THE STANDING SENATE COMMITTEE ON ENERGY, THE ENVIRONMENT AND NATURAL RESOURCES
EVIDENCE
OTTAWA, Tuesday, September 26, 2017
The Standing Senate Committee on Energy, the Environment and Natural Resources met this day at 5 p.m. to study on the effects of transitioning to a low carbon economy.
Senator Richard Neufeld (Chair) in the chair.
The Chair: My name is Richard Neufeld and I represent the province of British Columbia. I am honoured to serve as chair of this committee. I am a senator for British Columbia. I wish to welcome all those who are with us in the room and viewers across the country who may be watching on television or online.
As a reminder to those watching, these committee hearings are open to the public and available online on the new Senate website at sencanada.ca. All other committee-related business can also be found online including past reports, bills studied and a list of witnesses.
I would now ask senators around the table to introduce themselves. I will begin by introducing the deputy chair, Senator Paul Massicotte, from Quebec.
Senator Massicotte: Paul Massicotte, Quebec.
Senator MacDonald: Senator MacDonald from Nova Scotia.
Senator Galvez: Rosa Galvez from Quebec.
Senator Black: Douglas Black, Alberta.
Senator Dean: Tony Dean, Ontario.
Senator Griffin: Diane Griffin, Prince Edward Island.
The Chair: I would like to introduce our staff beginning with the clerk Maxime Fortin on my left, and our Library of Parliament analysts, Marc LeBlanc and Sam Banks on my right.
Colleagues, in March 2016 the Senate mandated our committee to embark on an in-depth study on the effects, challenges and costs of transitioning to a lower carbon economy. The Government of Canada has pledged to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions to 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. This is a big undertaking.
Our committee has taken a sector-by-sector approach to this study. We will study five sectors of the Canadian economy which are responsible for over 80 per cent of all GHG emissions. They are electricity, transportation, oil and gas, emission-intensive trade exposed industries and buildings.
Our first interim report on the electricity sector was released on March 7 and our second one on the transportation sector was released on June 22.
Today, for the forty-eighth meeting on our current study, I am pleased to welcome, representing both the Canadian Association for Renewable Energies and the Canadian chapter of the International Ground Source Heat Pump Association, Bill Eggertson, Executive Director.
Bill Eggertson, Executive Director, Canadian Association for Renewable Energies: Thank you for this opportunity to discuss the contribution that buildings can make to Canada’s carbon targets. This has been my focus since 1985 when I was hired by the Solar Energy Society of Canada following a federal decision to terminate all research into renewables because “the energy crisis was over.” I’ve worked with the national wind and solar associations, been trained Al Gore in Climate Reality Project. I spoke at COP 11 on this issue. I was senior writer for the world’s largest magazine on renewables out of Britain where I contributed to the European Union’s adoption of its directive on renewable heat. I managed the U.K. government’s climate security program and renovated my home into one of the top energy retrofits in Canada.
My current work with the CARE, the Canadian Association for Renewable Energies, and IGSHPA, the International Ground Source Heat Pump Association, includes implementation of the NetZeroPlus Coalition. I will speak more on that later.
I cite my background purely to show that I walk the talk on carbon, both professionally and personally. In 2010 I was selected as a torchbearer for the Winter Olympics because I demonstrated it can be and it has been done. My presentation will use data from the Office of Energy Efficiency citing figures for Ontario and converting petajoule into kilowatt hour.
Very few people understand what a BTU or a joule is, even though thermal-primary energy is the root of the challenge we’re here to discuss today. I refuse to prefix with with “giga” or “peta” or “tera” because our challenge is far more actionable if we use terms that people can understand.
If you’re following charts, the first convoluted one that the clerk has circulated shows energy consumption in Ontario. Transportation end use is 244 billion kilowatt hours a year and agriculture is 16. My focus will be the 265 billion kilowatt hours in the province’s residential and CI sectors.
In those sectors temperature for space heating, water heating and space cooling consumes 89 per cent of total energy in homes and 72 per cent in offices.
Our heavy use of gas, oil, propane, or GOP as I refer to it, for space and water heating means homes emit 21.5 million tonnes of carbon from just those two end uses. That is 5.6 pounds of carbon for every square foot of residential floor space.
The next slide chart shows that the average household consumes 30,500 kilowatt hours per year: 20,000 for space heating, 6,000 for water heating, 500 for space cooling and 3,300 for plug load. Can this level of energy consumption and the concomitant carbon emissions be reduced? Easily.
The next chart is a picture of my house. It is 3,500 square feet, built in early 1980s. When we moved in we installed low-flow toilets, rain barrels, trees, yada, yada, yada. On the energy side we installed motion sensors, timers, circulating fans, Energy Star appliances and an Energy Star metal roof, which also increases the efficiency of our solar panels, and LED lighting that can use 12-volt DC from other small panels and small wind turbines on their property.
The house was double wall construction but we added even more insulation and upgraded our windows to triple pane double low E krypton gas fill. That’s a higher RSI value than most of your walls. The result was an EnerGuide rating of 90. We are one of the top 20 houses in Canada for energy efficiency renovation, and I’m not finished yet.
The largest single contribution comes from our NetZeroPlus heat pump. That’s the new term for geothermal/ground source/GeoExchange earth energy heating and cooling. With a total demand of 30,000, a heat pump will produce 20,000 space heat, 6,000 hot water and 500 cooling. This is all renewable energy from the world’s largest thermal storage battery, the earth.
In addition to the existing 3,000 plug load, a NetZeroPlus heat pump needs 8,000 kilowatt hours to operate. The bottom line is that 30,000 house now needs 11,800 for all energy, plug and temperature, a saving of 19,000 per home per year. Not only does my house save a lot of energy/electricity, it uses almost no power during peak time of use and is a baseload demand for my utility.
In terms of carbon, my share for power from the grid is 700 kilograms a year, plus 300 kilograms from the GOP we use for propane cooking. I get no credit for the 7-tonne offset from my microfit solar panels or the carbon sequestration from my trees.
Too often people use the term “net zero” to mean electricity, but in Canada it must encompass all energy since lights and appliances are only 11 per cent of a home’s energy demand. A key goal of our NetZeroPlus coalition is to get supply and demand stakeholders to lever each other’s technology to optimize energy savings and carbon reduction. For example, to meet that 30,000 demand a house needs 130 solar panels. If it has a NetZeroPlus heat pump, it needs 50.
I’m almost out of time but I would like to leave some comments. I won’t mention the easy solutions of energy efficiency or conservation. Nor will I dwell on the potential for these ideas to build smart cities.
First, space heating and water heating are the prime targets, but watch out for space cooling. Even in winter most office buildings need cooling and residential air conditioning has doubled since 1990. With global warming it will only go up.
Second, utilities are implementing time-of-use rates, so any technology that leverages natural storage, temperature or plug, should be placed at the top of the go-to list.
Third, electrification will reduce carbon but be sensitive to the competition for this high quality pure sine wave commodity. It should never be used for low-grade applications such as warming a house to 20 degrees. If all passenger cars became electric vehicles now, Ontario would need four more nuclear reactors just to produce their fuel.
Fourth, beware of renewable natural gas. If adding 5 per cent waste makes something renewable, the 10 per cent ethanol in our cars means we’re driving on renewable gasoline, and the 6 per cent of wind in the Ontario grid means we have renewable nuclear. Ontario used to co-fire with biomass but they never said it was renewable coal. Natural gas emits half the carbon of coal and boosting our consumption of this fossil fuel, as better as it is, could push our carbon emissions back to former levels.
Fifth, after the renewable heating directive in Europe I tried to promote a Greentherm standard here, where suppliers of temperature energy, the GOP guys, would be required to source X per cent from a renewable energy such as solar thermal or NetZeroPlus. Renewable portfolio standards were critical to the early success of wind and solar power in many jurisdictions. A Greentherm standard for temperature energy would be even more effective in reducing carbon here in Canada.
Sixth, transitioning to a low carbon economy is simply a case of reducing carbon energy. Exhorting Canadians to limit global temperature rise to 2 degrees is even less useful than the old one tonne challenge where no one told us what a tonne was. If you want us to reduce carbon, tell us how many fewer kilowatt hours of carbon energy we must consume. That is actionable. Anything else will fall short.
December 11 will mark 20 years since the Kyoto Protocol, the first time our world collectively recognized the urgent need to act on carbon. I ask this committee to deliver an anniversary present to Canadians, clearly showing us what needs to be done and how so our transition to a low carbon economy will involve lower energy demand and use real renewables to provide the balance.
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Thank you for the time you gave me.
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The Chair: Thank you very much, sir. That was very interesting.
Senator Massicotte: I guess what your presentation is telling us is that the technology is there for us to achieve a significant reduction in carbon. You’ve personally experienced that, but could you give me an insight as to the cost? You talk about your geothermal heat pump and other innovations where you have an efficient home. What did it cost?
Mr. Eggertson: I have been in renewables long enough, senator, that the word “cost” irritates me only because I view it as an investment.
To answer your question, sir, the house that we moved into needed some work, so you might as well do a proper job. It was an opportunity for me to try it. There were little things like we changed to an Energy Star metal roof partly because, though the asphalt shingles had a few more years, of the efficiency of the solar panels increases. A lot of people put solar panels on the asphalt shingles on their roofs. The asphalt will continue to degrade. They will have to remove the panels at some point and change their roofs to put the panels back on. We won’t have to worry about that.
