Natural Resources Committee on June 7th, 2018

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Good morning to our witnesses: Ethan Zindler, Head of Americas, Bloomberg New Energy Finance; Maike Luiken, President, IEEE Canada; and Zoltan Stojanovic, Director, Information Systems, London Hydro, IEEE Canada.

Thank you all for joining us today. We're starting a little late, so we appreciate your patience.

The process for the morning is each group will be given up to 10 minutes for their presentation. Then we open the floor to questions from around the table. You are welcome to deliver your remarks or answer questions in French or English. It's not unusual to be asked questions in French as well. We have devices available to you should you need them for translation.

I will open the floor.

Mr. Zindler, do you want to start us off?

[Ethan Zindler, Head of Americas, Bloomberg New Energy Finance]

Thank you very much for the opportunity.

If at any time you can't hear me, just let me know.

I'm happy to join you here from Washington, where we're hoping by the end of the day we will hoist our first ever Stanley Cup. Not to rub it in, but we've very excited to be in the finals this year.

I'm very pleased to be joining you today to talk about this important topic. My name is Ethan Zindler, and I head research and commercial operations for Bloomberg New Energy Finance in the Americas.

Bloomberg New Energy Finance, BNEF, is a division of the financial information provider Bloomberg Finance L.P. Our group provides major investors, utilities, policy-makers, and others with data and insights on new energy technologies. These include renewables, such as wind and solar; electric vehicles; energy efficiency technologies; power storage systems, such as batteries; and natural gas, among others.

My remarks today represent my views alone, not the corporate positions of Bloomberg Finance L.P., and of course they do not represent specific investment advice. Sorry; that's language I have to include for our lawyers.

The topic of today's hearing, the importance of energy data, is at first blush a potentially rather dry one. I know most normal people probably regard the words “data” and “passion” to be fundamentally antithetical to one another, but we at BNEF and Bloomberg L.P. are deeply passionate about the value of data and its importance in guiding effective business policy and other decisions. As our founder, Michael Bloomberg, has often said, “In God we trust, but all others must bring data.”

I will talk in a moment about Canada and the level of data transparency there and its energy markets in just a second, but first I'd like to tell you a bit more about my firm, BNEF—not to be self-indulgent, but because I think our firm's journey over the last 14 years is in itself emblematic of the value of energy data.

BNEF was founded in 2004 as a start-up then known as New Energy Finance. The company was the brainchild of a former management consultant who was keen to invest in renewable energy companies. Very quickly he realized that there was almost no truly useful business data on the state of these types of firms or even on wind, solar, or other clean energy technologies. This included a lack of information about their costs, their deployment, which companies were involved with them, etc.

When I joined what was then a 30-person company in 2006, our informal goal was to maintain what we thought would be the Saudi Arabia of clean energy data. That involved each of us keying thousands of data records into a database, to which we then sold access to clients who had interest in those technologies. Over five years we built a small but ardent user base of utilities, equipment makers, policy-makers, and others, all of whom were seeking timely and accurate data on these potentially revolutionary new technologies.

Eventually, several large information service companies became interested in what we were doing and in 2009 we sold the firm to Bloomberg L.P. Our founder, who started the firm out of a small London garden apartment, today splits his time between his townhouse in Notting Hill and his chalet in Switzerland. I offer this anecdote not because it has a happy ending, but because it demonstrates the value of information in a vacuum and how very quickly the market can come to value and to recognize it.

There may be no industry in which data and transparency are more important than energy, given the fundamental role it plays in the lives of literally every one of us. Today, even on the most micro level, we are seeing greater transparency in how energy is produced, delivered, and consumed.

Consider, for instance, the proliferation of smart thermostats such as those produced by companies like Nest and others. These devices allow consumers to adjust their thermostats when away from home, understand their consumption patterns down to the minute, and make adjustments accordingly. Businesses large and small today are taking advantage of similar technologies to improve energy storage in their warehouses, retail outlets, and supply chains.

All of this brings me to Canada, which is one of the world's premier energy producers and exporters, but, at least in our view, not truly a world leader when it comes to energy data transparency.

Our team of analysts at BNEF regularly write research pieces about business and policy developments in the Canadian energy market. We've been honoured to host Minister Carr and Minister McKenna at our annual conferences, and our research is regularly read by the staff at NRCan, Sustainable Development Technology Canada, and other federal agencies there.

