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.