Natural Resources committee  Mr. Chair, ladies and gentlemen members of the committee, good morning. I would like to begin by thanking you for inviting us to testify before you today. My name is Patrick Bateman, and I am the director of Market Policy and Development at the Canadian Solar Industry Associatio

Natural Resources committee  Mr. Tan, to confirm and to ask for a clarification of your question, was it how can we ensure that a federal role would achieve that?

Natural Resources committee  We would recommend that comprehensive stakeholder engagement needs to take place through the development of this process. I think a central agency that was tasked with identifying the needs of the community and working with all of the various different stakeholder groups to lay t

Natural Resources committee  From the perspective of the solar industry, our electricity is largely metered. A number of the metrics that you would want to capture for solar are things that are very verifiable, so from that perspective a large part of the task for the solar industry is just going through the

Natural Resources committee  We would encourage a role for government that is much more enhanced than in the past for the aggregation of data, compilation of data, and making that data available, and also for analysis.

Natural Resources committee  Thank you for the question, Mr. Whalen. Currently a lot of Canada has advanced metering infrastructure, but not all of Canada. Most utilities, most regions, are moving in that direction, so it's likely that by the mid-2020s the vast majority of all electricity consumers will hav

Natural Resources committee  Thank you for the question, Ms. Stubbs. I think a lot of those questions that you've raised are ones that we have answers to, and we can follow up afterwards. Just to address one issue, I would say that in your home province, Alberta, the recent renewable energy procurement,

Natural Resources committee  I'd be happy to.

Natural Resources committee  Thank you, Mr. Johns. When supply-mix planners, policy-makers, or regulators are considering what the future supply mix will look like, cost is obviously one of the primary considerations. The cost of solar electricity will have dropped by about 90% between 2010 and 2020. Wind i

Natural Resources committee  One example would be that there are currently more than 12 U.S. states that generate more than 35% of their annual electricity from solar and wind alone. They are able to do that by having very good resource data on a granular basis in terms of time-frequency and space, meaning s

Natural Resources committee  I think that with respect to the electricity sector broadly, it's kind of at an intermediate stage. There are gaps, but there's a good basis. With respect to renewables and particularly the less established ones—wind, solar, and marine—we're really only getting started. We haven'

Natural Resources committee  Our answer would be no. I think that with the amount of investment in renewables that we're expecting to see over the next decade, we should really be accelerating the data that we have to ensure that those decisions are made wisely over the decade ahead and beyond.

Natural Resources committee  In the United States, they've had an investment tax credit that covers 30% of capital costs for both wind and solar. For wind, there's also a production tax credit. I'm less familiar with the subsidies for hydro or for marine, but the ITC has been the single largest subsidy for r

Natural Resources committee  At the national level, we have the accelerated capital cost allowance, which was recently extended from ending in 2020 to ending in 2025. That means that the accelerated depreciation is going to take place at a 50% rate, as opposed to a 30% rate. Our calculation is the difference

Natural Resources committee  I have two very quick ones. The first would be to make the decision to fulfill that central role and to begin to implement it. The second would be broad stakeholder engagement so that we can ensure that the scoping is right and that the agency can grow to meet the needs of the in