In my statement I talked about the Remote Community Wind Energy Conference, which was held in December of this past year. Actually, I believe it was November; I’ll correct myself. The conference report was expected in January of ’08, and it’s now February.
So my question is to the Minister of Environment and Natural Resources. I wondered when we could expect to receive a report on the conference proceedings.
Before the end of this fiscal year.
That was before the end of this fiscal year, so I guess that will be the 31st of March. Okay, thank you.
When can we expect to see a community identified for the wind energy demo project that was a recommendation from the conference? It also was a recommendation in two reports from 2007.
There is work underway as we speak. There have been wind monitors put out to do wind mapping to check the patterns of the wind across the North, there is a Wind Energy Committee, and as well, Minister McLeod is the chair of the energy coordinating committee.
For the government, in this issue of responding to the recommendations that came out of the Wind Conference in Tuktoyaktuk, one of the things on our agenda…. NTPC has the RFP ready to go, to move on this subsequent to the discussion that we are going to be having here in the next week or so with the energy coordinating committee. So there is a lot of work underway.
I would just like to point out that we need to do the base work, because one of the recommendations out of the conference is the observation from other jurisdictions that if you just do a one-off project all by itself, it’s doomed to failure. We have to do the right work with the wind mapping — make sure the infrastructure is in place to support it and make sure that the utility, the community governments, the Territorial government and individuals buy into this. So that’s part of our challenge. We are moving on this, as I just indicated.
I’d like to follow up and ask the Minister when he expects there will be some sort of advancement of the development of the regulatory and policy framework that is required in regard to selling and producing wind energy.
At this point the best answer I could give would be: in the fullness of time and in due course.
Laughter.
There is preliminary work that has to be done in terms of just determining where we would do the pilot project, the kind of other work such as the net to chargeback power. We have to work with NTPC to hook it up so it’s compatible with diesel. There’s a lot of actual logistical work before we have the systems in place, but that’s one of the pieces, and the Member is very accurate in pointing out that we need all these pieces in place to proceed over the long term.
“Fullness of time” is a little difficult to define, but I will accept the Minister’s answer.
Just to clarify, will the work start on the development of the regulatory and policy framework? As well, will we be able to see an operating wind turbine somewhere in some community in the N.W.T. in 2009?
What I will commit to is that through the energy coordinating committee we would be prepared to work with and report back to committee on the work that we’re going to do and the plans that we’re going to lay out to try to advance this initiative in a way that is going to allow full engagement at the community level, as well as with other governments, like the federal government. They need to buy into this process and hopefully put in some resources and lay out some of the steps we would have to take in terms of the infrastructure as well as whatever other legal requirements may be there to do this properly.