Is that a cost or an investment? Adding insulation, again, if it’s reducing my annual consumption and the cost of buying energy. Ignoring all of those caveats, I was lucky because I ran the association. I installed my own heat pump. It was far more efficient than what an average person would do. I went deeper and longer because I had such a great deal. I put contingencies and redundancies that I will never use. I think the average person would pay about $15,000 for a heat pump similar to mine, with all the bells and whistles I have on it.
We were the first in eastern Ontario to install solar panels. We ran into every problem you could imagine: the measurements, Canada switching us from serial to parallel connection, the IESO and the regulators. We had a 400-amp service and they said, “We can’t install it.” “Why?” “You’ve got 400-amp service.” “Tell me what the problem is.” I had to have my solar person say that 400 amps were better than 200 amps. They had to come up with a procedure that way.
There were a lot of hiccups that again were part of the labour cost, but I think I paid back the solar roof in seven years.
Senator Massicotte: All in I know you had a lot of conditions and what-ifs and so on, but what did it cost with all of those improvements and how much did you save in energy costs?
Mr. Eggertson: Again, a number of the improvements were things that had to be done. However, if I were to disaggregate the energy costs, just the heat pump, the added insulation, I’m going to say $20,000. The person before us had heated the house with propane, so I don't know what she was paying for energy bills. It’s not a fair comparison, but we saved a very large amount of money. We now buy 11,000 kilowatt hours a year of electricity to run virtually everything in our house. As one of the slides shows, my house is designed so that at 6:59 in the morning my heat pump shuts off. It kicks in, on a cold winter day.
Senator Massicotte: You spent approximately $20,000 in total costs of all of the renovations?
Mr. Eggertson: No. Additional granite countertop and things like that.
Senator Massicotte: I appreciate that, but the things you related.
Mr. Eggertson: Yes.
Senator Massicotte: How much money did you save in your annual heating and annual electricity costs?
Mr. Eggertson: Difficult to say because, of course, we did this immediately upon moving in. I know we were saving something like $1,500 a year over what the previous occupant had been paying, so a 10-year simple payback on that basis.
Senator Massicotte: We visited a couple of those homes like yours. They are very tight and air circulation becomes very important, as do relative humidity and disease. What did you do there? How did you resolve that, manage that issue?
Mr. Eggertson: By law, I have a heat recovery ventilator. It basically in winter brings the cold air into the house. It’s cold, dry air. As it’s coming in there is a honeycomb system that takes the warm, moist air going out and transfers the heat and the latency, the moisture, over so that it preheats this air. However, yes, I have to have three air changes per hour in the house.
Senator Massicotte: You also mentioned in your presentation that one should never heat space with electricity. It’s an inefficient use. That would also apply to Quebec where we have ample relatively inexpensive electricity?
Mr. Eggertson: Hydro Quebec makes a lot of money shipping that electricity down to the northeastern United States. They’re involved in a number of bids. Yes, you have a choice. You could use La Grande-2 to heat your houses in Quebec. You could install NetZeroPlus heat pumps in the feasible applications in all of Quebec and have an awful lot of electricity left to ship down to the United States. That’s how Manitoba Hydro does it. It’s an issue for the province and the utility there to consider.
Obviously electricity in Quebec is cheaper. It is cleaner. Hydro Quebec, in fairness, is the only provincial utility that admits they have a carbon footprint from the methane that is released from LG-2. I love the fact that they admit that. Should you be using that to heat homes? This is a pure sine wave carrier that my computer needs. You don’t need it for 20 degrees Celsius.
Senator Dean: Thank you for a terrific presentation. It’s inspiring. We mostly hear from two camps: one with a view that we can’t afford to meet our obligations in terms of climate change targets and others who say we can’t afford not to do it. You clearly fall into the latter camp.
You’ve talked a lot about residential applications. Can we presume that some of the applications and technologies and processes you’ve been talking about would apply to commercial facilities and indeed in some cases to light industrial facilities? Is there any practice or evidence or pilot projects in those sorts of facilities?
Mr. Eggertson: The quick answer, senator, is yes. A lot of my information is combining residential and commercial institutional. It’s just easier for me to segment it.
Commercial institutional is not quite as easy a kill as residential because they have more motors, more electricity. They need to have offices open from nine to five. I literally drop off grid during peak periods, but that’s a residential house. You can’t do that commercially. As a matter of fact, commercial is probably an even better sell in terms of payback than residential.
I love lobbying federal bureaucrats, usually in the highrises on Queen Street. I say, “Do you know what the largest renewable energy site in Canada is?” To tip you off, it’s the Canadian Museum of History. Both towers use water source heat pumps. Both towers are completely, 100 per cent, heated and cooled from the Ottawa River. It’s a stunning example of how the government did the right thing with that type of application. In schools, for instance, they are very easy there because you internalize your loop, and, to oversimplify what happens there, you take the heat from the hot sweaty people in the gym and transfer it to the sedentary people in the library. You don’t need as much heating and cooling. A lot of office buildings take the interior core from the elevator areas and transfer it out to the perimeter, which is where it is cold.
In terms of commercial, I have members who have installed heat pumps that claim a coefficient of performance, which is the efficiency level of a heat pump, of 7 kilowatt hours. For every kilowatt hour of energy they’re using for all of the bells and whistles, the pumps and motors they’re getting 7 kilowatt hours worth of useable thermal temperature energy coming out. CI is actually better.
Senator Black: Thank you, sir, for your presentation. What I’ve concluded from this is that we need about 20 million of you, and the problem would be solved. However we don’t have 20 million of you and we don’t have all Canadians with your resources or with your knowledge.
Why don’t you tell us a couple of things that this committee could recommend be done to endeavour to minimize the carbon discharge from residential properties? What should we do practically, recognizing that we’re dealing with Canadians across the country in all walks of life and all income brackets?
Mr. Eggertson: You’re also into a jurisdictional problem in that it’s not really your job, so to speak. This is very much more in the provincial mandate. The federal government can do a number of things. I think of two off the top of my head. The federal government committed to sourcing 20 per cent of electricity for federal buildings by 2030 or something like that, the Greentherm standard. The feds could simply say that 10 per cent of all federal buildings must obtain Greentherm renewable heating, solar, NetZeroPlus heat pumps or some thermal non-electric source of heat for federal buildings.
I mentioned in my speech the renewable portfolio standards in a number of countries. They said that you have to source 10 per cent of electricity from wind and solar, the renewables. That was the impetus for the takeoff of a large amount of renewable electricity in a number of countries. Canada could do it on the thermal side. It’s done in Europe. They have their directive on renewable heating. Some 5 per cent of all heat in Europe must come from renewable sources. They include wood.
Senator Black: We could do that, you think. If it were to be mandated that by a certain date 20 per cent of the fuel needs for all Government of Canada buildings would be accessed through thermal, what difference would that make?
Mr. Eggertson: I’d have to run the numbers, but a lot.
Senator Black: A lot, so it’s significant; it’s material.
Mr. Eggertson: Yes. It’s also showing leadership.
Senator Black: I get that, but we have a practical target to hit.
Mr. Eggertson: You’ve already committed to 20 per cent of electricity. You are subsidizing, incenting, or whatever the verb you want to use, wind farms and solar panels and they aren’t releasing any carbon.
You’ve probably sensed that I’m not a big fan of nuclear, but at least it’s clean. It’s non-carbon. You are incenting wind and solar. Thank you, keep doing it, but you are incenting it at the expense of nuclear. Why don’t you incent something that actually offsets carbon emissions?
Senator Black: And what would that be, in your view?
Mr. Eggertson: Greentherm, the renewables.
Senator Griffin: What would you say are the greatest obstacles to the installation of heat pumps in homes and other buildings?
Mr. Eggertson: Existing homes?
Senator Griffin: Yes.
Mr. Eggertson: If I can break it down by two, in new homes there are absolutely no impediments, no barriers whatsoever. It is different in existing homes, if you’re on an intercity lot. We used to live in Westboro, a suburb, sort of downtown Ottawa. We had an older house. I was prepared, with my members, to install a heat pump. It would have required a drilling truck to come on to our property and drill a number of bore holes through our driveway. The City of Ottawa is not exactly conducive to that type of thing. I ran the industry association and I could not get a single member who had the guts to come into the city and take it on to do that.
Lack of property is one. To do a horizontal trench, which is what we have done because we have the property, you have to do vertical bore holes. It’s expensive. I’m not going to deny this. If you have an electrically heated house you have baseboards, which means you don’t have the vents necessary to carry the hot air and you’re having to install vents and ductwork throughout your house. Ching, ching, we’re adding up the money here.
A lot of it is simply that we have subsidized energy costs. In my opinion, energy in Canada is far cheaper than what it should be. We’re competing with the conventional, the established. That is a major barrier.
Awareness is a big issue. Most Canadians don’t really understand it or know it. As the senator said, you get a few thousand houses like mine and it starts to get traction.
There are very real barriers. I’m not trying to deny that. The fact that you wouldn’t consider for new housing in new subdivisions is shocking to me. I'm sorry, that the developer wouldn’t do it. I’m not disparaging the federal government at this stage. It should be done. It should be a much more widespread allocation.
