Evidence of meeting #97 for Natural Resources in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was statistics.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Prof. Pierre-Olivier Pineau
Yes, they don't speak enough. They don't have a vision of what the energy data should be. With regard to electricity, in particular, it's a problem. That might be related to the fact that all electricity systems are provincially based, and then they basically operate in silos. Of course, they trade on the margin, but every province is operating its energy system within its own province as a silo.
If you look at, for example, Europe, there are many countries—27 countries—and they have a website. That's an example that I gave in my presentation, which you'll receive this afternoon. They have one website where you can have access to every European country. On an hourly basis, you can have the hourly consumption in France, Germany, Italy, etc. You go to one website, and you can have the production data—the hourly production data—for every country, and consumption data, and how much wind is produced in Denmark now, how much wind is produced in Spain now. They've been able to gather their data together—27 countries. We're 10 provinces, and we're not able to do that. I think it's a shame.
Electricity is extremely important to operate. We want the market to be active.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal James Maloney
I'm going to have to stop you there, Professor. Thank you.
Mr. Falk.
Conservative
Ted Falk Conservative Provencher, MB
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Dr. Pineau, for your testimony here at committee. Your passion is very evident. Your enthusiasm for the work you're doing is almost contagious, so thank you very much. It's refreshing to see people engaged in their work and passionate about it.
You published an article in “Policy Options” last year. In it you argue that the lack of shared data in eastern Canada is costly to the consumer, and that it also makes the possibility of large-scale projects very difficult. Can you expand on that a little bit? Is that just an eastern Canada phenomenon, or is that...?
Prof. Pierre-Olivier Pineau
No. As I was just saying in my examples for electricity, all our provinces are working in silos. Quebec is planning for Quebec. Ontario is planning for Ontario. New Brunswick is planning for New Brunswick. Of course, when you look only at one province, you don't have the economies of scale that you could have if you were planning for more provinces and if you were looking at, more generally, what happens.
Look at what Alberta is doing right now. Alberta wants to introduce a lot of wind into its electricity sector. It wants to displace coal, have natural gas, and invest in a lot of wind. At the same time, B.C. is struggling with its Site C hydro project. At no point have there been discussions or joint planning to see if Site C for hydro development in B.C. could be useful for wind penetration in Alberta. Wind and hydro are complements because when the wind doesn't blow, you can use hydro. That's just an illustration of how maybe Site C is not justified on a purely B.C. basis. If it were planned jointly with Alberta, then wind in Alberta would make more sense because it wouldn't fluctuate as much, but could be balanced with the hydro in B.C. Has Alberta gone to B.C. to do joint planning? Very little.
It's the same thing with Manitoba and Saskatchewan. They could and they should have joint planning for their hydro systems, but they have two separate hydro systems. Again, all across Canada there's a lack of joint planning that is actually extremely harmful because we have projects that are not optimal, and ultimately, consumers will pay more for these projects.
Conservative
Ted Falk Conservative Provencher, MB
You identified in your presentation also that the energy potential from biomass was excluded in data. Are there other sources of energy that you've identified that are not included, but perhaps should be?
Prof. Pierre-Olivier Pineau
Yes. There are many of the new, small, renewable energy sources, like geothermal energy. How many houses in Canada are heated through geothermal energy? We don't know. In Switzerland, they would actually collect that data, so that's another example, another best practice. Statistics Canada should look at what Switzerland is doing. How many PV panels are there on the roofs in Switzerland? They know that. Do we know in Canada? No, we don't. With regard to geothermal energy, how many wells have been drilled to get geothermal energy in Canada? Again, we don't know that. Biomass and most of these new and smaller, but potentially important, renewable sources are not very well studied.
Conservative
Ted Falk Conservative Provencher, MB
Another avenue I'd like to pursue a little bit, from your comments, is this. You said that we should shift our focus a little more away from environmental concerns and more to economic concerns. Without putting words into your mouth, I would like you to explain a little more about the benefit of doing that.
Prof. Pierre-Olivier Pineau
I strongly believe we should work against climate change and we should reduce our emissions, but people think it's first an environmental issue. However, as far as I am concerned, and the numbers I've seen in terms of congestion and Canadians going into debt to buy their new vehicles.... We currently have low interest rates, but people keep buying bigger vehicles and getting into more debt for them. When interest rates rise, they will be trapped with their big vehicles, which use more gasoline than the smaller vehicles they could have purchased that would have cost less.
Ultimately, right now Canadians are investing a lot of money in vehicles that are not used very often, because one vehicle is used one hour a day, on average. Basically you buy a $35,000 SUV and it stays idle for 23 hours every day. That's not a good business investment. You don't go hunting or go moving your grandma every week, so basically the pickup truck you have is not used optimally most of the time.
