Natural Resources Committee on June 7th, 2018

[Maike Luiken]

To be quite honest with you, I think it's going to be an ongoing race. There is no silver bullet. Technology is evolving, and whatever we build, somebody can break. There is no unified answer. We just have to keep on working on different technologies and different ways to keep data secure.

It's really serious, because in the case of cybersecurity, for example, we could have a breach in the communications in a power system that would bring down, say, the electrical power supply to Toronto and cut it off for a while. Depending on how long it was off, it could be catastrophic. Cybersecurity, data collection on cybersecurity, and the various ways we can monitor what is happening are essential as part of the data collection around energy systems in general.

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

Do you have any recommendations for us at all that we can put into this report, or anything you would like to see?

[Maike Luiken]

I could go back to our experts in that area, if you wish, and ask them to provide a brief. I think I would have to go back and get particular recommendations for you, and they change from month to month.

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

Yes, you are correct. It changes very quickly. I'm just curious.

[Maike Luiken]

There are a whole bunch of recommendations in terms of how to handle data, VPNs, and so on and so forth, on how to protect it in the first place, how to anonymize it properly, and so on. I think, though, that if you want recommendations on a month-to-month basis on what is going on, then we'd have to look at experts in that area and get those services supplied.

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

We've heard multiple times—

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

I'm going to have to stop you there. I hate doing it, but maybe Mr. Cannings can pick up where you left off.

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

I'm going to start with Mr. Zindler and get back to this analysis-modelling-forecasting question.

It seems a part of the reason—indeed, the major reason—for us to create a better energy information system in Canada would be to have all the data in one place. All the data would be consistent, and we could pool all the data from the provinces so that people like you and others wouldn't have to go through the headache of trying to stitch it together.

There's also the question of having a one-stop shop that is non-partisan and independent. I'm wondering how far you would go in terms of that analysis. You say the EIA does some analysis, but you don't consider its forecasts to be reliable. I'm wondering if there's any role for an agency such as this to do forecasts, if they provide various scenarios. You know the devil in those modellings is all the assumptions you put into them; some people will assume this and that, depending on what they want the forecast to look like.

I'm wondering if there's any role for an agency like that to say that if we believe this, then such-and-such will be the outcome. How far down that analysis road would you see a good agency going?

[Ethan Zindler]

That's a good question. I'm somewhat ambivalent about the idea of the government doing its own long-term projections about what the energy sector will look like.

You're exactly right that the good forecasts, EIA's included, provide high, low, and middle scenarios. I think that's very useful, but it is an open question whether it is government's role to forecast on what essentially is mostly a highly regulated but private sector and how it will evolve over the future. I don't know that we do that elsewhere. For instance, government doesn't necessarily try to forecast what exactly the health care industry or the information technology industry will look like in 10 years. I get that energy is in the national interest, and that's why this has probably existed over time, but I think the challenges with central government forecasts is that they become benchmarks.

I speak to this from historical context. Our firm got its start doing research in renewables. Ten years ago, if you looked at the standard forecasts from the EIA, from the IEA, and from many other big authorities in this area, they did not predict even close to the level of growth in development that we've seen in these technologies, and for a number of years that allowed various incumbent players to say these technologies are never going to be viable because the EIA says they are not going to be viable. I'm not convinced that having government provide that kind of benchmark for the future is necessarily the right role for these types of agencies.

That said, collecting data is extraordinarily important, and the analysis of that data, which EIA also does, is extremely important as well, and they do it extraordinarily well.

They got the forecast wrong, but we also got the forecast wrong. Everybody got the forecast wrong. That's inevitable. My issue is whether or not there should be an official government-sanctioned view of the future of the energy industry. I'm not convinced that's the right role for government.

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

One of the problems is having a dataset or some projection that the public at large can trust when it comes to projections. The oil industry might project that this is what the world oil demand will be 10, 20, or 30 years out; then the solar industry says no, it's going to look like this.

I can see the utility of having a neutral, middle-ground player providing some scenarios and people choosing whichever one they want to believe, but it would be something the public could get behind. They could see one industry predicting one thing and another industry predicting something else. As you say, everybody picks the one they want.

Is there any way we could have a neutral analysis of those kinds of questions? Also, how useful is it? Is it useful to go beyond 10 years in this day and age? We see energy demand in different sectors projected out to 2050 now. To me, who knows?

Continue your comments.

