Mr. Chair, I would first like to thank you for this opportunity to speak. We appreciate your interest in our work, as it relates to your study.
In our opinion, interties are one of the many tools available that, when used together, could improve the supply and demand of the current electricity grid in Canada.
To illustrate this point, I would like to provide you with some insight into our centre's research in electricity, as well as explain how our work complements or supports the use of interties in Canada.
Our work articulates itself around two main areas: electricity generation and supply, as well as transmission and distribution.
Under the first area, electricity generation and supply, we have examined the solar photovoltaic trends across Canada in terms of both technology adoption and its cost. While increased distributed renewables will contribute to a low-carbon future, they will require a series of tools to ensure Canada's electricity supply remains stable and reliable. Among these tools are increased interconnections between systems, geographically adaptable renewable technology, and smart grid control, which I will discuss further later on.
Costs of PV are dropping, especially for installation, and rooftop installation is becoming increasingly common. The cost of installing PV is decreasing, but residential electricity rates are rising. Therefore, consumers are installing PVs on their own, but utilities must now find solutions to make this new reality technically and financially feasible.
To this end, our centre is participating in international efforts to test smart inverters, which are power conversion units. These can be used to integrate PV, storage and wind energy into the electricity grid. Inverter research therefore aims to understand how generation equipment can supply additional grid services and enable greater use of renewables in the current electrical grid. Inverters represent an additional tool, alongside interties, to enhance electricity services.
Our centre is working with the National Research Council on standards and regulations related to energy storage. Canadian industry will benefit from the identification and mitigation of challenges associated with energy storage, which will constitute another tool to facilitate the integration of renewables in the electricity grid. Much like interties, storage is one of the tools in the tool kit. It does not generate energy but helps bring additional flexibility to the grid.
The second area of work related to electricity transmission and distribution that we focus on [Technical difficulty--Editor].