We are trying a number of things because everybody here in Ontario is complaining about the high cost of electricity for a number of reasons. What we would like to do is that for the 7,000 or 8,000 kilowatt hours necessary to run a NetZeroPlus heat pump we want a special tariff because that energy and electricity is being paid back fourfold. The utilities should love it. The nuclear generators probably won’t like it. That’s not my problem. Those types of things would encourage people to say we need to do this.
Senator Griffin: In May when our committee went to Summerside, Prince Edward Island, there was a huge number of heat pumps in the city. They weren’t the water-based source but the air-based source. The houses all up and down the streets had these heat pumps.
I think you said those are not as durable, that they don’t last as long as the thermal water-based heat pumps. It struck me that was one case where the word had got out that this was a great way to save energy. By the way, the cost of electricity in Prince Edward Island is high, so it was a real incentive for people to go to heat pumps.
Mr. Eggertson: You’re right. Air source works extremely well in temperate climates like P.E.I. and Vancouver, but the coefficient of performance is about 2.5 and sometimes up to 3.
Nobody knows ground source is there. Nobody at the Canadian Museum of History, including federal bureaucrats, knows it’s there. You can’t tell from my property that it has a heat pump other than the fact there’s no chimney. That’s one of the giveaways. Air source works in a number of applications, remembering that it provides water heating and space cooling. It’s a tri-mode operation. In P.E.I, where the temperatures are not that bad, air source works. In colder temperatures such as in Ottawa, this does need the ground source.
Senator Galvez: Thank you very much. It is very interesting.
You don’t need to time of use of what you are saying because I have been seeing the numbers for many years. To tell you the truth, it has been 10 years. I know you can do much better in your house.
The big question is: Why are we not seeing that? In European countries like Germany, France and Italy everybody has all the equipment you mentioned in your presentation: the pump, the solar roof, the heated floors, and the windows. Everything is there, so why do we not have that here?
I think there are political reasons and technical reasons. I won’t talk about the political reasons. Let’s stay with the technical reasons. The technical reasons are because products and materials are not there yet at the corner. Costco doesn’t sell it. Home Depot doesn’t sell it. Equipment such as the pumps are all imported. They have to come from Germany, not from China, but soon they will come from China.
Another thing is specialized manpower. You have to call somebody who knows what they’re doing, especially with the electrical and heating.
The last point is the lack of norms and standards in the building codes that move the economy and push everybody.
You passed through a lot of problems to build your house the way you did. I’ve been trying to do this in my home. I’m in downtown Quebec, and still I don’t get things very easily. On the technical part, and we will skip the political, how do we get around these obstacles?
Mr. Eggertson: If I can speak from the point of view of the International Ground Source Heat Pump Association, we’re the first body in Canada to have third party certified training for installers. It was developed for the U.S.-based mother corporation, or whatever it would be called. We are offering it in Canada because we’re cognizant of the fact that a number of provinces will probably provide incentives or inducements to Canadians to make their buildings better. We hope that the NetZeroPlus heat pumps are in there, but we are afraid that the industry is not yet ready to meet a skyrocketing demand.
A number of years ago Hydro Ontario had a $2,000 rebate, but that pushed the price up by about $1,900, which consumers didn’t know about. There were also some very poor installations. There was a warranty program which collected about $2 million in warranties that were supposed to last for a long time. They went through $500,000 in the first week after the program ended, partly because we had a system in a house where a well-known corporate CEO lived who had a heat pump installed without a loop in the ground. The efficiency is low if you don’t have the ability to collect the heat, but that was what the industry was doing. It’s like whenever there is a sale on diapers: You buy diapers even if you don’t have a baby. We hit the same problem.
We’re hoping that we are better prepared, that people are aware of the need for quality and professionalism. There are not a lot of people, so if you phone a dealer they will probably try to sell you a gas furnace or an electric baseboard in Quebec simply because they don’t have to explain anything to you. You know what a baseboard is. It’s a lot cheaper. You will pay more in the future, but that’s your problem. They are out to make a quick sale. The industry doesn’t back us because it’s faster, cheaper and easier to sell you a gas furnace or an electric baseboard.
On the reason the Europeans are way ahead of us we did the research. I’m including students at university, a lot of the outliers. The average stay in a home in Canada is 4.5 years. In Europe, it’s 4.5 generations. They install these things because their kids will take the home.
Going back to the question of cost versus investment, the Europeans are way ahead of us in terms of sustainability. I don’t know if there’s a way around that. We’re trying to do a quick flip here with most of our houses. Why would you install something that adds a lot of costs if the person doesn’t appreciate the long-term investment in that technology?
Senator Massicotte: Let me make sure I understand correctly. The average Canadian homeowner is there for 4.5 years. You are talking about people that own homes, not rental, and you’re saying in Europe it’s how many years?
Mr. Eggertson: I’m guessing at Europe, sir. In Canada we got datum a number of years ago. It was rentals as well as ownership, so that does skew it. We are a far more mobile society than they are in Europe. They stick in mommy and daddy’s home for a long period of time.
Senator Patterson: I’m interested in how these wonderful ground source heat pumps are appropriate in all geographical locations in Canada. Do they work in colder locations?
Mr. Eggertson: Even more effectively. Canada has installed them in a number of federal buildings in the North for permafrost protection. You are taking the heat away from the foundation pillar that goes into the ground. You are sucking the heat away from there to keep it frozen so the permafrost does not melt. So, bingo, you’ve already scored.
A heat pump will work. Below the frost line is warmth. You have to bury deeper in northern climates. You don’t have the backhoes. There are a lot of cost issues now that come into the North.
Why are these not used in indigenous communities, for instance? The houses should be energy efficient. You don’t want to waste the energy. It’s digging the trench into the ground. You can use water-based, as the Canadian museum does. There are a number of options that you can use. To answer your question, they will work anywhere.
Senator Patterson: I’m well familiar with thermosiphons, which replace piles in larger buildings and stabilize the ground from shifting due to the building warmth and climate change.
Are you telling me that if you can dig through permafrost, which is a challenge, as you said, you can get heat out of the ground?
Mr. Eggertson: Yes. It’s like a river. There’s ice and below the ice is water that is roughly 0 degrees Celsius.
Senator Galvez: Groundwater.
Senator Patterson: But you can’t do that if you’re building on rock. Is that correct?
Mr. Eggertson: I believe Environment Canada has an observatory in Gatineau. They drilled through bedrock. It is one of the most effective heat transfers. A person would not be able to afford it because costwise it’s unbelievable, but it’s a beautiful transfer medium.
I have a supplemental question. Geothermal electric is where you drill down many kilometres to extract the very deep heat that drives a generator to make electricity. You would never go below about 4 metres unless you’re doing a vertical borehole, but in my horizontal trenching they are down at about 3.5 metres.
Senator Patterson: How do you get through permafrost in the Arctic?
Mr. Eggertson: I’ll admit ignorance. I don’t know.
Senator Patterson: It’s tough.
Mr. Eggertson: Yes.
The Chair: My information is that once you disturb it you have problems. It may not be that easy to trench, but they can directional drill.
Senator Wetston: Thank you for coming. If you take a typical home in Toronto, there’s a lot of new construction but there are a lot of old homes there, as you know. If you had to make a recommendation with respect to properties that are very close, ground source is probably not viable. I will tell you I looked at it for my own home and at $50,000 it seemed unreasonable. It wouldn’t work anyway because of the nature of the home. That’s a personal thing.
You have more or less mentioned this in your remarks, but what do you say to the HVAC industry and the contractors? I mentioned this to another witness last week. I’m not talking about the contractors that just want to make a quick buck, because we certainly know there are a lot of contractors that want to do that, but what would your recommendation be to a homeowner if ground source is not available?
Solar panels become more challenging. I know what they’re doing in Ontario because I used to regulate that sector. I know what we’ve done on solar panels. I know what we’ve done with the IESO and the OPA, and you know it very well as well.
What do you say? Do you have a sense of what the cost would be for an average homeowner in Toronto who wants to convert to a home that is more efficient from a renewable energy perspective?
Mr. Eggertson: I always start off with, “Have you closed your windows?” A lot of people have leaky houses. Can you refurbish the insulation? Get the demand down.
Anecdotally, when I was with the U.K. government, we did an energy audit of Earnscliffe, which is where the High Commissioner lives. It is a touchy building because, of course, it’s a Canadian historic monument so we had to be very careful.
Had we been able to do anything, would we have gone ahead with it because of that sensitivity? I won’t tell you what the energy audit showed, but it is a very leaky building. There wasn’t a lot they could do without major renovations. They put a solar water heater on the swimming pool. That was their contribution. They put some solar thermal on their High Commission on Elgin Street.
To that person in Toronto I would start by saying, “Have you done everything?” We get these calls a lot. People say, “I don’t like my electricity bill.” Is it the utility you don’t like? Is it the cost you don’t like? Is it from a thermal or electric side? Have you reduced your demand profile as much as possible? That’s almost always the cheapest way. Have you done the motion sensors? Do you turn the lights off when you leave the house? Are you wasting the energy of either technology?