[Ethan Zindler]

I think that's a fair point. Frankly, we also do forecasts out to 2050, and I'm sure we're going to be wrong, just like everybody else. I gave us as one example, but our competitors are in the same situation. There are research firms that are trying to think about this in the long term and provide their own views. As you point out, the major oil companies, the solar industries, and others will do that as well. I think the public can combine them.

The concern I have over government forecasts is that your view of the future can be shaded by your view of the present. If you have a particular partisan leaning or view about one particular technology that is shaded by whatever your partisan backing is, that can shade your view of the future.

Again, in the U.S. the accusation against the EIA was that they were too conservative because they were too much in the pockets of the existing energy industry and not forward-looking enough. Frankly, I don't know that was an entirely fair accusation, but I think it's challenging to have government benchmarking the future and I don't know that doing so is a role for government.

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

Okay, I'll just then—

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

I'm going to have to stop you there, Mr. Cannings, unfortunately. Time flies.

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

Okay. I had so much more.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

We have about three minutes left.

Ms. Ng, I think you're going to take it.

[Mary Ng, Liberal, Markham—Thornhill, ON]

Thank you so much. I will try to be succinct here.

On the big dataset that you were talking about, as this committee is thinking about a data strategy, can you talk a little more about that? How might that actually integrate or be helpful in whatever it is that might get put together by way of doing a better job at getting data?

[Maike Luiken]

One of the things we want to avoid is collecting data differently, because we have lots of systems in place.

[Mary Ng, Liberal, Markham—Thornhill, ON]

Right.

[Maike Luiken]

What we need is an interface to be able to integrate data for various reasons—various levels of security, etc. The Green Button standard that was talked about is one of them. You can actually look at the data from different sources through, say, a consistent dashboard. Depending on what level of data we are talking about, if it's totally anonymized, then we can export that dataset into a neutral location, and researchers from all over the world potentially could use it.

[Mary Ng, Liberal, Markham—Thornhill, ON]

Are you saying, then, that those datasets exist now and could be fairly readily...? If Stats Canada, for example, wanted to find an interface to those big datasets, what's the state of readiness around them?

[Maike Luiken]

The readiness is that the system exists, but consistent data across Canada doesn't exist yet. However, this interface, this schema, that Green Button standard—that exists. As more utilities come on—and it could go to water, it could go to gas, it could encompass all of the different energy uses and other different data that can be connected through the schema, through the standard—then it would be a general interface.

The point is to make the datasets available for different analytics and different forecasts. One of the reasons forecasts look different and simulations look different from different sources is that the limits are drawn in a different way. For example, if I make energy forecasts to 2050 in Canada and I had all the data available that we could possibly get and I make assumptions about population growth this way and weather that way, and you do the same thing, but your assumptions on immigration are different from mine or you don't take immigration into account and assume a steady population, of course our forecasts are going to look different. It depends on what boundaries we draw on the different inputs. If one of us uses different or additional variables, the forecast changes. It's not necessarily the bias of the owner of the projection; it is what the boundary on the data input is—

[Mary Ng, Liberal, Markham—Thornhill, ON]

Right. Okay, that then enables the analysis.

[Maike Luiken]

—and then the assumptions that go along with it. People need to be able to play with that and then make a judgment call, saying they trust this projection better than this one. That's where your judgment call comes in.

[Mary Ng, Liberal, Markham—Thornhill, ON]

Mr. Stojanovic, you talked about the data that is being collected through the Green Button initiative. Of course, what we're trying to do here is understand how we can have data that will help Canadians make choices about consumption and about usage and how they might be able to make decisions that may therefore then affect the price of their consumption.

You said that Green Button is scalable. It's scalable through the provinces and across the country. Does it fit into the big datasets that Ms. Luiken was talking about? Then a national energy agency, or whatever, might therefore be able to work with it in an outcomes kind of way, which is understanding production but giving consumers the ability to understand usage and make decisions that then ultimately help our climate goals.

[Zoran Stojanovic]

Those are great points. I want to also add a comment to your previous question.

Data does exist in various formats, and it's not utilized. What's missing is the infrastructure. Going back, we talked about Wi-Fi. We see the Green Button as the standard for Wi-Fi for energy data. We know the data exists, but the ability to authorize it and then make it available, anonymized, and secure—we talked about security—is where the problem is.

Going back, yes, the answer is that the Green Button standard is scalable. It does not all have to be centralized. Utilities hold the data; we just have to enable them to turn that Wi-Fi into energy data so that anybody can use it.