Yes. I've basically been a scientist most of my life and so my thoughts are very wide.
Anyway, an observation on Canada is that we are focusing on electric cars and going eventually to ground-source heat pumps if you want to go to zero emissions. That means that in all these cases, we're going to use electricity.
I realized very quickly that there is no way that we can have this world all be electric. It's impossible. We already have a hard time with the air conditioning in the summertime. It's overloading the circuits everywhere. If you now look at that in relation to heat pumps, when you actually start to heat houses, you need approximately two to three times more heat pump capacity than when you use it for cooling.
That means that you use two to three times more electricity for heating the house. In the case of air conditioning, not everybody has air conditioning. However, if we are going to go to heating houses with heat pumps, everybody will have a heat pump. We're going to run out of power, and we haven't even talked about the electric car that's going to be plugged in the laneway.
I looked at the Tesla website and the smallest charger is a 40-amp charger. If you drive long distances every day, like a salesman or something, you need to double-charge it. That means 80 amps of power that you draw at the same time that everybody has the thermostat automatically starting the heat pumps at five o'clock and start cooking. We're going to end up with not enough electricity.
If we have to change that, we have to start changing not only the middle of the house, like the panel, we have to charge the wiring in the streets. We have to put in more transformers, and whatever feeds these transformers has to be heavier and so on, all the way to the power stations. That would be a replacement of millions of kilometres of wiring throughout the whole country, and we don't have that type of money.
I started to look at this and I said, wait a minute, when we look at powering a household, we're actually using different energies. We use electricity for the computer at home, the lights, to run the TV, and maybe electric cooking, but we have a second power source coming in, which is natural gas, and the third power we're using is fuel for the car, which could be gasoline or diesel fuel. We actually use three energies today, and with cleaning up this world, we are saying we want to put everything in electricity. You can't do it. You just don't have it.
What I'm trying to suggest is a different way of looking at how we can do it. This is an established technology that I'm taking about, and it's called P2G, power to gas. It was developed about 10 years ago in Germany, and it works on a very simple principle. I understand you have handouts.
I have this picture here for you, and when you look at it, the first one is basically the components of making water. You see an oxygen molecule and two hydrogen molecules there, and the next one is carbon dioxide. What they do on the first model, the water, through the means of electricity, they toss out the oxygen and they keep the hydrogen. Then the second molecule, which is carbon dioxide, they again toss out the oxygen and keep the carbon. Then they merge it together in this model, which is methane gas or natural gas.
The advantage of this natural gas is that it is 100% pure natural gas. There are no trace elements in it of oil or gas. There's no mercury in it. This is natural gas that is pure. That means when you burn this, of course there's no oxygen here, but to get combustion, you use oxygen, and you basically then take that oxygen again and merge it with hydrogen and it becomes water. That's your waste product. The carbon is merged with oxygen in the combustion process, and you get carbon dioxide again.
What you have done is basically taken the cycle all the way around, from starting with CO2, and then combining it, and then releasing it back into the atmosphere. They call it carbon-neutral natural gas. In the handout I showed the process that can be used in carbon neutral natural gas when you use this.
The next document I have is this one that is related to what happened in Germany, where they actually have an overproduction of electricity due to renewable energy. At the bottom you see that, even when they reduced the standard energy production—they reduce it every day, more and more—they're still overproducing because what we see under the zero line is the overproduction. The discussion of carbon-neutral natural gas is getting very strong there because they see it as wasted energy, what they are doing right now. When we produce more of this carbon-neutral natural gas, then we can actually divert our energy to a carbon-neutral source instead of having everything electricity.
To do that, to collect all the surplus power in Canada.... What happens with nuclear power plants, wind turbines, etc., is that they need to be collected. Therefore, you want an east-west power grid. An east-west power grid is already defended by Engineers Canada and by the Chamber of Commerce. The Liberal Party has talked about it. The NDP has talked about it. The Green Party has talked about it, and the Chamber of Commerce. I speak now for the Progressive Conservatives. I think they also have made the same discussion because they often look at the policies of the Chamber of Commerce.