Industry committee  I'm not quite sure what he meant. The small producer.... The utilities don't like distributed generation, but the future will have to be that way, so there's a lot of work to be done. When you interact with the grid, there has to be an interface so that when the solar is produci

Industry committee  Oh, yes, absolutely.

Industry committee  In fact Xantrex, which is a Canadian company here, specializes in the equipment that does that.

Industry committee  It would depend on who has the constitutional responsibility, I suppose. You guys know more about that than I do. It's basically legislation that makes the utilities do certain things, and I described it. Ontario, as I say, has this so-called standard offer program, which is in

Industry committee  You're number six in six years.

Industry committee  Yes, we have a little thing going. Until about ten seconds ago there were only five people who've known that since 2002. Now there are six.

Industry committee  I taught at universities for 12 years. These are the places where knowledge is discovered. I think the idea of coupling it into the industry provides a mechanism to get it applied--for example, the sponsoring of research chairs and that type of thing. The mandates that the team t

Industry committee  Is that 100 megawatts?

Industry committee  That's pretty big. It's about 200 acres, roughly. With the technology at the moment, it's about 6,000 panels per megawatt, and the panels are roughly a little more than one metre square.

Industry committee  At the moment, you can just multiply by somewhere between $7 million and $8 million. So for 99 megawatts—call it 100 megawatts—it would cost $700 million or $800 million.

Industry committee  It's substantially more, but like all the renewables—or most of them, anyway—when you purchase the system, what you are really doing is buying future kilowatt-hours. So you have to amortize it over a length of time, and it gets fairly complicated.

Industry committee  Of course it does, and we have ways that we think we can creep up on cost parity. We have a long way to go.

Industry committee  You know what I'd do? I'd start using renewable energy. This is the energy of the future. I'd do an analysis. We don't have time to talk about it here, but take the Bay of Fundy project. Do it. It's very simple. Governments can't pick winners or pick companies or even technolog

Industry committee  When you pick a project, it fulfills a need. I'm not saying we can't find good things to do and open the door to Canadians to respond. We're going to have to have clean energy in this country. Let's get on with building it and open the door. Put in policies that make it possible

Industry committee  I think the question was about good ones and bad ones. I mentioned the unsolicited proposal program. In those days, the purchasing agent was DSS, the Department of Supply and Services. You could make a proposal to DSS and they would shop it around the departments, asking, “Does