Industry committee  He's in there with all the bad guys.

Industry committee  I'm sorry, what was it you just asked?

Industry committee  Yes.

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 producing energy, it's feeding it into the grid or you're using it yourself.

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 fact a feed-in tariff structure.

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 that's working on whatever project it is be both industrial and academic are very positive things.

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  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.