The Canadian Electricity Association is the voice of Canada's electricity industry. Its members represent the entire electricity value chain, from producers and distributors to residential and industrial customers across the country.
[English]
The electricity grid is the largest and most complex and interconnected machine in North America. It's safe, solid, and well maintained, but it is starting to show its age. Much of Canada's power generation and transmission infrastructure was built more than 50 years ago, when Canada's population stood at 20 million. Today, with more than 34 million Canadians, per-household energy consumption is often double, or triple, what it was in the 1960s.
A recent Conference Board of Canada study entitled, “Shedding Light on the Economic Impact of Investing in Electricity Infrastructure”, projects that an investment of $347.5 billion from 2011 to 2030 is required to meet electricity demand and to power Canada's future.
[Translation]
Increasing the grid's capacity by renewing and expanding infrastructure to meet our customers' power needs is a tremendous challenge. But there is more. Despite the fact that aggressive energy-efficiency programs exist all over the country, a fundamental renewal of infrastructure is needed.
[English]
Compounding the challenge, but also providing a great opportunity, is the need to improve both environmental performance and operational efficiency by replacing analog equipment with new cutting-edge technologies. In short, our existing electricity infrastructure must not only be renewed, but the system itself must be transformed. This is where innovation comes in.
We recognize that innovation in the electricity sector is essential for developing a safe, reliable, and sustainable energy future for Canadians. As we turn over our aging infrastructure, innovation provides an opportunity for us to replace assets with newer and better versions.
[Translation]
The electricity sector is stepping up the pace of its innovative process. Innovation is defined in a number of ways, but for us, it means, quite simply, creating and putting to use smarter or more efficient products, processes, services, technologies or ideas that yield environmental, societal and financial benefits.
[English]
Some Canadian electric utilities are implementing innovation directly related to operations on the ground, such as SaskPower's demonstration project near Estevan, Saskatchewan, that will capture and store a million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. That's the equivalent of taking more than 250,000 cars off the roads.
Others are innovating through the development of processes and services, such as electric vehicle charging stations, infrastructure, or new conservation programs that require collaboration behind the meter.
[Translation]
Innovation is not limited to technological advancements. For an electric company, innovation can mean introducing an internal program for employees to dramatically reduce health and safety risks, or identifying new ways to reach customers and communicate with them. From an electric company's perspective, what matters is being able to either directly or indirectly use innovation to meet new challenges posed by environmental, social and economic sustainability.
[English]
In 2012, CEA's sustainable electricity awards recognized several companies that were working on innovative approaches to project financing, effective engagement of stakeholders, and the optimization of wind generation.
Let me elaborate a bit more on the wind power optimization project, given it's unique approach and the amount of cooperation shown by governments and industry alike.
The wind power optimization project, PowerShift Atlantic, is a four-year clean energy fund project funded through Natural Resources Canada. It's a collaborative research project by New Brunswick Power, in partnership with Saint John Energy, Maritime Electric, Nova Scotia Power, New Brunswick System Operator, the University of New Brunswick, and the governments of New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island.
The program will run until 2014, piloting technology that allows utilities to remotely shift energy usage to specific appliances in homes and commercial buildings in order to optimize wind generation. While current research is focused on wind energy, the learnings may be relevant for optimizing other sources of renewable energy generation in the future.
Innovation is always a work in progress, and we must continue to find new and better ways of delivering our products to the customers.
[Translation]
As far as the main thrust of your study goes, over the past few years, only innovations involving our sector have led to major changes, not only in how we use electricity, but also in how we think about it.
[English]
Not very long ago, fixed to the side of your house was an electric meter with moving dials and mechanical parts. While it's possible, depending upon your home province, that some of you may still have electromechanical meters, odds are that for most of us those old meters reside in the same part of our memories now occupied by rotary-dial telephones and eight-track tapes.
[Translation]
Customers can now access the data they need to actively manage their electricity consumption. They have gone from passive consumers to active participants in the market. They understand the value of every kilowatt-hour of electricity used in their home.
[English]
For example, time-of-use rate pricing introduces market signals that shift electricity usage to off-peak hours, which can lower customer bills while alleviating system constraints. Also, smart meters have enabled the two-way flow of both electricity and information between electricity producers and customers. This is a fundamental shift from that one-way grid, a shift that allows the integration of both distributed power generation and advanced energy management tools.
