Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In my Member’s statement today, I talked about the possible advantages of doing more about conservation when it comes to energy and I was speaking particularly about our high cost of power. My questions today are for the Minister responsible for the NWT Power Corporation.
I don’t know if I should have been in marketing, but I thought of a few campaign titles if we were to actually launch a campaign to encourage people to reduce their consumption of energy. I mentioned Ghostbusters. How about The Lights Are on But Nobody’s Home? I came up with a few others here too. I was just sitting here thinking about this.
I’d like to ask the Minister, what has his department, or his role as Minister responsible for the Power Corporation, what kind of research has gone into the advantages of a promotion or a campaign to encourage consumers to reduce the consumption of power? Thank you.
Thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen. The Minister responsible for the Northwest Territories Power Corporation, Mr. Miltenberger.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The underlying concern, of course, in some quarters, is that the Power Corporation has no interest in encouraging people to reduce and conserve because they are profit driven and they have to survive on their revenues. In fact, if that was the case, it no longer is. As we will see over the course of the next few days, there is going to be discussion about the Power Corporation, our Crown corporation of which we are the one shareholder, of how it can better be a vehicle for the energy policy of the Government of the Northwest Territories and the people of the Northwest Territories.
They are committed to conservation. They’re switching out simple things. Like, they’re switching out all their sodium vapour streetlights to LED streetlights. They’re going to be rolling out a very significant conservation program online here in the next few days. They’ll work with communities and homeowners to look at what things they can do to conserve energy. We have a common shared commitment on that, and we are going to work on that together here as we move forward.
That could be the title of another couple of campaigns: Urban Legends and Something About Myths.
Back to my question, what has this government done to launch any kind of a campaign directly targeted at consumers to encourage them? He’s named some things that the Power Corporation is doing, but what has this government done directly targeted at consumers to encourage them to reduce their consumption?
At the beginning of the 16th Assembly, we came forward and we put $60 million, as a government, into the development of an approach to energy savings, energy efficiency. We rolled out the biomass plan, the solar plan, a strategy that has guided us. We have spent millions converting to biomass in our own facilities. We have put millions of dollars into Environment and Natural Resources as well as the Arctic Energy Alliance to help people, to give them rebates for switching over to energy-efficient appliances, to switch to biomass, conversion with LED lights, we’ve picked up our work we’ve done on recycling, all of which are energy savers in the long run, in addition to the work we’re doing with the Power Corporation. We’ve mapped out, through our Energy Plan, a lot of these activities that we’ve continued to invest significant amounts of money into.
Minister Miltenberger made a brief reference to this theory or concept or myth that’s out there in the public that if it costs this much to generate, distribute and retail power in the Northwest Territories, that if we actually reduce our consumption, the unit price is not going to be changed, because they still need to receive a return on their investment. I’d like the Minister to speak to that issue. People are saying, well, if we use less , the unit price will go up and we’re not really going to accomplish anything.
Could the Minister please elaborate on this to dispel that myth?
I can talk to the Power Corporation. I can’t speak to the NUL, which, as well, is a distributor. I know we work hard to keep the price of energy as low as we can. As we move forward, as I’ve pointed out publicly, we’ve subsidized the Power Corporation over the last three years directly over $50 million to soften the blow and protect rates because of the increasing diesel costs, the fact that we haven’t raised diesel prices for five years to help offset the low water here in the Snare system. We have moved past the point of where it’s strictly a for-profit, you have to live off your revenues, you have to generate a dividend, to recognizing that as we have moved to a two-rate zone, and actually, we have started actually moving to more of a one-rate zone, we, as a government, have put in more and more money and our relationship with the Power Corporation is now very, very close. It’s not really an arm’s-length corporation. It’s much more consistent with the relationship we have similar to the Power Corporation, and as we move forward into the future that kind of relationship is going to continue.
Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. Final, short supplementary, Mrs. Groenewegen.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I don’t doubt or deny that our government has spent millions to try and protect consumers from the rates, but I think we need a campaign directed at the consumers at a household level to get them to do their part in tandem with the government’s efforts to try and reduce their consumption.
Has that kind of a program ever been researched, and could there be projections done to see what kind of gains we could achieve from that? Thank you.
As we move forward on renewables like solar, that we have in place, after some considerable debate over the years, a Net Metering Program which encourages and doesn’t penalize folks for putting in solar in their own buildings. We have removed the cap, we have removed the standby charges. As we look at the charrette, we are going to be asking people for further ways that we can encourage people to look at generating distributed energy that they can generate and that we will buy back through a net metering process. There are those kinds of opportunities that currently exist and are going to continue to exist.
As we gather all these very, very interested and dedicated people around the tables here over the next few days, I’m sure we’re going to find out other things that people recommend that we can do. For example, should we, as a territory, as a government, should we subsidize the wholesale change out of every light bulb in the Northwest Territories to be an LED light within the year? Should we do those types of things?
What other things, in terms of conservation, should we do? We have beefed up our energy standards requirements, both in our own construction and what we encourage people to do when they build in the Northwest Territories. We’re working with industry to set up our first only pellet plant in the Northwest Territories. We spent years building the market, now we are building the industry. That’s going to give us a northern energy source that we believe will be cheaper and we know will save us 30 to 40 percent over the cost of diesel.
So, we are doing an enormous number of things and we are going to continue to do that. We are going to publically say, again, that we are prepared to invest tens upon tens of millions of dollars to help make this transition away from diesel into the more sustainable renewable. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. Member for Sahtu, Mr. Yakeleya.
