Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As mentioned, my colleague Mr. Krutko and I just returned from a fact-finding trip to Denmark, Sweden and Finland...
---Laughter
…on behalf of the Joint Committee on Climate Change. The work was in recognition of the need to reduce territorial greenhouse gas emissions and to reduce our cost of living. Our goals were to learn about the technologies that Scandinavians have developed to economically produce heat and electricity and organic material on a neighbourhood to small community scale, to determine whether this technology and practice is potentially applicable in the Northwest Territories and to determine the costs and benefits of this approach.
These countries have replaced huge amounts of fossil fuels with renewable energy and are well along towards achieving new European targets of 30 to 50 percent of all energy requirements to be met with renewable energy by 2020, 11 years from now. Biomass for heat and power is a big part of their success.
The Scandinavians have developed a suite of biomass appliances, from small scale furnaces suitable to individual buildings to a range of boilers that service the heating requirements from neighbourhoods to small communities. They now also commonly generate electricity from large biomass plants and they are beginning to scale these down to sizes appropriate to our communities. For example, we learned of systems that generate about two megawatts of heat and 500 kilowatts of power suitable for NWT communities of about 500 people.
Fuel for these systems is primarily wood chips made from chipping small trees, branches, stumps from locally managed forests. Here in the Northwest Territories, of course, we have 33 million hectares of forest to draw on and only 42,000 people to service.
The mechanized wood harvesting and transportation industry, which relies on GPS directions to wood resources, provides many local jobs and enterprises. Systems in the neighbourhood to $200,000 to $300,000 in cost were fully automated, being visited only twice a week by operators for a few minutes, and they are very suitable for our northern communities.
Scandinavians have developed a number of policies which achieved rapid and wide adoption of this technology, considerable employment, a new export industry and significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
Mr. Speaker, I look forward to further sharing and government action on the significant opportunities available with biomass and to discussing the implications to our review of electricity rates, cost of living, NCPC and ATCO proposal reviews. Mahsi.
Thank you, Mr. Bromley. The honourable Member for Kam Lake, Mr. Ramsay.