Senator Wetston: There are programs in place in Ontario, as you know, to support retrofitting and trying to make your homes more energy efficient. Really what I was getting at is you talk about heat pumps. There are other kinds of heat pumps. There has to be some heating and cooling source for a heat pump and normally that’s natural gas.
Mr. Eggertson: Yes.
Senator Wetston: What is the alternative?
Mr. Eggertson: You have told me that this place in Toronto does not have enough property to wheel in a drill and drill down two or three boreholes?
Senator Wetston: You can’t do it. Are you stuck with natural gas? Let’s call a spade a spade. Is that what you’re stuck with?
Mr. Eggertson: If you have the gas lines going in, you have enough energy and you cannot convert to any other options.
Senator Wetston: Right.
Mr. Eggertson: You can’t convert to solar thermal collectors with the orientation of your roof. If you’re on gas, those are the people who need to stay on gas.
Senator Wetston: We want to reduce, obviously, and we know we’re a natural gas economy. When we talk about Europe, we’re not starved for energy. Many of those countries you mentioned are starved for energy. There’s a natural inclination to try to find a way to provide heating and cooling.
Don't get me wrong. I’m not making excuses here. They have a different industrial environment to deal with their issues. Germany needs natural gas from Russia. It may be painful from time to time. We don’t have that problem. I still don’t know why we’re bringing in oil from other countries, but that’s another issue, chair.
Can you comment on that? That’s the nature of our economy. This is very much the way our economy has been built in many ways. What are your thoughts about that?
Mr. Eggertson: I would request you do an analysis of how many of those houses in downtown Toronto are stuck on gas versus how many of the 14 million households in Canada. Toronto is a good city to show as an example where you can’t do an awful lot. Even renovating and putting in more insulation is tricky in most houses, but if 7 million of the 14 million households can switch off gas that would do a fair amount toward Canada’s carbon contribution.
Senator Wetston: I understand your point. I’m not trying to be difficult. I hope you understand that. I’m trying to understand the circumstances for a reasonably normal homeowner who wants to do this.
If one wanted to do what you did, and I don’t want to pry into your personal life, what would it cost?
Mr. Eggertson: That is a personal question. It does sound a bit rhetorical, doesn’t it, and unfair?
The Chair: It’s a good question.
Mr. Eggertson: It’s probably the question I’m asked most often, as I mentioned to the senator. You know it is cost versus investment. If you are looking at purely how many cheques, we had to write purely for the energy side and not the aesthetic beauty side, it was probably 20. It could even have been as high as 25. I got a deal because I installed the heat pump myself. I got it at cost.
Senator Massicotte: That is $25,000 or $30,000, right?
Mr. Eggertson: Again, not knowing what it was before.
Senator Massicotte: That was your estimate.
Mr. Eggertson: Yes. I have never done that one properly to find out what she paid for her energy before we moved in, but the payback and convenience are there. The fact is that I am avoiding peak time of use rates. I’m on a city advisory committee and the head of Hydro Ottawa is on there. I took him in the photo that is one of my charts showing that I don’t use electricity from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. He said, “You have doctored our photograph somehow.” I said, “No, this is from your online service.” He couldn’t believe that consumers can literally almost drop off the grid. I can’t drop off the grid because I have a microfit system I have to continue to use to get my money, but there is a cost. I’m not arguing that.
Senator Wetston: Of course there’s a cost. I was wondering about a ballpark.
Mr. Eggertson: We also have a larger house than normal and some houses would be cheaper.
Senator Massicotte: Senator Wetston’s home is a lot larger than normal also.
Senator Wetston: That is not so. One final question here. I know senators have heard me ask this question before, but I’m preoccupied with how you get things done in Canada because we have municipal, provincial and federal governments and they all have a piece of the action.
Senator Galvez is very concerned about building codes, and it’s an important area. She will have to deal with a lot of municipal officials in that regard. She knows that better than I do.
What’s the role of the federal government to try to reduce? Can we ever get there? Can Canada ever become 100 per cent renewable? That is a two-part question.
Mr. Eggertson: If you’re talking about 100 per cent renewable of all energies, the Solar Impulse was the first plane to fly around the world with solar panels. It took nine months with one passenger. I don’t think it will displace Boeing and Air Canada immediately. Will it replace ships, trains or boats?
I used to live in Burlington next to the Stelco steel plant. You can’t do that with wind turbines and solar panels. You can’t make steel with most renewable energies. You deal with the low-hanging fruit.
Can we go 100 per cent renewable? If you’re talking about energy, no. If it’s renewable electricity, there’s a shot.
What was the first part of your question?
Senator Wetston: It was on jurisdiction. What is the role of the federal government?
Mr. Eggertson: I’d like to believe, after 20 years of being involved in carbon, since Kyoto and stuff like that, and running the climate security program here, it exposed me to the fact that Canada is slow off the mark, partly because many Canadians deny or don’t want to move. We have cheap energy, so why should we move? We have a lot of hydro electricity. Roughly two-thirds of our electricity is low carbon. In Ontario, we have 60 per cent nuclear, no carbon, and people keep talking about electric cars.
Senator Wetston: I think it’s 40 per cent nuclear, not 60.
Mr. Eggertson: I’ll get back to you on that.
Senator Wetston: I'm happy for you to do that.
Mr. Eggertson: We did analysis using 12 million passenger cars in Canada travelling an average of 16,000 kilometres a year outside of Ontario. If all of them were Toyota Priuses or Chevy Volts, based on the charging amount -- I don’t have the exact number of kilowatt hours -- it would be 12 nuclear reactors.
I asked owners of EVs how much they pay for their fuel. They say, “I don’t. It’s electric.” Are you charging at peak periods during the day? The City of Ottawa has two tier-two charging stations. I probed, and they don’t charge you to charge your car. In my opinion, that is improper. You should be charging.
Senator Wetston: Or pay.
Mr. Eggertson: Yes, at least a nominal amount. You’re correct, sir. I’m glad I’m here and you’re there, because this is your headache. Most Canadians are slowly getting some appreciation of what carbon emissions are, what they mean and, what the implications are. I’m not glad to see disasters in other parts of the world or anything of that nature, but I do love raised awareness. Obviously your committee is tasked with how we get there. You’ve set a goal. I don’t like the two degrees. How many kilowatt hours do you want me to use less? If we can get that signal, it would be nice.
That’s where I view federal government leadership. You don’t have as much power under the Constitution. You’re doing 20 per cent renewable electricity. Do a 20 per cent Greentherm standard. Wow, that would have a huge impact. It would show to Canadians that temperature energy is something we should care about.
We all know it, but we just pay the bills and it goes on. I’m probably the only geek around that tracks my daily watt/hour consumption by end use. I can show you the data. I can bore you to tears, sir. It’s nice to know how much energy, I’m using for what so I can cut back if necessary. It’s nice to be able to explain to people that this is where you’re wasting money, energy, and emitting carbon.
The Chair: I’m very interested in the cost of doing this to homes. Yours was built in the early 1980s. You put your house in public view, so I’m going to ask you, if you don’t have the numbers now, to provide to our clerk the actual cost and when it was done. Did you do most of the work yourself?
I’m a little confused. You say you did some yourself. I don’t know if you hired contractors or all that kind of stuff. It’s not because I want to get nosy into your life. I want to be able to tell Fred and Martha that this is what has been done and this is the cost. Senator Wetston asked that. That is what I’m looking at.
You say the house was built in the early 1980s and it was double wall construction. That’s not normal in the 1980s. Do you mean two walls with an air space in between? That’s not a common build to start with and yet you put more insulation in. I would suggest most houses built in the 1970s or 1980s didn’t have double wall construction and were likely two-by-four instead of two-by-six. There’s a cost associated with that as well.
Mr. Eggertson: Yes.
The Chair: I would like you to get as close as you can, sir, to the actual cost.
Heat pumps are great. I know I inquired about it when I built a house and the cost was horrendous. That’s probably because of where I live in Northern Canada.
Do I understand you converted all energy use to kilowatt hours and you saved 19,000 kilowatt hours? An average kilowatt is about 10 cents an hour, so you’re saving about $1,900 a year. Would that be correct? That’s what my math tells me.
Mr. Eggertson: Yes.
The Chair: I really do want to see itemized costs for these things.
We compare Canada to countries in Europe. We should be fair and tell people Germany has only an average cost of 45 cents a kilowatt hour for electricity. Denmark is the same, and it is only going up. There’s a real incentive at 45 cents a kilowatt hour to be energy efficient and keep your lights turned off. It really makes people think about what it’s costing them. Would you agree with me?
Mr. Eggertson: Yes, 100 per cent, sir. I’m not advocating that Canada jack up prices. I would like to see Canadian energy prices at market value. Without being anti-nuclear, the position of environmentalists is that the cost to commission, run and decommission a nuclear reactor is a lot more than 10 cents a kilowatt hour for the electricity coming out of there, but we’ll let our children worry about the decommissioning. The Europeans are probably one step ahead of Canada. They tend to cost things based on what it costs. Whereas we bury it.
The Chair: They subsidize big industry to keep them at a lower rate and then subsidize the individuals. I don’t know how well that works out because money has to come from somewhere.