We produce long-term 20-year outlooks projecting how the Canadian power sector will evolve in the face of unprecedented technological development. We attempt to predict the number of electric vehicles Canadians will buy over the next two decades, among other things.

We are deeply interested in what is happening in Canada, both because it represents a dynamic and intriguing domestic power market and because the country's exports of oil, gas, and uranium, among other commodities, give it a real influence over certain global markets. However, we regularly find it challenging to find timely, consistent, and entirely accurate data on the state of play for energy across the nation. Specifically, there are insufficient datasets collected and made easily available at the federal level, particularly on the power sector. Those datasets that are collected are often too high-level and are updated too infrequently for those seeking a nuanced understanding of the market.

Furthermore, our analysts tell me that the figures reported at the federal level are, with some frequency, inconsistent with those produced by the provinces.

To give one rather specific example, our team this past year has sought to update our short- and long-term outlook for the Canadian power sector. Among other things, we sought out a single comprehensive look at all the country's power plants, including the plant name; the primary fuel that each one was burning; the operational date of each one; the planned retirement date, if it had been disclosed; its annual power generation; and how much CO2 each plant emitted. As well as we could tell, there exists no single repository for this information today.

Beyond making life easier for energy wonks like me and those on my team, why is it so important for Canada to better organize and provide its data? Consider the example I mentioned a moment ago, but from the perspective of an energy project developer, either a small local player or a large multinational looking for strategic opportunities in Canada. Surely such a developer would want to understand where the oldest or otherwise least economical existing power plants are today, as these are the plants that stand to be replaced by newer generations.

In the same vein, companies now looking to deploy large-scale batteries onto the grid to address reliability are keen to know where certain pinch points exist as well. It's worth noting that provincial governments around Canada do publish energy statistics. Some of these datasets are robust, reliable, and very helpful. However, there is little consistency in the format of how those datasets are produced, and collating them can be a big headache.

In terms of addressing this issue, I would simply note that other nations have established regimented protocols for the collection and dissemination of data. There's also the International Energy Agency, which compiles key datasets on international activity.

I am joining you from Washington today, as you know, and I do not often hold up my own government as a paragon of data transparency, but when it comes to energy data, I will argue that the U.S. Energy Information Administration does a really admirable job of collecting key information and making it very easily consumable for market players. I would also note that this is really EIA's only job. It's not a regulatory or enforcement party. EIA certainly has its detractors in the United States. Renewable energy proponents in particular have long complained about its forecasts being inaccurate, but EIA has very rarely been accused of having any kind of partisan bias. Given the extraordinarily contentious climate here in Washington today, that really is saying something.

I would posit that the reason EIA is regarded as being so independent is that it holds no regulatory power itself. Those tasks are left to other federal offices. Having this division between government and data collector and government policy implementer strikes me as very wise.

I'd like to conclude my comments simply by reiterating that investors and businesses of all stripes crave data transparency. Those in the energy field are simply no different. Furthermore, the expectations are higher than ever, given the technologies currently available to collect such data and the plethora of data that's all around us now, so it's understandable that on these issues many expect just a bit more clarity from Canada as one of the world's leading energy producers and exporters.

Again, I would like to say thank you to the committee for giving me this opportunity today, and I look forward to your questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thank you, Mr. Zindler.

I was actually cheering for Las Vegas, but you're so persuasive that I think I might cheer for Washington tonight.

Ms. Luiken, we`ll go over to you.

[Maike Luiken, President, IEEE Canada]

Are the questions at the end for everybody?

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Yes.

[Maike Luiken]

Thank you very much.

I'm Maike Luiken from IEEE Canada. It's a pleasure and honour to have a first opportunity to address this standing committee of the House of Commons.

I'll say a couple of words about IEEE and IEEE Canada.

IEEE is the world's largest technical professional organization, with 400,000 members around the world. Its byline is “advancing technology for the benefit of humanity”.

We all use IEEE, because I assume you all use Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi is an IEEE standard.

In Canada, we have more than 16,000 members. The IEEE Canada organization is a member of the Engineering Institute of Canada and a member of PAGSE, which delivers the Bacon and Eggheads breakfasts on Parliament Hill, which you might be aware of. We work with other organizations, such as the Canadian Standards Association, or CSA.