The F-150 is the most sold vehicle across Canada, and we're not using it as.... It's just oversized for the needs of most Canadians. I'm not saying that some Canadians don't need these pickup trucks. I'm just saying that most buyers don't need them. Some do; some don't. We're investing a lot of money in these trucks that are ultimately burning more gasoline than needed just for the transportation needs, and that's creating congestion. It's also creating infrastructure costs, because we always want more roads and bridges. That's costing Canadians a lot.
In terms of economics, it's a bad investment, and in terms of the environment, of course it's not good for the environment, so I think the focus should shift towards how much our transportation system costs us. It costs us a lot for providing us with a lot of congestion, which is not very productive from an economic perspective.
Conservative
Ted Falk Conservative Provencher, MB
I think I follow what you're saying. Just to summarize, you're saying that by focusing more on the economic side of energy, we would actually achieve our environmental goals as well.
Conservative
Ted Falk Conservative Provencher, MB
We're starting from the wrong perspective is what you're suggesting.
Conservative
Ted Falk Conservative Provencher, MB
I have one quick question I would like to get in. You talked about Stats Canada. You've had lots of interaction with them. You work with them closely. You gather data. You talked about some of the inconsistencies in, or the incoherence of their data.
In your opinion, can Stats Canada be fixed to the point where it would accomplish what you would envision a national data energy supplier should?
Prof. Pierre-Olivier Pineau
I have to say I'm not an internal expert on how Statistics Canada is organized and the internal problems they may have. Without knowing these internal problems and the possible fights they may have internally, I think, yes, they can definitely fix the problems. If they get the resources and put their priorities on doing that and they are rewarded for doing a better job, I really think there's no reason why they couldn't. I think, yes, Statistics Canada could do that, but they may have internal problems that are difficult to solve, although I'm not aware of those internal problems.
Richard Cannings NDP South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC
Thank you, Professor Pineau.
You were rushed at the end of your presentation when you were going to talk about what we should be doing and some best practices we could look for, and I'm just offering you an opportunity to expand on that, whether we should look to the EIA in the United States or to Europe. You mentioned Norway and Switzerland. Could you spend some time talking about what we should be doing?
Prof. Pierre-Olivier Pineau
There are many things we should be doing. I think the single agency or one agency having a higher standard is definitely what we should do.
This morning in the U.S.... It's not the EIA. I love the EIA. That's the website I go to maybe three or four times a week to get data, but the U.S. Department of Transportation just released the 2017 national household travel survey. Basically, every few years they do a survey on how Americans are travelling in their cars, in their vehicles. That's key because almost 80% of the oil we're using is in transportation. The majority of the oil we're using in transportation is for households, for our individual vehicles.
If we want to solve our energy issues, we need to understand how it's used. Oil is mostly used in transportation. This morning they released a survey and they provided all the data. They have 130,000 households in their sample. This morning, by going to the American website, as a researcher I could download a dataset containing 130,000 lines with information on the number of cars these households have in the U.S., how many miles they travel in a year, the type of car, their income. This is what we call “microdata”. It's microdata at the household level. I could click on their website and download the dataset and start some analyses, or ask a student to do it.
If you go to Statistics Canada and you want to have access to the microdata, it's hell. Two years ago I actually went and asked for microdata to have my students work on real Canadian data, because I thought it was time to have students working on Canadian data and not always using the U.S. data because the U.S. data is available. I had to go through a lot of paperwork, sign a confidentiality agreement, and then they sent me a CD-ROM with the data, which was less interesting than the U.S. equivalent. In the end we did use the Canadian data in my class, but it's not user friendly. There are a lot of barriers. For the American data, you go on the website and you download the dataset. For Statistics Canada, you have to write them an email. They send you a letter. You have to read the contract, sign the contract, resend the contract, and then they send you the DVD or the CD-ROM with the data.
This was not secret. Everything was anonymized so I could not track back to the household with their good house and how much energy they were using. There were no confidentiality issues, no anonymity issues. It was just lots of paperwork. So the access to data is problematic, and then it's not the data you would wish for. Access to data that you actually don't really like, which is the best you can get, is difficult. Of course, there's a lot of better data.
There are European websites. I've already mentioned this electricity website where you can have all the hourly consumption and production from all sources, from all European countries. Switzerland produces a yearly energy book, similar to the one I publish for Quebec, but much more detailed, and they publish it themselves. It's the energy statistics institution in Switzerland. Switzerland is a federation so they have lots of, not provinces, but what they call cantons. They are smaller, so they do have to compile data from different kinds of provinces in Switzerland. They do provide excellent data on the type of biomass that they use to heat buildings. Is it logs or other types of pellets? For PV, for geothermal energy and, of course, for oil, gasoline, and natural gas, they have extremely detailed data accessible. Again, Switzerland is a country with eight million people. In Canada we have more than 30 million people and we should have better quality data.