Real-time system operating information results in distribution networks that are used and expanded more efficiently. Smarter distribution networks and dispersed energy storage devices allow utilities to reduce and respond more quickly to outages. Automated switching devices also make this system more responsive to outages, and limit the impacts to fewer customers.
The net result is significant improvements in the frequency and duration of outages. Modernized customer service systems allow customers to interact with their electric utilities in a way that best suits their lifestyles in real time using customers' preferred means of communication.
While utilities are pushing the innovation agenda across the country, significant barriers to integrating innovative technologies and innovative approaches to customer service remain. The most prominent barriers experienced in our sector are higher costs for new technologies relative to the incumbent technologies and the high standards for technology reliability and certainty.
Reliability, of course, is essential for the electricity sector. In fact, it is a regulatory requirement. This requires that new technology be grid ready.
[Translation]
Transforming Canada's electricity sector and achieving our social, environmental and economic targets hinges on a lot more than just the industry's plans and actions.
[English]
Governments, regulators, civil society, and the broader public must be involved in the conversation if we're to be successful in transforming Canada's electricity system. Our industry has made significant progress in implementing innovative technologies and approaches across the electricity production and delivery system, but significant challenges remain, particularly in regard to large-scale renewal of infrastructure across this country.
Because of infrastructure investment requirements—this is actually a global trend, not strictly a Canadian phenomenon—there is upward pressure on electricity prices across the country. While innovation cannot fully alleviate that pressure, because there's simply no avoiding the fact that our infrastructure is aging, it's doing three things that are very important.
First, innovation is ensuring that tomorrow's technologies are considered when building today. Over time this will lower operating costs, improve asset management, and reduce societal impacts from power interruptions.
[Translation]
Second, innovation is making the grid more dynamic and more flexible in terms of its capacity to adapt to change. That change could last a few minutes, as with outage situations, or a few years, as with the integration of electric vehicles or distributed power generation.
Innovation by power companies is bounded by time, as little as a few nanoseconds to as much as a few generations. And as far as the amount of investment goes, time considerations must weigh heavily in determining what customers are charged.
[English]
Fortunately however, innovation is providing a third benefit, and I have tried to give you a sense of that today.
The relationship between the utility and the customer is changing. Communicating by mail six times a year when the bill comes in is no longer sufficient. The reliable and efficient production, delivery, and use of electricity is too important to be left to a passive utility-customer relationship. Therefore, innovation for our industry goes beyond technology and speaks directly to the need to engage customers in the discussion, understand their preferences, and assure alignment across the entire value chain.
Both industry and customers are already seeing value from this innovation.
[Translation]
Thank you. I would be happy to answer your questions.
:
Thank you, Councillor Hayne.
Thank you, Mr. Chair and committee members. I'm Rob Costanzo. I'm the deputy manager of operations for the City of Surrey.
You have in front of you a PowerPoint presentation. I'm going to reference each slide as I go through it.
Slide 4 illustrates the high-level four-phase approach the city engaged to implement its system. I'm going to speak to each of those phases in turn.
Slide 5 shows how one of the initial studies we engaged in was to determine whether the city had enough feedstock within its own curbside material to justify the implementation of a biogas facility.
To that end we looked very closely at the garbage collected from residential waste, and we conducted a series of seasonal composition studies to determine how much of that garbage comprised organic material such as food waste and kitchen scraps. We found on a consistent basis that approximately 65% of that material comprised organic waste. So on that basis, we determined that would be enough to move forward into a further study to determine the size of facility we would need to develop and what additional materials would need to be brought into that facility to increase the capacity. In our case, we were looking at a facility that would process both residential waste from the Surrey residential curbside program and also waste from the institutional, commercial, and industrial sectors.
If you turn to slide 6, you'll see that one of the challenges we had back in 2010 when we initiated our study was that there were very few municipalities in Canada that had initiated or engaged in waste collection using compressed natural gas garbage trucks. The industry traditionally has used diesel vehicles, and there seemed to be a movement in the United States, particularly within the waste management industry, to leverage the CNG vehicles, particularly now when compressed natural gas costs are very low relative to diesel costs.
We found that globally the uptake is significant in countries outside of North America. The United States, for example, as you see in slide six, has possibly 110,000 CNG vehicles, which represents only 1% of all CNG vehicles. Canada is much lower at 12,000 vehicles. But if you look at slide 7, we have found that the uptake in the last six to seven years has been quite significant. So we know that the uptake is growing substantially. Waste collection transfer vehicles account for about 12% of total vehicular natural gas use at present, and they represent a fast-growing segment in the natural gas vehicle industry.
