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Industry committee He's in there with all the bad guys.
May 29th, 2008Committee meeting
Dr. John MacDonald
Industry committee I'm sorry, what was it you just asked?
May 29th, 2008Committee meeting
Dr. John MacDonald
Industry committee Yes.
May 29th, 2008Committee meeting
Dr. John MacDonald
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.
May 29th, 2008Committee meeting
Dr. John MacDonald
Industry committee Oh, yes, absolutely.
May 29th, 2008Committee meeting
Dr. John MacDonald
Industry committee In fact Xantrex, which is a Canadian company here, specializes in the equipment that does that.
May 29th, 2008Committee meeting
Dr. John MacDonald
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.
May 29th, 2008Committee meeting
Dr. John MacDonald
Industry committee You're number six in six years.
May 29th, 2008Committee meeting
Dr. John MacDonald
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.
May 29th, 2008Committee meeting
Dr. John MacDonald
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.
May 29th, 2008Committee meeting
Dr. John MacDonald
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.
May 29th, 2008Committee meeting
Dr. John MacDonald
Industry committee Is that 100 megawatts?
May 29th, 2008Committee meeting
Dr. John MacDonald
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.
May 29th, 2008Committee meeting
Dr. John MacDonald
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.
May 29th, 2008Committee meeting
Dr. John MacDonald
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.
May 29th, 2008Committee meeting
Dr. John MacDonald