Another thing is that you don’t fall for the renewable natural gas boondoggle. You don’t agree with taking the natural gas, pure methane, from our garbage dumps, capturing it and using it rather than letting that pure methane go to the atmosphere. Pure methane is hugely polluting. Is it not a good thing to do as opposed to burning it and letting those greenhouse gas emissions go? That’s my impression, but you seem to think differently unless I misunderstand what you’re saying.
Mr. Eggertson: The Canadian Gas Association says that methane is injected 5 per cent into the pipeline, so 95 per cent natural gas and 5 per cent filthy, disgusting, horrible methane. Yes, that is a better use of methane. After 30 years of promoting the brand called renewable, I get upset when someone comes along and puts 5 per cent the way they should be doing. They should be doing it automatically.
I wouldn’t care if they call it cleaner, more sustainable natural gas, no phosphates or trans-fat-free natural gas. It riles me that they use the term “renewable” and Canadians already think, “It’s renewable like solar and wind and it’s a good substance.”
The Chair: I’m not talking about the renewable part. The question was: Would you say it should continue to be vented to the atmosphere, which is highly polluting, or should we actually be piping that into the system? I know they put it in the lines and it can be burned, but to me that’s a smart thing to do.
Mr. Eggertson: I would go one step further. I’m a bit shocked that the oil and gas plants flare to burn off gas. I wish there were some way it could be done so there is either a mini generator over the top or something happens that you produce energy from that flaring. The flaring is doing nothing. It’s a problem. Can’t we capture that? Better minds than mine have gone after this.
You’re right, sir. Methane should be captured as it should be captured from landfill dumps. Methane is CH4 and people don’t worry about it because it’s not carbon. Well, it’s damaging to the environment. Capture it and use it if possible. If not, somehow decarbonize it.
The Chair: As far as the oil and gas industry, where they can actually recapture that gas they don’t flare it any more. There are regulations. I know that because I put some in place in British Columbia to reduce it. In other places they just can’t do it and there are some reasons why they flare at some places. It’s for a whole host of reasons, not just because they’re too lazy to capture.
In your notes you said if all passenger cars in Canada switched to EV now we would need 12 more nuclear reactors just to produce their fuel. How many megawatts is that? How many megawatt plants is that? Is it twelve 100-megawatt plants or twelve 1,000-megawatt plants?
Mr. Eggertson: We have 17 nuclear reactors in Canada. I took the combined aggregate output from all 17, divided by 17 and came up to a number that I don’t have with me. For the number of electrons or kilowatt hours we need to charge those 22 million cars I did simple math based on the average nuclear reactor. Canada, 12; Ontario, 4.
The Chair: I think you said there were some plug-ins at city hall and they don’t charge for the electricity. It’s actually free. I agree with you there.
What do you think about subsidizing the purchase of EVs? I think in Ontario it is $12,000 a car, Quebec is $8,000 and B.C. is $5,000. Do you agree with doing that? To me, a lot of those cars are being purchased, at least in today’s costs, by the folks who can well afford to buy them.
Mr. Eggertson: Since this is the built environment, not your transportation analysis, I will step outside the pond a little bit. I’m paid 80 cents a kilowatt hour for my solar panels. You incentivize, bribe, or whatever verb you want to use, behaviour modification so people will do the correct thing. If it takes that amount of incentive to kickstart the EV industry, that’s a public policy decision. That’s a decision you guys have to make.
Would I buy an EV without a subsidy? I don’t know. My concern is a little deeper. I totally agree that we need to have fewer flue pipe emissions from cars. We need to burn less gasoline, but, again, we’re at 10 per cent ethanol. Let’s go to 20 per cent ethanol so it’s less bad.
Do we need as much transportation? Why do we continue to pave roads? I’m not being anti or pro intensification. It’s just: Are we sure we want to continue our love affair with cars simply by making them electric? Do we still have an addiction to transportation? Mobility is great but are we subsidizing Elon Musk to buy a Tesla? Is that the public policy objective? That one I don’t want to comment on because I have my own views, but I haven’t done enough research to make any commentary to this committee.
The Chair: Do you drive an EV car now?
Mr. Eggertson: We are in the rural area of Ottawa. We bought a car. We were looking at an electric vehicle. It wouldn’t make sense for a Prius simply because in the country you never brake; you drive. Since the regenerative braking is charging the engine, I would have been paying more gas to drive a heavier car in the country. It didn’t make sense.
We bought the Hyundai Elantra, which at the time was the highest rated gasoline powered, energy efficient car on the market. In the country we don’t have charging stations yet. We have always bought standard transmission simply because it gives you 3 per cent to 6 per cent better fuel efficiency.
This is how I find an environmentalist versus a non-environmentalist: “Do you have a car?” “Is it standard or automatic transmission?” “Automatic.” “Okay, so you’re wasting 3 per cent to 6 per cent of your gasoline.”
When I say I live it sir, I live it.
The Chair: I appreciate that and I'm sure you do. I live in the country too and I use my brakes. I don’t know. It might be a little different country. That’s all. I guess where you live is absolutely flat. Sir, thank you kindly.
Senator Wetston: May I correct the record on one matter?
The Chair: Yes.
Senator Wetston: We were both right and wrong. You were more accurate on the amount of nuclear in Ontario. You said 60 per cent and I said 40 per cent. It’s actually 50 per cent, so we’ll call it a draw.
The Chair: It’s right down the middle.
Senator Wetston: Well, more or less, but he’s probably closer than I am, so thank you.
The Chair: I’m glad you put that on the record.
Mr. Eggertson: On a point of clarification, if I may, Mr. Chair, is that capacity or output generation?
Senator Wetston: It is net output.
Senator Galvez: I want to say something and you tell me if you agree. We are talking about transport. Is there something more inefficient in our society’s transport? The car is in the garage for many hours and then everyone comes out at the same time. We’re all stuck in the traffic for one hour and then the car is stopped again for many hours in parking. We are burning this petroleum, this oil, in a few seconds, what it took nature many million years to produce. I drive a Prius. I have two Prius cars at my house. I brake a lot because I am in the city. I believe in that.
Since we touched the political thing when I thought we were not going to touch it, I want to talk about the subsidies. At the beginning I was upset with the fact that solar, wind, ocean and tide didn’t have subsidies. I was thinking, as you said, the government should give incentives because this is what the government has done with petroleum. They give incentives and subsidies and keep doing it. I was really upset about that.
Now I have changed my mind a bit because what happened is that the renewable industry is doing very well without subsidies. That is a strong indicator of the robustness of this industry. They don’t need the help and assistance of the government.
I think that we can give a push by encouraging, as you said. I believe the government has three roles: forbid noxious things that are bad for our environmental health, control some things and then encourage. I think the government should encourage.
Mr. Eggertson: If I can cite the senator, no, I don’t want to touch the politics.
The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Eggertson, for your presentation. We look forward to your response to some of the questions. I appreciate it very much.
Welcome to the second portion of this Standing Senate Committee on Energy, the Environment and Natural Resources.
I’m welcoming Ian Beausoleil-Morrison, Professor, Faculty of Engineering and Design, Carleton University.
Thank you for being patient. We were late, and I apologize to you. However you got to listen to the first presentation. We look forward to your presentation, and once you’re done we will have some questions from you.
The floor is yours, sir.
Ian Beausoleil-Morrison, Professor, Faculty of Engineering and Design, Carleton University, as an individual: Thank you for the opportunity to speak with the committee this evening. What I would like to talk about are the opportunities for the housing sector to contribute toward the achievement of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets.
We use a lot of energy in the places we live. About 17 per cent of all of the energy we use in Canada occurs within our housing. Predominantly that energy takes two forms: natural gas and electricity. Fully a third of all of the electricity we generate in Canada is used within our houses and about one-quarter of all the natural gas is also used within the houses. I’ll come back to that fuel mix later on.
It’s important to look at how we use that energy within houses. The majority of the energy is used for heating our houses, space heating, which is not a surprise in a cold climate. The second most is hot water heating. Between the two of them they account for more than 80 per cent of the energy we use in our houses for space heating and water heating.
The remaining 20 or so per cent is mainly electricity used for operating appliances, lighting and some space cooling. If we look back over time there is a graph in my presentation that shows that situation has not changed in the last quarter century. We’re still a heating dominated climate. Our buildings are still heating dominated and fully 80 per cent or more of all the energy we need is in the form of heat.
There have been a lot of efforts over the last quarter century to try to address this to reduce energy consumption within Canadian housing. Industry has taken a large role, as have energy utilities and all levels of government, through incentive programs, regulations and building code changes. We have more insulation in our walls now, more insulation in attics, more airtight construction to reduce extraneous air infiltration, better quality windows and lower consuming appliances. All of that has had a very positive impact. If we look back over the last quarter century, we can see about a 33 per cent reduction in the energy intensity, being the amount of energy we use per square metre of floor area of house.
That’s all positive, but if we look at the other side of that coin we see that we’re living in larger and larger houses. Although the energy intensity per square metre has dropped quite a bit, we’re living in larger houses. We’re consuming more space, if you like, and compared to 1990 we are using 29 per more floor area per person in Canada. Beyond that our population as also grown. It has really been a case of taking one step forward by all of these efficiency gains and two steps backward by living in larger buildings and increasing the population. The net result is that we’re consuming more energy and producing more greenhouse gas emissions in our houses today than we did 25 years ago.
