Transforming Electricity Grids for a Sustainable Future

The holiday season is here and 2024 is coming to a close. It’s a good time to reflect, so we’re looking back at five of the top episodes of thinkenergy in 2024. Join your host Trevor Freeman, as he unwraps the year’s most important topics surrounding the future of energy in Canada. Listen in for how experts are guiding change with insightful data and how they’re communicating facts about the climate crisis. Plus, learn about new energy policies and ongoing updates to the electricity grid.

Related links

• Episode 134 (What the data tells us): https://thinkenergypodcast.com/episodes/what-the-data-tells-us/
• Episode 122 (Climate communication): https://thinkenergypodcast.com/episodes/summer-rewind-climate-communication-motivating-change-with-re-climate/
• Episode 138 (Energy policies deep dive, part 1): https://thinkenergypodcast.com/episodes/energy-policy-deep-dive-with-nicholas-rivers-part-1/
• Episode 136 (Modernizing the electricity grid): https://thinkenergypodcast.com/episodes/summer-rewind-modernizing-the-electricity-grid-with-the-advanced-distribution-management-system/
• Episode 135 (Modernizing Ontario’s energy future): https://thinkenergypodcast.com/episodes/vision-quest-modernizing-ontarios-energy-future-with-the-eda/
• Trevor Freeman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trevor-freeman-p-eng-cem-leed-ap-8b612114/
• Hydro Ottawa: https://hydroottawa.com/en 

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Transcript:

Trevor Freeman  00:07

Welcome to think energy, a podcast that dives into the fast, changing world of energy through conversations with industry leaders, innovators and people on the front lines of the energy transition. Join me, Trevor Freeman, as I explore the traditional, unconventional and up and coming facets of the energy industry. If you have any thoughts, feedback or ideas for topics we should cover, please reach out to us at thinkenergy@hydrottawa.com 

Hey, everyone, welcome back. Depending on where you live, you may notice that it's getting a little chilly outside. There is actually a couple snowflakes in the air or even on the ground, depending, again, on where you live. Up here in Ottawa, where I am, it's definitely starting to feel like we're getting close to winter, maybe not quite there yet, but like we're getting close to winter, which does seem to be happening later and later every year, because we're near the end of the year, we thought it would be a good idea to kind of look back at Think Energy over the last 12 months, and this has been an interesting year, both for Think Energy as well as for the industry we work in for Think Energy. It's been an interesting year because we transitioned hosts, and that brings me into the picture. So, I took over the hosting chair earlier this year, and I've really had a great time having conversations with folks and getting to dive into topics that either I know a little about, but not the full picture, or sometimes don't even know that much about. So, it's really been fun to do that, and it was fun to look back over the year at the different episodes that I've recorded and get a sense for where we've come with the show. The industry we work in has also been full of changes, and I think that is just the new reality. Every year, at the end of the year, I could probably say, wow, that was a really impactful year., things changed a lot. Hopefully all that change is in the right direction towards this energy transition, towards cleaning our energy and getting off fossil fuels. But like anything, change will be a bit up and down. Today, we're going to look back at the year and highlight some of the moments from our top episodes. These are the episodes that resonated with you, the listener the most, the ones that kind of got the most listens and the most reaction from and it's fun to pull out some of the impactful moments for us from that, from those episodes. So, in the holiday tradition, we're gonna go back and pull out some holiday treats from our from our favorite episodes, if you will. We're going to start by going all the way back to April, when I had the pleasure to chat with David Coletto, the founder and CEO of abacus data. So, David gave us a snapshot of what Canadians are really thinking about when it comes to the future of energy and our planet. This conversation is the perfect starting point for this episode, because it really lays the groundwork for understanding what Canadians think and feel about the energy landscape and how we will move forward. So, what did David's research reveal about how Canadians prioritize climate change amongst all the other things that are vying for their intention? Here's what he had to say when I asked him about evolving attitudes towards this pressing issue.

