Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  The very quick, facile answer is—

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  —solar thermal water heating.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  No, it's solar thermal. Just to make sure that all your colleagues on the committee understand, there are various types, but the easiest way is simply facing a board toward the sun, with pipes, and running water through them.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  That is the simplest, cheapest, least-likely-to-have-a-problem technology to derive the greatest amount of energy for the work you put into it.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  That would be my number one solution. Many people with pools go to Home Depot, pick up some black pipe, and throw it on their roof. They have a small pump, and as it's going through the pipe up on the roof, it's heating their pool.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  The second one would be buying flat plate collectors, as they're called, which are slightly more sophisticated, but it's the same concept. You are circulating either water or—pardon my oversimplification—an antifreeze that circulates through there and comes back. The heat is transferred over to your drinking water so that there's no antifreeze in your water.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I'm sorry; I missed wood stoves. They would probably be the absolute easiest and the least likely to go wrong, if you have wood.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  So there's solar water heating, which may not be a big deal in the north for pools. Solar water heating for your potable water is logical, because you need that for 12% of your energy, but it doesn't work well in the winter.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Then you're probably getting into wind. That would be my guess.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  As a first quick point, I hope the data from the Office of Energy Efficiency are accurate. You're right; I was very surprised at how well northern homes showed. It was not the stereotype I was expecting, but we've used the data for years, and we assume they are reasonably good. I couldn't crunch the commercial data because they group the territories with B.C., so that would have made it meaningless.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Oh, it was the barriers. Thank you.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Yes, then there was mining. The biggest barriers for all renewables are cost or resource availability. Dispatchability means wind doesn't work at all if there's no wind. When people drive by the CNE in downtown Toronto, frequently the blades on the wind turbine are not turning.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  If you can get the equipment up north, it's cheaper to install. I lived in downtown Ottawa. We wanted to put in a geothermal loop before we moved out of the city. There wasn't a single driller who would come into the city with a drilling rig in order to install it. They were afraid of the city officials.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Mistakes happen. Twenty years ago, the technology was far more vulnerable or fragile than it is now. You ow have what is called a plug-and-play solar module. You can take it out of a suitcase, throw it up on your roof, connect it in, and it's ready to generate electricity. You need the inverters and a large number of other components.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  If your solar was for electricity, then you could use what Mr. Bevington is talking about, a backup generator. It could be a gas or diesel generator or it could be a wood-pellet generator. You don't need electricity between, say, 10 o'clock at night and seven o'clock in the morning, so you shut off the generator.