There are a lot of things we can do about it. Some of them will be quite complicated to do. Some of them will be virtually costless to do. Some of them will be very costly to do. In large measure we could make great changes by changing some of our behaviour as individuals. Living in smaller buildings, for example, would go a long way.
Do we always need to condition our spaces so that it’s 21 degrees Celsius year-round? We could dress more appropriately according to the season. I’m wearing a jacket today. It’s 30 degrees out. That’s an insane thing to wear. We have to condition our space more for that.
If we turned down the thermostat in the winter by one degree Celsius, we would save about 5 to 10 per cent of space heating energy and by two degrees, 10 to 20 per cent space heating energy. We could have a big impact through our behaviour as individuals, but I think many Canadians don’t really have, I would say, the energy literacy to understand the choices they are making and the impact that could have and how that could contribute toward Canada’s greenhouse gas emission reduction targets.
We can also do what we have been doing, which is mostly focus on efficiency gains through regulations, building code changes, voluntary incentive programs to put more insulation in walls, to make buildings more airtight and to make appliances more efficient. We could continue to do that, but if that’s all we do and that’s where the focus is we will see those gains being offset by increased consumption, larger buildings and population growth. That on its own will not lead us to where we need to be.
There are opportunities for fuel switching. I mentioned earlier that we use a large amount of natural gas in our houses. Some 25 per cent of all the natural gas in Canada is consumed within houses. We can’t get away from the chemistry. When we burn natural gas in a furnace or water heating system we produce carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. We can’t get away from that fact. We have the potential to reduce or potentially even eliminate the use of natural gas within houses but we have to replace that with something.
If we replace it with electricity, then one or two things could happen. If we replace it with electricity, we create a large increase in demand for electricity. We have to grow the central electricity generation systems. We need more generating capacity somehow. If that new generating capacity comes from burning coal or burning more natural gas, we will not improve the situation. We will just displace where the emissions are generated. That will only be helpful if the new generation we add to the grid is emissions free.
The fourth area I’d like to touch upon where I think we have huge technical potential in Canada is exploiting solar energy. Solar energy can take different forms. Passive solar simply means allowing sunlight to pass through windows and designing houses to make better use of that. I think many people are familiar with solar electric systems, but solar electric is a solar thermal system, the type of solar systems we use very little in Canada. Keep in mind that most of our energy needs are thermal. We need to heat houses and heat hot water.
Solar energy is definitely a possibility. It’s a huge challenge with solar energy. We don’t control when the energy is available. The sun shines when it shines and doesn’t necessarily coincide with when our energy needs are. We can have these temporal mismatches. We can have a sunny day, followed by a cloudy day. We already have fairly conventional technologies that can store energy for a few hours or a few days, so that’s not really such an issue.
The bigger time mismatch we have is that most of our solar energy comes in the summertime and most of our energy needs happen in the wintertime. If we could capture solar energy from the summertime and store it for months, we could potentially provide virtually all of our thermal needs of our houses through solar energy. It is technically possible. In the handout I provide some photographs of a research facility at our university where we’re doing just that. We’re exploring ways that we can seasonally store solar energy, so capture solar energy from the summertime, store it for months, and then use that in the wintertime to provide space and water heating. We are quite confident that we can supply 90 to 95 per cent of a typical house’s thermal energy needs through solar energy using these kinds of concepts. They’re not simple. They will not be cheap and that’s one of the big challenges that we have.
In terms of recommendations, the housing sector is one sector that will be the easiest to significantly reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions from, compared to the industrial sector and perhaps compared to the transportation sector as well.
If we are to meet our greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets, we have to do something radical in the housing sector. That will require some bold policy moves on the part of the government if we want to bring about lifestyle changes, things like living in smaller houses and convincing people to use fewer energy services.
We can do more energy efficiency and should do more energy efficiency, but if that’s where our focus is we will not get there. We have the history of the last 25 years to show us that.
With solar energy we do have the potential to provide most of our thermal needs but it won’t be simple. It will not be cheap, and I can already anticipate some of the questions around cost. Technically it is possible to do, so if we make the decision that achieving the policy objective of reducing emissions is important it can be done. It will not be simple or it is not easy.
Senator Massicotte: Thank you very much. It is much appreciated. My starting point is that I’m a market guy. I think the market is very efficient. You have a million decisions made every day by consumers and producers that reach that equilibrium. If we compare ourselves to the communist system, it works wonders.
Relative to your solutions, though, we have a serious climate change problem. I understand that, but to simply ask us to do lifestyle changes it is like buy American or buy Canadian. It is the same with our produce or fruits. A small percentage of Canadians will buy out of loyalty or whatever but most people respond to the market changes. If it costs me more, I’ll consider my behaviour. I will not feel guilty if I don’t change if you’re not charging me for it.
How do we get smaller dwellings or fewer appliances? How do you tweak the market to get you there? If you do it through coercion or some nice political speeches, it will not get you there.
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: I’m not an economist. I’m an engineer but I will give you my opinion. I think we have a market failure in that in our energy market there is no cost for pollution. If I burn natural gas, I’m producing CO2. Someone will suffer the consequences of that. It might not be me. It might be or someone living in the southern hemisphere. It might be my grandchildren’s generation. I’m not paying for that, so there is no incentive for me to produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions. If we costed the pollution that would do a lot to shift the market.
Senator Massicotte: Do you support CO2 pricing?
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: Absolutely, yes, I do.
Senator Massicotte: Will it get you there when you look at your proposed solutions?
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: That depends on what the cost of the carbon dioxide pollution is and how many dollars per tonne. I’m not an economist but I think at $30 a tonne, no, it’s not. That will be a small amount. Is that the real cost of the pollution? Someone could determine the true costs. There will be costs of not acting. If the market were responding to all of those price signals, it would look very different from the market we have today.
Senator Galvez: I’m an engineer and I think that the building codes are horizontal. Right now provinces and municipalities do what they think it is. If we can normalize and extend horizontally, I think we can do a lot.
On the question about the specialized main power that can install this equipment, I have talked to them and they have said that they have barriers to work from Quebec into Ontario and from Ontario to Alberta. I think there are barriers and there is room for this.
Do you have some suggestions for me on how to improve building codes?
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: There are requirements in the building code. There are energy components in the building code. In Ontario’s building code, for example, there are requirements on how much insulation has to go into a wall and what type of windows you can install.
Those requirements are mostly established through consensus, but there is lifecycle costing done to establish those levels. They look at the current cost of natural gas and electricity and projections of what the National Energy Board says natural gas will cost in 10 or 20 years. They look at how long a wall assembly will last and at the incremental cost of adding more insulation. Does that offset the natural gas that will be saved over the lifetime of that wall assembly?
Again, if the cost of the fuels that were used in that lifecycle analysis reflected the full cost of the CO2 emissions, then those numbers would come out very different.
Senator Galvez: According to you, why don’t we produce solar panels here? What is missing? Why don’t we make this production or big batteries or wind turbines or river turbines? I was in Europe and I saw a river turbine. Here we have so many rivers. Why don’t we have river turbines?
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: We do. Canada is one of the largest hydroelectricity producers in the world.
Senator Galvez: I’m not talking about the dam. I’m talking about running rivers.
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: It’s not my area of expertise, but I know a number of Canadian companies develop run-of-the-river hydro systems in certainly British Columbia, Quebec, Newfoundland and Ontario.
Senator Galvez: Are they connected to houses?
The Chair: Certainly, through the transmission system just like when it comes from a dam.
Senator Massicotte: There is no name to it.
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: There is a lot that governments can do to cultivate an industry. If you look at Ontario with the feed and tariff program, 10 or 15 years ago there was no solar electric industry in Ontario. There were no companies that had the capacity to install systems. If you wanted to install a solar PV system, you were paying someone a great deal of cost who didn’t have much expertise in doing. There was a significant learning curve.
By developing the industry, the number of players increases and the costs come down. We have seen in solar PV the cost per installed watt has dropped dramatically in the last 10 years.
Senator Griffin: What barriers need to be removed to make solar energy more available to your average person? What barriers are keeping people like me from using solar energy?
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: The biggest barrier now is cost. The homeowner has to make a decision to put in a heating system. Will they buy a solar thermal system or a natural gas furnace? It’s an obvious choice today. Natural gas is very cheap. The cost of installing a furnace is quite low. There are lots of technicians and companies available that can install that because the market developed that way. That is the incumbent technology. It is the most cost effective right now. If we are not considering the cost of pollution then natural gas will be what we continue to use for a very long time because it’s very inexpensive in Canada. It is different from the situation in Europe.
Senator Griffin: It’s not available in Prince Edward Island. I have to use heating oil from Venezuela.
In your notes you said that leadership is required. Following up on that, what exactly would you recommend that we recommend to the Government of Canada so that it can take some action?
It has two types of actions or instruments available to it: financial and regulatory. What would you recommend would be the two top things we could do?
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: In order to increase the use of solar thermal energy, there are a couple of things that could be done. First is a very strong carbon tax and moving toward that fairly quickly is critical.
There is also a lot the government can do to cultivate the industry and help it become established and build credibility, and that is having more demonstrations of credible systems and having more trained professionals who are able to install and service such systems.
Kickstarting that is difficult for individual consumers to do because the first person out there will pay very large costs because they are dealing with someone who is inexperienced and technologies that are unproven, and they are taking a lot of risk. The government can do a lot to cultivate those industries.
