Natural Resources committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. It's a pleasure to be here before the committee once again as you discuss the greening of Canada's electricity system. I believe you have the presentation slides before you. Just to remind you, CanWEA is the national industry association for the Canadian w

Bill C-30 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) committee  The WPPI program and the new program, the eco-energy for renewable power program, are very important for a couple of reasons, but I should say first that the WPPI program had an initial target of securing 1,000 megawatts of installed capacity of wind in Canada by 2007. That was p

Bill C-30 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) committee  In response to your first comment, yes, there is a gap between support levels for wind energy in Canada and in the United States. In Canada, support is 1¢ per kilowatt-hour production payment incentive. In the U.S. there's a 1.9¢ production tax credit. That does make the U.S. a m

Bill C-30 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) committee  It's basic economics, in the sense that increased liquidity will lead to decreased costs. On some of the emerging technologies, we've already seen that the clean development mechanism mentioned by my colleague has led to the installation of wind energy projects in a number of co

Bill C-30 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, for the opportunity to be here today. I'll start off just by telling you a little bit about the Canadian Wind Energy Association. We have 300 corporate members, including turbine and component manufacturers, several utilities, project owners an

Natural Resources committee  A lot of the issues you're touching on are dealt with at the level of the system operators, the people who manage the electrical grid. And one of the areas where we're starting to see a tremendous amount of cooperation is in Atlantic Canada. The New Brunswick system operator is u

Natural Resources committee  Canada is an energy super power, and that's because we've been blessed with a lot of tremendous natural resources, including renewable resources. But it's an energy super power because we've actually developed strategies to develop those resources, whether it's the oil sands, nuc

Natural Resources committee  Clearly, federal, provincial, and municipal governments all have a role to play in terms of regulating and permitting wind energy projects. A recent project in Ontario calculated that it required 77 different permits in order to proceed. There is a problem in the number of permi

Natural Resources committee  There are different ways you can measure penetration of wind energy. One is in terms of absolute megawatts. If you look at it in that way you can see countries such as Germany that have 18,000 megawatts of installed wind energy capacity. Right now we have 900 megawatts. Spain has

Natural Resources committee  I can take a first crack at that. In terms of the levels of wind penetration, the answer will be different in every country. It will differ depending on the quality of your wind resource and it will differ in terms of what you can have to complement wind going forward. You're

Natural Resources committee  I only have a quick comment. Historically, manufacturers didn't look at Canada because it didn't have a market of adequate size. Clearly, having a market of adequate size for your product is a necessary pre-condition to attract manufacturing. But it's not necessarily a sufficie

Natural Resources committee  You raise a lot of things in those questions. First, you asked a question about public opinion. The experience in Canada for wind energy has been that the overwhelming majority of wind energy projects have actually encountered very little in the way of public opposition. There h

Natural Resources committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman and committee members, for the opportunity to be here today. I expect you have a copy of the presentation I'll be giving. It's a little long, so I'm going to be going through some slides rather quickly, but I'll cover all the topics within. My key messa