Good afternoon.
Mr. Chair and members of the committee, thank you for inviting the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers, or OSPE, to provide expert input on behalf of Ontario's engineers regarding Canada's electricity interties.
My name is Handan Tezel. I'm a professor in the department of chemical and biological engineering at the University of Ottawa. Today I'm joined by OSPE's past president and chair, Paul Acchione, as well as by OSPE's policy and government relations lead, Patrick Sackville.
Mr. Acchione and I are members of OSPE's energy task force, which is a group of 12 seasoned professional engineers who are energy experts in their respective fields. We are pleased to be here today to speak on behalf of our esteemed organization and membership.
OSPE is the voice of the engineering profession in Ontario, representing more than 80,000 professional engineers and 250,000 engineering graduates, interns, and students. OSPE advocates on important public policy issues that affect engineers and society. One of those issues is energy, and within that electricity, as well as environmental protection and the existential threat that is climate change.
From the outset, OSPE must stress the importance of ensuring a comprehensive justification for the development of electricity interties, with particular attention to the electricity market reforms being implemented across North America. The electricity markets in North America are evolving toward a design that includes separate markets for energy, capacity, ancillary services, transmission, and distribution. This design progression will have profound impacts on the jurisdiction for intertie and generation capacity investments, as my colleague will now explain.