Senator MacDonald: Solar power seems so benign, and I think we all assume that it is. A couple of things trike me as I read up on it. One is that an awful lot of large solar power companies around the world are going bankrupt. Bankruptcies seem to be galloping, actually. It seems to occur as soon as the government subsidies are mulled away that these companies are collapsing.
I look at environments like California where you have substantial access to sun year-round, certainly more than we have in Canada. Is there a practical future for solar power in an environment like Canada's?
Another thing I want to mention, and I was reading up on this, is that certainly a lot of the solar panels throw off and lose a lot of heat. I am curious what your assessment is of those who say that solar panels in many ways contribute to global warming? I’m curious about your professional opinion on these things.
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: I believe what you’re talking about are solar electric systems, solar photovoltaics, which is a very different technology than solar thermal.
With solar electric we’re directly converting sunlight to electricity. Typically those panels have an efficiency of between 15 or 20 per cent, so 15 to 20 per cent of the energy in the sunlight that strikes those panels gets turned to electricity. The rest becomes heat.
That heat is not incremental added. If the solar panels weren’t there, that sunlight would be absorbed on the ground or in the asphalt and would eventually be released to the earth’s atmosphere, so we’re not incrementally adding heat from the solar panel.
Some people argue that the energy required to manufacture the solar panels is quite substantial, and it is. It probably takes two to four years of operational energy use of the solar panel to pay off the energy that was used to manufacture it. They have lifespans of 30-plus years, so over their lifespan they are contributing substantially to GHG emission reductions.
In terms of the economics, solar electric is very different from solar thermal as we’ve seen in a lot of jurisdictions. Germany was the first to have the feed-in tariff program but it has been replicated in other jurisdictions including Ontario. That’s a case where a government policy has incented an industry to develop. In normal economic conditions it wouldn’t have. In Germany’s case they were competing mainly against coal-fired electricity, which was inexpensive to operate. That was a policy decision they took. They wanted to reduce the amount of coal and nuclear and replace it with a renewable source.
Most people working in the renewables field will agree that renewable technologies can be quite complicated and are not cheap. They will not be cost competitive with inexpensive natural gas. If we consider the cost and implications of the pollution caused by burning fossil fuels then the situation looks very different.
Senator MacDonald: If there is a future for solar power in Canada, what type of technology would it be? What type of solar power? How would you see it applied?
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: There’s definitely room for both solar electric and solar thermal. Most of our energy needs in our houses are for low grade thermal energy. We need to heat our houses and to heat hot water, and for that solar thermal technologies are more appropriate. We also use electricity in buildings. If we electrify the transportation system we will need electricity to charge those electric vehicles, and solar electric and solar PV will play a role in that.
Senator Wetston: Thank you for coming. I was kind of interested in some of the stuff you were doing around the saturated sand energy capture process, which I didn’t understand. That’s a new one for me although we talk a lot about energy capture. Tell me about that. I think your sense is that it can be effective for both space and hot water heating and can meet a lot of those requirements.
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: The concept is quite simple. There are two photographs in the presentation. In one you see a large white vessel we ended up burying in the ground. That’s a big hot water tank filled with water, heavily insulated and buried. We use the solar collectors on the roof of the house to heat that water throughout the summertime in particular to 80 degrees Celsius. We’ll continue to heat it, especially in weather like today's, for the next few weeks. Then when we have less solar energy available in December, January and February in particular, we will start to pull the energy out of the tank to heat the house and to provide the hot water heating. By charging it up in the summertime, it’s heavily insulated. We can hold most of that energy and then draw it out months later.
The idea with the sand in the second photograph is to serve the same purpose. It’s a different system. We’re doing research to try to reduce the complexity and cost of this concept as much as possible. We basically have a box of sand that’s heavily insulated and we have water pipes running through it. In the summertime we circulate hot water heated by the solar collectors through the pipes which heats the sand. In the wintertime we pull that energy back to heat the house.
Senator Wetston: I guess the house would have a typical duct system to distribute the heat.
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: This is not a typical house. It’s a research facility. We have duct system but we also have a radiant floor heating system so we can experiment with both.
Senator Wetston: I’m sure you prefer radiant. It’s a personal view, but I wish I had it in my home.
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: If you’re interested I would be happy to give any of you a tour of the facility sometime.
Senator Wetston: That would be nice. Thank you for that.
Does the centre have the support of Urbandale?
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: Urbandale Construction was a large financial supporter, yes.
Senator Wetston: As a very general question, what surprises and disappointments have you experienced in this process? I realize this is very much a research project that you’re hoping might become more socialized, if I can put it that way. Do you have any thoughts about that?
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: That’s a good question. It’s a research facility. We’re trying out concepts that quite frankly we don’t know if they will work or not. Some will likely fail because they’re ideas that are unproven and not commercially available. The sandbox hasn’t been tried yet.
We’re running a set of experiments right now in which we’re to trying to convert the house itself into a solar collector. We have a large south glazing. There is a lot of south-facing windows in the house. If we didn’t do anything, the sunlight coming in through those windows would overheat the house in February. We can heat the house up to 30 degrees just through passive solar gains with no heating system in February.
What we try to do is capture that excess energy when it’s available by circulating water through the radiant floor system. We keep the house cool that way. It’s connected to a heat pump and we use that heat pump to heat the hot water tank and to provide space heating or hot water heating at night.
We’re having challenges with that system right now, mostly because we’re trying things. Some of our equipment is failing and some of our instrumentation isn’t working but that’s normal for research.
Senator Wetston: I find it quite interesting because I did note, in trying to understand these systems, that often the public doesn’t distinguish between electricity and thermal. It’s a little challenging.
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: Yes.
Senator Wetston: We can distinguish between an electric home versus using natural gas or oil in P.E.I. We'd better do something about that, Senator Griffin.
Senator Griffin: Yes.
Senator Wetston: You talk about the cold climate air source heat pump. I’m aware of the company and both engineers who run it. What do you do about air conditioning? What do you do about cooling in this system?
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: You’ve done your research. One of the other systems we’re researching at this facility is a cold climate air source heat pump, a device that can provide cooling in the summer and heating in the winter. We can cool the house with that.
Senator Wetston: You can use the same device.
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: Absolutely.
Senator Wetston: Once again you are using a duct system.
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: It is a duct-based system, yes.
Senator Wetston: But duct systems, you might agree with me, are very inefficient.
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: It requires more energy to move heat using air than using water.
Senator Wetston: What’s the alternative to the duct system?
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: Radiant floors are a definitely an alternative. There’s less energy used in pumping. That said, by far the more significant energy use is converting the heat or the cooling initially. The pumps or fans that move it around the building use a small amount of energy compared to the energy conversion device.
Senator Wetston: Would that assist in your view about the reduction of greenhouse gases? Would you go that far?
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: It would make a contribution but not huge, really not huge, no. Right now generating the heat is the major energy consumer, not moving it around using water or air.
Senator Wetston: I’m interested in the research and what you do with the data. I think you have a website.
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: Yes, we do.
Senator Wetston: I took a peek at it. How available is the data? How much information are you providing? Is it sufficient for others to test and discuss what you’re doing in your research so that you’re more or less providing it to other research institutions or government?
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: That’s a good question. Our facility has only been operational for about a year and a half. We are at the early stages of releasing our information but as we gather and analyze it we publish things. That’s what academics do. We write papers, present at conferences and write journal papers, and that's all disseminated freely.
Senator Patterson: Thank you for your presentation.
Further to Senator Wetston's question, you have told us that Canada is not benefiting from the big opportunity, which is storing solar thermal energy. Are there countries or areas of the world you’ve looked at that are ahead of us in that regard?
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: Yes. There are certainly countries in the world that are exploiting solar energy at the individual house scale much more than we are in Canada. Places like Austria and Germany are. In fact they have less solar availability than Canada has. Our climate is better in terms of using solar energy but it’s mainly the economics of the energy system there that make it more favourable. As was mentioned earlier, they pay about four items as much for electricity in that part of the world than we do, and that makes very different decisions for consumers as a result.
Senator Patterson: Do you have a vision for how storage technology will emerge over the next five to ten years?
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: Yes. We can use solar thermal without the seasonal storage concepts that I am showing here. We can use solar thermal that will provide maybe 30 or 40 per cent of our space and water heating needs in a building with technologies that are available today. If we want to achieve the majority, 90 per cent or so of our energy needs, we need to go to seasonal storage.
There are solar thermal technologies today that are working and used extensively around the world. In Portugal, for example, their building code mandates for the installation of the solar thermal system for hot water heating when you build a new house. The industry there is well developed. The technology exists. We know how to use it. We just don’t have much of a market here because the economics don’t lead the homeowner to choose that technology over natural gas or electric resistance heating.
Senator Patterson: There was a report released by the Council of Canadian Academies in 2015 on technology and policy options for low emission energy systems in Canada and switching sources of heating from natural gas to electric powered by clean sources. That study said doing that switch is likely not cost effective in most regions of the country without significant improvements in the building envelope. Would you agree with that?
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: Absolutely. We don’t have a single technical solution. Switching out one heating system for another doesn’t necessarily make sense. We need to improve the building envelope, make houses more energy efficient with greater levels of insulation and better quality windows, and then think about what’s the most effective way to heat that space.