In the organization, there is significant strength of expertise in the areas of electrical power and energy, communications and data science, and in artificial intelligence. That may be of use to this committee and other committees as the need arises.

With respect to national energy data, energy-related data is being collected across the country by various stakeholders, as we heard before, for a variety of applications and purposes, although not necessarily in a standard format, and there are definite gaps. This includes data on available energy resources and their extraction technologies; energy transport, energy infrastructure, and energy carriers; energy storage; energy users—essentially private industry, business, and public sectors, and all end-user consumers for all types of energy use, from electricity to gas to coal—and energy consumption patterns; energy conservation technologies and their impact; building infrastructure inventory, which is lacking quite a bit; greenhouse gas emissions; weather patterns; population changes; cybersecurity, which is another area where we lack significantly in data; and industry trends. That's just to name a few of the areas in which we collect data by one agency or another in the country.

For the future of national energy data, it's absolutely critical that we have nationally consistent energy data to plan, develop, and provide reliable services. The requirement for the future national energy data is that the data be, among other things, sufficient, trusted, reliable, current, secure, and sufficiently accurate. Data analytics applied to these data will support, among other things, evidence-based decision-making, policy development, and system optimization and planning. Of course, this data will then enable research and development.

The requirements are that we determine what data we actually need and what data is desirable, and how that data may be obtained and protected. We need to audit the data that we collect. We need to determine the data gaps and augment the datasets to address the gaps. We need to look at the data integration from many sources, using a standard like the Green Button standard, which my colleague will report on later. We need consistent access, with different access levels of security for all stakeholders through a trusted independent agency. The data has to be current, and it has to be compliant, for example, with the GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation. We have to have a transparency of process and system, and we need to use the established practices of big data.

Some of the members of IEEE Canada are focusing on underserved communities, particularly northern and indigenous communities, to bring technology-based solutions to improving the living and working conditions there. This would mean that robust location-specific data, as well as technology performance data, are expected to enable optimal holistic solutions, considering heating, lighting, internet access, potable water, wastewater treatment, and transportation as a system of systems.

In other words, datasets across these various disciplines, these various areas, taken together with a transparent access would allow us to support such policies as a dig-once policy and essentially deliver holistic solutions.

Today, that's very difficult. Some of my colleagues report to me that when they're trying to do energy systems research and development, they don't have, or have very little, access to data. Even the data from the EIA is hard to obtain for research.

I offer, at the end, a positive note. IEEE has started to address the issue of large datasets and accessibility to large datasets by opening up a service that's called IEEE DataPort. The standard use is free for use today. It is essentially an accessible repository of datasets, including big datasets. It's designed to store datasets, to provide access to facilitate the analysis of datasets, and to retain referenceable data for reproducible research. It's essentially a service that the Government of Canada, for example, could use to deposit the anonymized datasets for research purposes and public access.

With that, I'd like to turn it over to Zoran.

Thank you very much.

[Zoran Stojanovic, Director, Information Systems, London Hydro, IEEE Canada]

Good morning. Thank you for the opportunity to present this morning. My name is Zoran Stojanovic, and I'm Director of Information Services at London Hydro.

I want to thank you for an amazingly good introduction to the topic I'm going to talk about, and that's data transparency and how we can help our customers.

I'm going to bring the view of what data transparency means to our consumers and our customers—especially our commercial customers, who really need this data to make efficiencies and save on costs.

The fact is that North American utilities daily store a variety of data that are utilized for grid monitoring, bill production, customer engagement, education programs, and so on. Typically this data among utilities is stored in isolated databases such as their operational data stores, and it's not easily shared. It's not transparent to all the ecosystem, which includes customers, government organizations, and research organizations.

The fact is that a wealth of data exists, and it's growing among utilities. However, challenges remain for effective sharing, authorization, and utilization of this data, of this tremendous resource, on a consolidated cross-utility level.

Take Ontario, where we have just over 60 utilities. If you're a customer such as a school board, with facilities across six or seven utilities, it's pretty impossible to obtain the data in a standardized, transparent format to manage your portfolio. These are real challenges for real customers.

I'd now like to introduce an initiative that we've been spearheading since inception and that came as part of the data transparency in the call to action from the U.S., and that's Green Button.