The International Association for Natural Gas Vehicles estimates that there will be more than 50 million natural gas vehicles worldwide, or about 9% of the world transportation fleets, within the next 10 years.
On that basis we felt our risk was relatively low and through additional market sounding we found that the industry was ready to move in that direction but they were really waiting for a municipality to move forward with this kind of requirement. The City of Surrey mandated natural gas vehicles. Otherwise there are very few government incentives to move in that direction for a private entity.
Slide 8 simply reflects one of the environmental benefits of the CNG vehicle, which is that it produces 23% less in carbon emissions and 90% less in particulate emissions than does a vehicle powered by diesel.
Slide 9 describes the approach we took to maximize output from organic waste. We implemented a system two years ago, which we piloted over the course of a year and a half, to determine how we could leverage and maximize that organic waste output. We engaged a three-cart system. Residents are required to place organic waste in one cart, and this waste is collected every week. Their garbage and recycling carts are emptied on a bi-weekly basis. It's forcing residents to remove the odorous waste on a weekly basis.
Through that process, we found that after a year, that waste, the garbage tonnage, dropped by approximately 50%. Conversely we saw a significant increase on the organic waste side. There was almost an equal increase on the organic waste side.
More important is customer satisfaction. The customer's acceptance of this sort of program is very high at 90%. On this basis, we initiated a request for proposal in 2011 and awarded that request for proposal in late 2011 to BFI Canada, or Progressive Waste Solutions, and initiated our program on October 1, 2012. It was four months ago that we initiated the program city-wide to 100,000 households across the city.
Slide 10 talks at a very high level about some of the benefits we found through our process.
The process we engaged not only has economic benefits, on which I'll get into more detail further on in the presentation, but it also has significant financial benefits. Moving toward the CNG system and the type of system that the city engaged resulted in a $3 million a year savings for the city. Those savings were based on the change in waste collection frequency, having a fully automated collection system, fuel savings with natural gas approximately 50% lower than diesel costs, and lower disposal costs associated with organic waste.
Currently in this region, the cost of garbage disposal is very high. It's at $107 a tonne and the region will increase that rate to $180 a tonne by 2015. Organic waste disposal is at less than $50 a tonne.
Slide 11 shows that already in the first three months of the program, from October 1 to December 31, we realized a waste diversion increase from approximately 15% to almost 70%. We've almost met our goal. We anticipated that it was going to take at least two years to reach that 70% diversion, but we're already there.
As far as public consent goes, there's a very high desire to move toward greater waste diversion, and we were able to gauge that through significant public consultation. We're seeing that success now at curbside. This means the facility we're now proposing to develop will already have a significant amount of material ready to be delivered once it's developed.
:
I'll conclude the presentation. There are three slides left with respect to what's left in our plan.
We are about to embark on a request for qualification process to attract a partner to develop the biofuel facility. The city is very grateful to have received funding from the P3 Canada Fund, late in 2012. P3 Canada will provide up to 25% of the capital cost of the facility. The facility's cost is estimated to be $68 million, so that's approximately a $17-million contribution from the federal government in that regard.
Following the request for qualification, there will be a request for proposals in mid-2013, the selection of a partner late this year, and then move toward construction of the facility, which we expect to be operational by 2015.
As far as the system-wide benefits are concerned, I'll refer you to slide 13. The environmental benefits are that 80,000 tonnes of organic waste will be diverted from landfill annually. Currently much of the waste within this region is trucked on a daily basis to a landfill that is 350 kilometres northeast of the region. This will effectively cut off the transition of that waste from this region to a distant landfill. The future facility is estimated to produce approximately 320,000 gigajoules of natural gas, which equates to approximately 6.9 million litres of diesel annually. It's quite significant. We estimate that would fuel approximately four times the fleet size that it takes to collect waste in the city of Surrey. That gas will not only be used by the city, but it will be placed on the market. It's a carbon neutral gas, given that it's stemming from organic waste—food waste and yard waste—versus a gas stemming from the grid.
The CO2 equivalent reduction is estimated to be approximately 23,000 tonnes.The significance is that it will offset the City of Surrey's corporate emissions, which are estimated to be 16,000 tonnes per year. As far as the economic benefits are concerned, as I mentioned earlier, our annual saving in waste collection is approximately $3 million per year. Annual fuel savings, alone, are $1.2 million, which is incorporated within that $3 million savings.
