Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Members of the committee, good morning.
Energy data have been a focus of mine since 1985, when I was hired to manage the Solar Energy Society of Canada, Inc. after the federal government terminated funding for renewables at the National Research Council. That political decision was partly due to the fact that most Canadians had no idea then of the potential or the need for renewables. We had barely registered on data charts and joked that when a second photovoltaic panel was installed, Canada had increased its PV capacity by 50%.
You have posed five questions on the current state and future of national energy data. Your mistake was asking for my recommendations from 30 years of promoting emerging renewables.
After SESCI, I worked for the national solar and the national wind associations, served as senior writer or editor for the world's two largest magazines on renewables, was trained by Al Gore in his climate reality initiative, spoke at COP 11, managed the U.K. government's climate security program out of Ottawa, currently manage the Canadian Association for Renewable Energies and the Canadian chapter of the International Ground Source Heat Pump Association, and in my spare time serve on three advisory committees on energy or environment for the city and the province. In addition to my professional obsession, I also renovated my older house into one of Canada's top 20 homes for energy efficiency.
The benefits of energy data go far beyond tidy columns of numbers. We do need to know how many million barrels of bitumen are produced, but we also need to know the end use for that oil. Was it burned one time for heat or did it become plastic that can be recycled? How many billion cubic metres of natural gas make fertilizer and how many are burned to generate sine-wave electricity at half the CO2 emissions of coal?
Energy use is finally linked with climate change, and there is an urgent and growing need for clear interpretation of what happens beyond tracking basic production data.
Most users of energy data are geeks like me who care about market share, potential penetration rates, relative movement, and other statistical cross-tabs. As a registered lobbyist, I cite only government figures. You can argue with my assumptions and question my conclusions, but you cannot dispute the statistics.
Experts will never be satisfied with data collection or distribution, but this committee should consider the needs of non-geek Canadians and how the availability of relevant and actionable data can help us become a greener and more sustainable country.
The largest single gap in current datasets is the lack of the detail on end-use application or the disposition of energy. My associations advocate for low-carbon temperature energy in buildings. I crunched NRCan's comprehensive energy use database to show that each home consumes 30,338 kilowatt hours' equivalent of energy, of which 86% is for space heat and water heating. Only a minority is for electric appliances and lights. I then dug deeper to show that an average household emits 4.6 tonnes of carbon, or six pounds per square foot of floor space. Only when numbers are made relevant will people notice, understand, and take the appropriate action.
There are many ways to manage, acquire, and share data, as evidenced by the complex outputs from the office of energy efficiency, the National Energy Board, Statistics Canada, EIA, IEA, EPA, Ernst and Young, Frost & Sullivan and hundreds of private reports that touch on every aspect of energy. When I worked out of the U.S., I liked the EIA reports that were based on mandatory company filings. When I reported out of Britain, EU energy data were culled from a complex structure that makes Canada's federal and provincial jurisdictions look quite simple. However the data are acquired, numbers must be timely, accurate, and open to scrutiny, and, ideally, in the same ballpark. While retaining confidentiality, they must cascade to the lowest possible level of aggregation so they make sense to me as well as to us.
Before I table my top 400 recommendations, I apologize for their cryptic nature and hope they will make sense—