Green Button is a standard based on a common technical standard called Energy Services Provider Interface. It is a collection of existing proven standards and it's capable of supporting any time series data, energy data, and any attributes of that data, including real time data. We talked about thermostats and how customer behaviours are changing. Green Button is capable of storing the data.

The most important thing is that it puts customers in the driver's seat. As a customer, if you had the ability to leverage this data with an easy process and authorize in anonymous ways anybody to leverage and provide value, you would do so. With what I call the Green Button initiative, customers are able to leverage a simple authorization process and view their data, which allows them to save on time and cost while helping to save the environment.

To bring you back a little bit to what we've done in Ontario, we have successfully implemented pilot programs, we have delivered a cost-benefit analysis for implementation of the Green Button platforms as the standard across the whole province, and we currently have a proposal pending for province-wide implementation of Green Button.

Furthermore, I'd like to say that at London Hydro we've been spearheading the development of a platform that allows us to share what we have among utilities so that they can collaborate and share the resources, because we do share customers at the end of the day.

In closing, we see Green Button as an enabler and an innovation catalyst that creates the foundation for an open data economy in the energy space. We believe greater benefits can be achieved if everybody adopts the standard nationally for all types of energy data.

I'd like to tie this up by saying that Green Button offers the opportunity to put Canada back on the map of leaders in data transparency.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thank you very much, all of you, for your presentations.

Mr. Tan, are you going to start us off?

[Geng Tan, Liberal, Don Valley North, ON]

Thank you, Chair, and thank you to the witnesses for being with us today.

My first question is for IEEE, since you are here.

IEEE provides scientific and engineering information on the data field. This field has become very fast-paced and is ever-changing, which means that technology has to be updated or developed very quickly in AI or other areas.

You mentioned in your statement the importance of data, data access, and data transparency, but what I'm asking about here is the pace—the real time, let's call it. With this field changing so quickly, how does IEEE fulfill the role of providing up-to-date technology or scientific information to your members? What's your strategy to ensure that your data or technical information remains current and up to date? Maybe we can learn from some of your experiences.

[Maike Luiken]

First of all, we speak for IEEE Canada, not necessarily for IEEE. I technically could, because I'm a board member of IEEE, but I just want to be proper about this.

We stay current in terms of knowledge through the ongoing publishing business, through the publishing process. IEEE's data, let's say in the data port, can only be as current as the data that is provided by those who work with us. What we can do is essentially form new committees, new ad hoc committees, about future direction.

For example, we have a brain initiative. We have an initiative on smart communities, on the north with the Arctic communities, and on the environmental impact of technology deployment. I don't think I have all the committee names correct right now, but there are some 10 different initiatives working on future directions. Those eventually, if they prove required and necessary and they gain momentum, turn into new societies or new permanent committees at the IEEE level. They work across the different countries, so they are not country- or region-bound.

Does that answer your question?

[Geng Tan, Liberal, Don Valley North, ON]

Yes, I think so. From your answer, your institute is always beyond or in front of technology development. You foresee the trends or tendencies of new technology.

[Maike Luiken]

We give our members an opportunity to come to the organization and say, “These are the items that need to be worked on. This is what we need to explore.” That goes through a process to be evaluated by other members and to be looked at in order to determine whether we want to fund, essentially, activities in that area and explore it further.

For example, we have the Photonics Society, which of course did not exist 30 years ago. Electric vehicular technology has existed for a long time, but today it concentrates a lot on vehicular direct technology related to autonomous vehicles, communications in vehicles, and so on.

[Geng Tan, Liberal, Don Valley North, ON]

Okay. Thank you.

I still have time, right?

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

You have lots.

[Geng Tan, Liberal, Don Valley North, ON]

Okay.

To Mr. Zindler, you're head of the Americas operations. Of course, your business covers Canada, as you mentioned in your statement.

Your company provided an independent analysis of the energy economy. How can your company contribute to the conversation in Canada on energy data and the future of the energy industry's strategy? Where do you get your Canadian energy data from? Is it from NRCan, or is Statistics Canada your only source of information in Canada?

You mentioned that you are not very satisfied with the quality of Canadian energy data, and that quite often the data is not very timely. If this is the case or the situation, what do you and your researchers do—I guess you have lots of analysts—when the submitted energy data is not reliably available?

[Ethan Zindler]

Thank you for the question.