There are many examples. By no means do I pretend this to be exhaustive, but there are lots of good practices we could draw on to get better data, especially if we claim to be an energy superpower. We do produce a lot of energy, but we're not a superpower in terms of energy data.
NDP
Richard Cannings NDP South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC
I wondered if you might want to continue in that vein on energy efficiency. I've heard at energy meetings that efficiency is the best new fuel and you seem to have a lot of passion for that subject. Perhaps you could let us know what kind of data we're missing in Canada around energy efficiency that would be helpful for us to meet our target.
Prof. Pierre-Olivier Pineau
We don't have a good picture of the cost of our energy transportation system, the transportation system, or mobility across Canada. We don't have a good grasp on how much it costs us as a country to build the roads, to maintain the roads, to buy the cars, and to maintain cars and SUVs on the roads.
With regard to our heavy trucks compared with rail, rail uses one-tenth the energy of heavy trucks. Canada has not invested in new railroads for the last 50 years. CN and CP are just maintaining their railroads. We don't invest in new railroads. Our priority infrastructure project should be to connect Canada for freight because heavy truck transportation is expensive. It's destroying roads because heavy trucks are heavy. This is what costs us a lot in terms of roads. They take space, and many of these heavy trucks go across Canada.
We don't have a good picture of how heavy trucks could be substituted by rail and what the overall cost to society would be. So far, CN and CP are not interested in building new railroads because they see their businesses as extremely operational. They operate their railways extremely well, but they don't think in terms of investment. If we want to reduce greenhouse gases by 30% in 2030, now is the time to ask how we will transport freight in 12 years. We will need to have fewer trucks.
We talk about electric trucks and hydrogen trucks. These are fine and we'll need them, but you cannot electrify all these heavy trucks easily. It will cost a lot, so you will need more railways. We've built Canada on railways. We should build a 21st-century Canada on railways. That will not exclude the individual vehicles or trucks; it will be a complement. If we look at the growth of freight traffic in Canada, it's heavy trucks that have taken the majority of the growth, at the cost of more congestion and more road damage. These heavy trucks are the vehicles that are destroying roads and creating the issues. More data on freight transportation and on cost would help us a lot.
Building efficiency is a key area. There should be more information on how we're using energy in buildings and on what is the energy saving potential we could achieve.
Liberal
Mary Ng Liberal Markham—Thornhill, ON
Professor Pineau, thank you so much for sharing your information. I'm looking forward to reading your slide deck on the proposed solutions.
You talked about the three issues that inhibit us from getting good data, which were incompleteness, incoherence, and scatteredness.
Can you tell us about the incomplete data? Is it because of the way in which it is being compiled right now that it's incomplete, or is it the case that there actually is incompleteness and, therefore, we are not collecting the information that we should be?
About incoherence, do you have recommendations about how to make the data more coherent and more accessible? In terms of the scatteredness, I think we already talked about StatsCan having a greater role or the potential for a central mechanism that actually allows for the data to be collected, analyzed, and used.
Maybe you could talk to me about recommendations around incoherence. How do you make it more coherent?
Prof. Pierre-Olivier Pineau
Thank you for your question.
Regarding incompleteness, I think in terms of biomass and new renewable options, we don't go as aggressively as we should to collect the data, especially on biomass. There are a lot of different types of biomass. It's complex. It's wood but it's waste. It's agricultural waste. There are different types of biomass, but all of that biomass could be used and better valorized to create energy products that are renewable and that could be used.
This is important because we don't go and collect the data. Part of it is that there is not a big market, so of course, there is not a lot of money to be made. Industry is not pushing for that because nobody really cares. It's a farmer from whom you buy some logs to heat your cottage. That's a small market. The problem is that, if we want to move towards our environmental goals, we'll need to do the most from our renewable resources. If you want to manage, you need to be able to have the data and be able to monitor what we're using.
Incompleteness is really based on the fact that because we were blessed with so much oil and natural gas, and because it's cheap, we've overlooked what we also have in great quantities, which is even cheaper. We just leave it on the floor in forests.
Liberal
Mary Ng Liberal Markham—Thornhill, ON
We just finished doing a study on secondary wood products and there certainly are a number, whether it's industry associations or industries themselves, that are actually in this business. They may not be gathering data or maybe they are. At this point, I think that it might be fair to say that it isn't being collected, perhaps as part of the dataset at Statistics Canada, nationally, or through national or even provincial organizations. You're saying that there's an opportunity there to do so.
