Finance committee  I'm not sure that I'm familiar with this particular program. I'm going to have to ask you to repeat the question one more time. I apologize--

Finance committee  There have been so many investments made in the United States under the most recent stimulus package that I wouldn't want to discount, or not acknowledge, all of the efforts and all of the investments made in renewable power in the States. At the same time, there is one particula

Finance committee  Yes, but they're both really important.

Finance committee  I'm not sure what particular program your friend was referring to that favoured larger projects over smaller projects. The ecoENERGY for Renewable Power program remained the same before and after the last budget. It simply wasn't renewed or expanded, and it is about to run out of

Finance committee  Great. Thank you for having me here and for kicking off this process. My name is Tim Weis. I'm the director of renewable energy and energy efficiency policy at the Pembina Institute. We're a national sustainable energy think tank. We work on issues from conventional energy to t

Natural Resources committee  I just want to make one clarification, because it's been picked up on a couple of times. I didn't mean to say that pilot projects in and of themselves aren't useful, but the point I wanted to make is that pilot projects can't be the ends unto themselves. We need to be thinking be

Natural Resources committee  That is the way the current incentive, ecoENERGY for renewable power, works. It's not specifically for wind; it includes other technologies. But there is sometimes an advantage in targeting certain technologies if you want to try to spread them around geographically. That's what

Natural Resources committee  It's a difficult question to answer because Canada is very different. Obviously, the different provinces have different technologies that they're competing against. The price of carbon in Alberta would be a boon to the industry, because you have a coal-based electricity system th

Natural Resources committee  Even if there's a national price for carbon, for example, if you install a wind turbine in Quebec, where you're competing against hydroelectricity and there's not a lot of carbon associated with that electricity, the electricity that you're offsetting has different rates of carbo

Natural Resources committee  I'll try to give a really quick answer focused on wind, because that's what the question is about. I think Sean is right. If we do want to see manufacturing for the large-scale turbines, we need to have a long-term, stable market. These are huge machines that require huge inves

Natural Resources committee  Thank you. I'd like to thank the chair and the committee for inviting the Pembina Institute to present today. The Pembina Institute is a sustainable energy think tank. We're one of Canada's largest environmental NGOs, and we have offices in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Drayto