Historically, my team has gone down and looked at provincial-level data disclosure. Some of the stuff at the provincial level is pretty good. In some provinces, it's good and in some provinces it's not as good. The format in which the data is produced is not always consistent. Sometimes it's literally in a PDF, or multiple PDFs, that you need to go through. Sometimes when you total up those numbers you get from the provinces, they don't necessarily match the numbers that are provided at the federal level. It's a lot of additional legwork.

I'll be candid. One analyst mentioned to me that once she has done all the big provinces, sometimes she feels like she won't put the extra effort in on the smaller ones, because the level of disclosure might be good or it might be bad, but it's just so much additional work.

It is challenging. The data can be collected. As the other folks who testified mentioned, there are some datasets that simply don't exist, that are more on the micro level about levels of household consumption or regional consumption of electricity, all of which we're very interested in. I should have put that in the context of the fact that we've seen, as you mentioned, a tremendous amount of progress and change in energy technologies over the last 10 years. We expect a lot more to come, but to understand where and how you deploy those technologies, you need to have a better understanding at a fairly micro level of how energy is being used and consumed. I think we feel there could be real improvement in that area.

[Geng Tan, Liberal, Don Valley North, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Mr. Schmale is next.

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

Thank you, Chair. Thank you, witnesses, for appearing today. Your very informative presentations are greatly appreciated.

I might as well start with Mr. Zindler, because I guess we're on a roll with him anyway.

As we go through the study, I have my suspicions where we might go with this, or where the government is headed.

I want to talk more about the set-up of the EIA. You mentioned that it was just plainly a data collection agency and had no regulatory power and that type of thing. Maybe you can expand upon that a bit more and tell us how the agency, to the best of your knowledge, functions separately from the government, or from the legislature as well.

[Ethan Zindler]

[Inaudible—Editor] the folks at the EIA directly as well. We know them well here in D.C. We actually provide some of our data to them, and of course we consume a lot of their data.

The EIA is literally in the U.S. Department of Energy building, but it is essentially its own independent office. It has its own funding and operates with the one and only goal of collecting data and providing forecasts. I wholeheartedly think that in data collection and provision, they do an outstanding job.

Frankly, with some others, I probably share some.... I've had my complaints about their forecasts, and I would not necessarily wholeheartedly endorse this model of an agency to do forecasting in Canada, but in collecting and providing data, they have a really important role. They've done a wonderful job of building a website that is pretty easy to use. The datasets can easily be downloaded into Excel and processed without paying for it in any way or without any kind of a firewall.

The data they provide really depends on the dataset. In some cases, it's monthly data. In some cases, it's annual. It includes natural gas storage levels, which are figures that can literally drive activity in the market every single week. There is import and export data on oil and gas, of course. On the electricity side, we find the plant-level data extremely useful in terms of their tracking literally every power plant in the U.S.

They have also really upped their game when it comes to trying to understand the level of generation now coming from photovoltaics on individual residential homes. That's actually becoming a bigger deal. It's obviously a very small percentage—I think way less than 1% of our power in the U.S. comes from rooftop solar—but it's growing. It has real implications, as one of your other witnesses would probably attest, for how we think about local utilities and how they interact.

Anyway, that's their general set-up. As I say, it's set up autonomously to some large degree, although I do believe the President appoints the head of the EIA. The person who has been the head of the EIA typically now is a non-partisan, academic type, and not somebody who brings to the job a real axe to grind on energy issues, necessarily.

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

For the most part, that information is mainly collected at the EIA and the analysis done elsewhere, at a third party or an outside agency, correct?

[Ethan Zindler]

The EIA collect the data, and then they in turn do some analysis themselves.

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

You said sometimes it's not reliable. Is that correct?

[Ethan Zindler]

I would say they do their own analysis of the data on a current basis, which I think is outstanding. The only time I would ever really take major issue with the EIA is when they do long-term forecasting, because that actually goes beyond the realm of data collection and into the realm of trying to predict the future. Of course, we all know that is impossible, but we do it all the time.

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

Thank you very much.

Ms. Luiken, in your presentation you mentioned security and using that information for a wide variety of sources, but also keeping it secure. How do you see that being a challenge, based on the fact that we've had security breaches at the Pentagon, the CIA, and so on. How do we do that? What recommendations do you have?