The cost of the CNG vehicles is approximately 20% higher than traditional diesel vehicles, but the return on investment is very fast, at two years. The typical life of these vehicles is approximately 10 years. Annual savings of organic waste versus garbage disposal will be approximately $600,000 per year. The sale of the renewable gas is estimated to be between $4 million and $5 million.
What's very important is that there's a real made-in-Canada story here. The CNG trucks used by the city are comprised of Cummins Westport CNG engines. The head office for research and development for that engine is in Vancouver, B.C. The bodies of the trucks are from Mack, which is a U.S.-based production, but the truck is assembled in Quebec, in the city of Saint-Nicolas.
With that, we thank you again for allowing us to provide our presentation, and we look forward to your questions.
:
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and honourable members.
As mentioned, my name is Dave Simpson, and I'm the general manager of sales and marketing and customer care for Union Gas, which is based in Chatham, Ontario. On behalf of Union Gas, I would initially like to thank the committee for inviting us to present our perspective on technological innovation in the natural gas sector.
Over the next few minutes, l'm going to touch on a few key innovations that have helped us move our product more efficiently and others that are helping our customers use it more efficiently. I'm also going to talk about a few of the most promising areas we see for future innovation.
I did provide a few slides.
If you would turn to slide 2, I would point out that Union Gas is owned and operated by Spectra Energy. Spectra Energy operates a diversified portfolio among four different business lines: western Canada transmission and processing; Union Gas; DCP Midstream, which is a natural gas liquids joint venture with ConocoPhillips; and Spectra Energy Transmission.
As you can see from the bullets on the slides, Spectra Energy is deeply invested in Canada. In fact, the majority of our employees are here. We have made significant investments, paid millions in federal taxes every year, and our Spectra CEO, Mr. Greg Ebel, a former president of Union Gas, is a Canadian. Greg was actually born in Ottawa and worked for a time as a senior adviser on Parliament Hill.
I draw your attention to the third slide just to call out that Union Gas is essentially two businesses in one. We are a distribution company delivering natural gas to about 1.4 million homes and businesses across Ontario. We have more than 67,000 kilometres of pipeline in the ground, and we deliver not just to residential customers but also to industrial and power generation customers. As well, Union Gas is a storage and transmission company. We own and operate the largest underground storage facility in Canada, one of the largest in North America, at Dawn, which is a town just southwest of Sarnia, Ontario.
Natural gas already makes an important contribution to Canada and Ontario. It's plentiful and affordable, cleaner, and we believe with new technology applications, it will play an increasingly important role in the future of the Canadian and global energy supply mix.
One important note is that natural gas is filling the gap as the province of Ontario closes its remaining coal-fired power plants. As Ontario moves toward more renewables such as wind and solar, which represent about 4.8% of our energy needs, natural gas is the on-demand power source that is responding when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining. My point is that natural gas has a foundational role to play in any energy plan.
The last slide, slide 4, shows that we've seen some innovations in the natural gas sector that have definitely moved us along. For example, on the transmission side, over the past two decades we've seen compressor improvements in the stations that compress and move the gas through our pipeline system—noise reduction, efficiency improvements, pipeline coatings, and the use of plastic pipe.
From an end-use perspective, we've seen tremendous innovations to the residential building envelope—insulation, windows, and high-efficiency furnaces and water heaters—driven in part by a steady evolution in building codes and standards. This is reflected in lower average gas consumption. For example, consumption for our residential customers has dropped by 30% in the last 20 years. This reflects not only the significant improvements in building envelope and space heating efficiencies, but also customers' continuing energy conservation activities.
Union Gas has played a significant role in driving energy conservation and market transformation in all of our customer market segments through our demand side management, DSM, programs.
Union's programs span all of our customer segments, from the smallest low-income residential applications to the very largest industrial process improvements.
Since 1997, when we first began offering demand side management programs, Union Gas has helped deliver more than 5.5-billion cubic metres of natural gas savings, and reduced carbon emissions by the equivalent of removing effectively two million cars from Ontario's roads for a year.
In other words, gas utilities like ours are key players in the continuing drive to use energy more efficiently and deliver better environmental outcomes, higher productivity, and affordability for Canadians.
l'd like to spend my last few minutes talking about what we see as some prime areas for innovation. In a side note, I am going to focus on taking a few technological innovations more deeply into the implementation and commercialization phase. These specific applications have made some early technological progress; however, they have not migrated to full-scale application.