One technology will not solve it. There’s a lot we can do to improve the building envelope to make the buildings more energy efficient and then there are better ways for space and water heating.
Senator Patterson: In addition to stimulating us to think about storage of solar thermal energy, would you agree that electrification of heating sources is an important means to reduce emissions in the building sector?
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: Some 40 per cent of all the energy we use in Canadian houses is in the form of natural gas. We can’t get away from the chemistry. When we burn that in furnaces and hot water heaters, we produce CO2. There’s little ability to try to capture that. Maybe carbon capture and sequestration could work on a large scale such as a power plant scale where it’s a concentrated source, but it will never work on an individual furnace scale. The economies of scale will never be there.
Moving houses off of natural gas as much as possible and replacing with electricity will be beneficial only if the new electrical generating capacity, we add is emissions free. If we move houses to electric and then build new gas-fired power plants to supply the new electricity, no, it will not be beneficial.
Senator Patterson: That’s why I don’t understand why the new government in BC is not supporting Site C. You don’t have to answer that.
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: It is not my area of expertise.
Senator Galvez: I want to go back to one of your recommendations. You said we have to change our lifestyle and with time even though we have become more efficient we occupy more square metres per person.
I was wondering if those statistics will change because of the fact that is the behaviour of baby boomers. You are a professor. I am a professor. We have seen the new generation. Millennials don’t think like baby boomers. They don’t want big houses or the trouble to maintain them. I have three children. None of them are interested in keeping my house. They want to live in a comfortable condominium or apartment close to the city and have all the services. They don’t drive. They don’t want to own a car.
It’s mostly our generation. We have to change our minds. We are sort of dinosaurs and we have to change.
The Chair: Speak for yourself.
Senator Galvez: I’m speaking for all of us. You talked about bringing down one degree and insulating the house.
In Europe it is very popular to have water consumption on demand. I think it’s more efficient than these big reservoirs that we have.
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: That’s a good point. Our common way of heating hot water is to keep a tank of about 200 litres in the basement. We heat it up and when we want to take a shower or bath we drain the water out. Sometimes we heat the tank and don’t use the water. Then the tank loses heat and we have to heat it up again.
There’s a fair amount of energy loss from hot water tanks. On demand systems tend to be much more efficient. That is a possibility. Those are existing technologies.
Senator Galvez: Are you negative on the future generation?
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: That’s a big question.
Senator Galvez: You’ve seen people passing by your office. How do you feel about them?
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: I think most people would have the right intentions, but many of them are operating in a vacuum of knowledge. They don’t understand. They want to do something about climate change but don’t understand their individual actions can have an impact. They don’t realize turning on air conditioning at 5 p.m. means we fire up a gas turbine somewhere in Ontario to supply that. They don’t realize that heating the house to 22 degrees and walking around in a T-shirt in January has an impact. They don't realize that in many cases.
In some cases it comes down to cost. It’s cheap to do, so why not do it? That’s part of the reason. I think many times people aren’t aware of the implication. A visible example is nobody is financially incented to recycle, but all of my neighbours put out their recycle boxes because they think it makes a difference. They have been educated to understand that it makes a difference. Probably their children tell their parents that they had better do it.
Senator Massicotte: That’s mostly what it is.
The Chair: You were asked about fuel switching, replacing natural gas with electricity. What would you do in Alberta and Saskatchewan where you don’t have large rivers to build hydro? They’re caught between a rock and a hard place. It’s easy to say replace natural gas with electricity.
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: I don’t think it’s easy at all. That said, Southern Alberta has the best solar resource in the country.
The Chair: But that’s not all of Alberta.
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: I appreciate that. It would not be a simple change to replace all natural gas, absolutely not. In many cases we could go a long way to replace natural gas with electricity-fired systems using heat pumps in particular, because that’s the most efficient way to use the electricity for heating, but we have to add the grid capacity with non-fossil fuel sources.
If we are simply to build a gas-fired power plant to supply electricity to a house and run it through a heat pump, it’s counterproductive. We are better off to stay with the furnace. In some parts of the country it makes sense to keep that. In other parts it won't.
I don’t think it’s a uniform prescription to apply across the country. I don’t think we’ll eliminate use of natural gas but we need to reduce it. If we want to achieve these climate change objectives, we will have to reduce at least the burning of natural gas in distributed systems like furnaces in homes.
The Chair: On the last page you say that bold policy is required to bring about lifestyle changes. You talked earlier about smaller dwellings, fewer appliances and those kinds of things. If you were a politician, what bold policy would you be willing to walk out on the street and talk about to bring this about?
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: I’m not a politician.
The Chair: Imagine if you were.
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: A lot of these policies would be really hard to implement. For example, on house size municipality tax is based on property value for the most part. Why not tax based on size? If you are consuming more and using more, why don't we tax based on that? That’s a possibility. It could be tax neutral but some people will pay more and others will pay less.
The Chair: They already do because usually a bigger house is worth more money.
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: It depends on the neighbourhood.
The Chair: Lastly, when you talk about meeting our challenge the latest stats from Natural Resources Canada say that by 2030 we have to eliminate 219 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions. The building sector by 2030 is expected to be at 94 million tonnes, up from 85 million tonnes in 2005. It doesn’t sound to me like there’s much happening to reduce consumption in the building sector throughout that time.
The other stat is for the oil and gas industry. This is everything. You talk about natural gas but I’m talking about everything. If you eliminated it all, you’d be about even. You would be even-steven. You would eliminate 219 million tonnes. Do you think we’ll meet that target in 2030? Realistically. Help me a little bit.
The rest of the world won’t meet these targets, either. We can’t say we’re just the bad ones because we’re not. There are some that are a lot worse than us. Climate change is coming. What do you think about adaptation?
As part of it I agree we have to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but should we be looking at more adaptation to changing climate rather than focusing on thinking we can just take one sector of the whole economy, which is a huge piece of the economy? It is not just the economy. Natural gas is used in many things. How do we eliminate all that and still be able to survive? How do you build plastic cars so they’re nice and light if you don’t have natural gas and all those kinds of things?
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: You asked several questions. I don’t know if I can remember them all.
The 2030 target is the 30 per cent reduction target.
The Chair: It’s only 17 years. It goes fast.
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: It’s not far off, agreed. The UN has analyzed all the INDCs by the individual partners and has said that if everyone meets those targets we will still not maintain the 2 degrees. It will be more like 2.7. The 30 per cent target is our first intended contribution, but we will have to ratchet it up. It will have to go much beyond 30 per cent.
The Chair: After 2030, I agree.
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: That is if we’re to slow down climate change.
We’re talking about the first steps. They will bring about substantial change. It will change the economy substantially and will distribute costs differently. If we were to tax pollution, that would have a large impact on things like people’s choice on the size of houses they purchase. If it costs $10,000 a year to heat that 3,000-square-foot house, they probably wouldn’t buy it. They would buy something smaller.
We make those choices now all the time. We’ve distorted the energy market by not putting a cost on pollution.
On your question about which sector of the economy will be affected, all sectors have to be. We can’t just stop driving. We can't stop living indoors. We can't just shut down the oil and gas industry. We won’t be able to achieve that target by affecting one individual sector. We have to touch all of them. We have to find ways to save in all of them.
It won’t be easy. The policies will be complicated because the messages won’t be popular. Convincing people to consume less is not an easy sell for a politician, but you know a lot more about that than I do. It is not my game
Senator Massicotte: Especially the chair.
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: The question was about just giving up on it and worrying about mitigation.
The Chair: No, I didn’t say to give up on it. I said one is reducing greenhouse gas emissions and adaptation.
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: Yes. We have to adapt, regardless. Even if we make the 30 per cent target by 2030, the climate will change. Even if we make a 50 per cent reduction by 2050, the climate will change. We have to adapt. We need to do both.
The Chair: You’re doing work on the house where you use hot water and store it and everything. Is there some way you could give us some kind of an average cost? I don’t know. You pick the size.
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: It’s a good question and not an easy answer to give because we custom designed a lot of these components. We custom fabricated these components. The cost we paid is not reflective of what a mature market would bear.
The Chair: But the mature market is years down the road.
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: Yes.
Senator Massicotte: Give us a range to start with.
The Chair: Give us some idea.
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: The market cost that we paid for the solar thermal collectors we put on the roof is less than $10,000. The copper we used in the piping in the house was more expensive than the solar collector.
The Chair: Yes, that’s if you’re building a new house.
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: Yes. The cost of the seasonal storage system, what we call the sandbox, was really for digging the hole. If you’re excavating for a house foundation anyway, the incremental cost of that is an extra half hour of backhoe time. The incremental cost is low. The big cost is insulation and piping materials.
I’m ballparking. In a mature industry that knew how to fabricate it, it would be something like $10,000, roughly. This is not a hard number.
The Chair: I’ll tell you where I live that $10,000 goes quick when you hire people to come in and do that kind of stuff.
Anyway, I appreciate your coming and spending some time. I appreciate that we stayed a bit late. If you have anything else you want to give to the clerk, that would be great, and it will be distributed to all of us.
Thank you.
Mr. Beausoleil-Morrison: Okay, thank you.
(The committee adjourned.)