm reporting one way to one place at one time, then that will be a whole lot better than telling five people almost the same thing in a slightly different way. Yes, it may make some sense to boost the capacity and capability of a number of places across the country in the federal system and in the provincial and territorial systems to enhance the ability to collect information and to perhaps make some sense out of it. But at a certain point, what you need is leadership. On this subject matter, which isn't normally high profile or really important or at the top of everybody's agenda, somebody needs, or some bodies need, to be inside the system supporting everybody else but also thinking ahead, thinking about the things that need to be done and the priorities.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

There are deficits, and we are looking at the overall situation. If there is no money to create that kind of a centre, where should we invest to have the best data collection? Should we invest in Natural Resources Canada, Statistics Canada or both?

[Bruce Cameron]

I would say that if you don't have a lot of money, you'd do a couple of things. One, you would begin to get more timely information from Statistics Canada, and so you would invest there. I think there should be investment somewhere in a central place. Whether it's Stats Canada or NRCan, I do not know. That's a decision for the Government of Canada. There needs to be some investment in a leadership role where they know a lot about energy and they're connected back to energy departments across the country. Stats Canada is connected back, first off, with finance departments, who are statistics agencies across the country.

You'd need to rewire some things there as well.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

You said that renewable energy data was lacking. Do you have any recommendations on what the government could do today to collect and analyze data on renewable energy and biomass?

[Bruce Cameron]

You're actually touching on a subject that I am trying to learn a little bit about, as well. Let me give a small example in Nova Scotia.

Normally, on small solar installations, photovoltaics installations, it reports back on the net. It's reported back that my installation sold 100 kilowatts of electricity into the grid more than it used from the grid, so it's a net. To actually understand what's happening on that, you'd really like to know, back and forth in any given hour, whether it is producing for the home or producing for the network. You'd want some recording of that, so you could then analyze this dynamic and understand more about when that little solar installation is actually contributing or drawing, so you can design a better system.

In Nova Scotia we didn't have any way of getting to that, except in 2015 when we revised our Electricity Act and just said that people are going to get a benefit from the system by doing net metering; what they will have to contribute for getting that benefit is that they will have to install a meter that will tell exactly what's going on, back and forth, and it will be reported back. We had to write that into law, had to actually say that was it.

Nobody minded. All the people who were doing solar PV were the committed people who probably would share all of their data with anybody all the time. What Nova Scotia now has is this requirement to collect all this information up to now, so that five years later, by 2020, it's able to start making some really subtle decisions about the future design and what is going to be the impact if it goes from hundreds to thousands, to tens of thousands.

One other thing that needs to be looked at is whether we are collecting the information we want to make those decisions, and whether there is technology that we can require that will not put a real big burden on anybody, but just report out. That was the case of what we did there, and I know there are technologies and ways of doing it. But you need some people who are thinking about that, too, because that's in the policy area. That's not in the Stats Canada collection.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thanks, Mr. Cameron.

Jamie, you have five minutes.

[Jamie Schmale, Conservative, Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

I appreciate the witnesses coming back, and I appreciate their testimony.

To elaborate on what you were talking about—renewable energy, the quality of the data, the consistency, and that type of thing—and you named a few examples already, are there any other gaps that you are aware of or that you can see coming that we should be preparing for?

[Bruce Cameron]

In a lot of ways, again, it comes back to the data, which is there. The biomass—out in the woods, somebody cutting their own wood and making their own energy for their home—is going to be a very difficult one because they don't fully understand what the cost, the volume, or anything else was. People are looking at that today.

With regard to wind, what I think a lot of people want to understand more about wind is the cost. They want to understand where it's going, and not where it was.

Where we've embedded wind in the country, over the last five to 10 years, it has been at a much higher cost than if we were to do it again today. We can only do that because we've learned and we have a much bigger base and a supply chain, and we have all this knowledge.

I think it's important to have the capacity to understand what happens now and what happens in another 10 years and 15 years. When all of those ones that were more expensive to start off with come off contract, what's the possibility? That's analytical, so it's not so much about the number gigawatt hours of wind. I think people want to know much more about what the cost is and what can we look to for the future. That's analytical.

When it comes to solar PV, understanding a whole lot more.... I don't know of any province other than Nova Scotia that collects that granular level of data on solar PV. Everyone else is sitting there, saying, “I don't know; it comes on; it's in the system,” and we draw analogies to what's happening in southern California or Arizona, but wait a second, they're not exactly like us at all. If we're to get to real energy information decisions and impacts, we need to collect Canadian data that is relevant to Canadian energy needs. That's also about investing in projects, and not just surveys, but also technologies and pilots and things to be able to collect.

[Jamie Schmale, Conservative, Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON]

I asked a witness this question previously; it might have been you. If it was you, I apologize.

This data is so important. It has so many aspects to it and can be used in so many different ways. Is there also potentially an option for the private sector to start collecting and gathering the data, and allowing others—whether it's a membership or whatever—to buy into it and get the information that way, rather than having a new government agency or an expanded government agency?

[Bruce Cameron]

I hope whoever you asked that question gave you an interesting answer.