Much of the innovation that I'll mention revolves around LNG, or liquefied natural gas, and CNG, which we've heard mention of, which is compressed natural gas.
LNG is natural gas that is supercooled to extreme, extreme low temperatures and then stored in a highly concentrated liquid form. It takes considerable energy to manufacture LNG, but the versatility and the possible applications of this fuel are quite diverse.
Compressed natural gas, as the name implies, is compressed through the compression process under higher pressures and stored in cylinders.
There are three main items I'd like to mention.
The first is LNG for heavy trucks. Canada was an early leader in natural gas vehicles, or NGV, developing innovative vehicles and station technology, as well as codes and standards. Today, with the lowest natural gas prices in a decade, LNG is more economical, at about 40% to 50% cheaper than diesel, and has up to 30% fewer emissions than diesel.
We're seeing a growing trend toward LNG for heavy trucks in the United States. You may have heard of America's natural gas highway initiative. This is where more than 100 fuelling stations are already in place or under way across the country. Here in Canada, we're seeing pilot projects in Quebec, Alberta, and British Columbia start to emerge.
Areas ripe for continued innovation include technologies that enable traditional diesel-powered engines to run on liquefied natural gas, incorporating LNG technology into transport truck manufacturing, and updating vehicle standards, siting of LNG plants, and refuelling depots.
The second item I will mention is LNG or CNG for communities that are difficult to reach by traditional pipelines. These communities are what we call “off pipe”. They are typically remote applications that it would be cost prohibitive to connect by pipeline, but LNG and CNG are now giving us new ways to think about fuelling these communities, which are often located near or right next to such industrial sites as mining operations, which also require heating and power generation.
Currently Union and other utilities across Canada are working with the Canadian Gas Association to identify some pilot projects to utilize these applications. The federal government in fact spends a significant amount of money to aid in the transport of diesel fuel up to many of these communities.
We believe CNG and LNG could be more cost-effective and better for the environment. The Canadian Gas Association is pursuing efforts to better define this opportunity. We believe there's merit in having government engaged in such efforts to help identify the economic, environmental, and social benefits that might be realized.
To put the savings opportunity into perspective, in 2012 Union Gas was able to successfully construct and run a pipeline to a rather remote community in Red Lake, Ontario. This community is located closest to, but fairly far north still, of Thunder Bay, Ontario. The potential savings for residential customers who are converting their equipment to natural gas could be upwards of $2,000 to $3,000 per year. This project of running the gas distribution system to the municipality and the mine in the area was supported by Union Gas, the municipal, provincial, and federal governments, and the Goldcorp mine itself. It's a great success story for a northern community that's been trying to get clean and affordable natural gas to their town for over 25 years.
The third and last technology I would mention is combined heat and power. This technology exists and there are small applications where it typically ranges from 500 kilowatts to about 5 megawatts of power production. Combined heat and power refers to the process that utilizes fuels like natural gas to generate electricity through a turbine or a reciprocating engine. Now the waste heat that is a byproduct of the power generation process is captured and used as useful energy for heating applications. The result is higher energy efficiency and lower emissions. There are several applications that can leverage this technology, including commercial and industrial processes, greenhouse operations, and, even at the local level, models for district heating and cooling systems.
Those are my comments, and again I would like to thank you for your attention and your interest.
:
Thank you for your question.
[English]
Yes, we're just starting to get a sense of what the impact is of time-of-use pricing. This is really very new in terms of how customers are going to respond to begin with, in terms of what kind of price differential is required to actually effect change.
There are two sides to it. One is the behavioural, just based upon pricing, and that's something people are trying to get a sense of. The other side of it is the technology side, what kind of tools can be put into the hands of customers and what kind of tools can be put in the hands of companies to be able to affect the load within the households.
We are seeing some interesting things taking place. I mentioned the Atlantic shift project that had nothing to do with time-of-use pricing and everything to do with wind. What in fact it deals with, though, is the ability to control demand and to shape demand. You can shape demand centrally with respect to wind, but you can also shape it, using the same sorts of tools, to match time-of-use pricing.
At the same time, we see a lot of people outside of our industry, in the IT community, in the IP space, who are looking at developing what they call the “Internet of things”, the web 3.0, so that your fridge and your other appliances will be addressable by IP. Well, when those sorts of innovations actually come into play, the end customer will have even more tools to be able to shape their use of electricity.
The innovation in some cases will come from within the industry. In some cases it will come from the Googles of the world. It will be interesting, though, to see how that plays out.