David Coletto  03:24

Coming out of the pandemic, though, and I think the defining mindset up today, which is really important to understand, to then understand why people will be resistant to certain public policy choices on climate, or may not be ready to fully embrace a transition, is that most Canadians right now, and I say most, I mean, like 80 to 90% of them, I believe, have a mindset that's very much tied to scarcity. And that is that is a real shift. And what that means is that a lot of the things that people have come to expect they can get in their lives are either more expensive, harder to find or get or they fear losing what they already have, and those are often tied to issues like housing, the general cost of living, and healthcare. And so that mindset then causes us to view public policy decisions, broader economic forces and our day to day lives to a very different lens than one where I describe as there's plenty of everything, right, and a plenty mindset means I can take risks. I can perhaps pay a little bit more, even if the perception is that I pay more, even if it's not true, in order to achieve other kinds of goals. But when I'm the perception of struggling every day just to get the kind of life I want, or I'm the one in three Canadians who feel like they've completely fallen behind, that is going to make it much harder for me to be persuaded to do things that feel like a big change, or feel like they're going to disrupt my life more than it already is. Now, if we expand that and then we say, okay, so how do we overlay that? Add on to views around the broader issues around climate change, energy transition, I think what's clear in the long-term trends is the vast majority, 90 plus percent of Canadians believe climate change is real and is caused by human behavior. Overwhelming majorities believe that we that's actually a crisis that we have to do something about. And in the shorter term, the last, I would say, 12 to 18 months, as a result of you and me, Trevor, I don't know about you, I grew up in, you know, in Ontario. I never once in my entire life stepped out on a June morning and saw smokey skies and, you know, take my dog for a walk and bring her home, and she smells like smoke. That was never part of my experience. My wife grew up in Alberta, much more likely to happen in in in Western Canada over time. So, I think there's also become a realization that's firmed up, that if we don't do something about this, that it's going to have not just theoretical consequences for the earth, but actual implications for my life. Won't be able to do certain things, my health might be compromised, the value of my property might be at risk, I may not be able to ensure and so that, I think, has created far more desire or demand to see action. But what's muted it, at least in the short term, is that scarcity mindset, where people have basically said, including young people, which is the most fascinating thing, is people often assume younger Canadians are more likely to, you know, say climate change is a priority. For the first time and probably ever that I've tracked this, we now have younger Canadians. If you're under 30, you're the least likely to say climate change is one of your top three priorities. And that's because other issues, like housing, like economic security, like the cost of living, have overtaken them. And so short-term fear of short term scarcity has, at least for now, pushed down fears about the longer term scarcity that climate change will create.

Trevor Freeman  07:00

Super interesting. I really like this conversation with David, because it was really great to get into the psychology of climate action and some of the barriers we need to overcome. I mean, there's a risk of thinking about climate science and the collective action that we have to take as being very scientific and data driven, and a lot of sense as it is, but we are all still people in the mix here, and we need to choose to take action, and how a country and a society, and in fact, that globe chooses to take action is really dependent on how we feel and think about it. So, this was a great conversation, and good to get that insight from David. It really kind of gets us to ask ourselves, what is going to mobilize and motivate the majority of people to take action when their focus is on more immediate needs? And that kind of ties into the next conversation that I want to highlight, which is actually a conversation that my predecessor, Dan Seguin had with Amber Bennett, the deputy director of rec climate, who talked about how we can perhaps move the needle when it comes to a large segment of the population that wants to take action but aren't entirely sure how. So, Amber shed some light on how to engage this movable middle, if you will, those people who believe in climate change, but maybe need that extra nudge to prioritize action. So let's hear what Amber had to say.

Amber Bennett  08:29

I feel compelled to say that I think the term movable middle is used differently by different people. I think when the context of, you know, the work that we do, it kind of comes out of, you know, some of the themes that I was talking about in the last in the last question or last answer. It's this idea that, you know, people are kind of undecided, or they're conflicted about an issue, so they could move either one way or the other, but they're not, at the moment, oppositional, right? So, if you think about, you know, a broader population, there is a segment, you know, of Canadians whose identities are really built around the idea that they don't believe in climate change, they're not going to support, you know, climate action and whatnot. There's also on the other side, a whole group of Canadians whose identity are built around I'm a climate activist and I'm a climate advocate and, you know, and I'm an environmentalist, and so they're on the other side, but most of us just kind of we live in the middle. Some are more well informed than others, but for the most part, people are concerned right in the middle. They have they you know, when they ask yes, we want the government to act, we are highly supportive of it. But when it comes down to it, it's this tension around the fact that, because they may not be well informed, they're not thinking about this. They have many competing priorities. They're kind of undecided, or sometimes they're just conflicted about an issue, right? Because, on the one hand, as an example, yeah, I think we, we absolutely need renewable energy. We need lots of, you know, solar panels. I just don't want them on my house. Or we need lots of, you know, solar renewable solar farms. I just don't want them all over the landscape that I cherish from my childhood. So there are many things that you know are underneath of that are operating underneath for people that kind of create some conflict for them. So, people, so when we talk about the movable middle really, I think what's important is to acknowledge that most people are concerned, they want and they support action, but they're undecided, potentially, about one particular aspect or issue of it, or there's some other kind of thing that's happening for them that's creating a conflict, or they're kind of uninformed. So, you know, I think that you know one example, or rather, I'll back up that uninformed piece is particularly important right now as we see more and more kind of organized misinformation and disinformation, right? So, as an example, when I'm in focus groups, I can predict with very, you know, the lot of certainty. What are some of the kind of key narratives that are going to surface where people are kind of undecided. One of them might be, well, EV batteries are actually worse, you know, for the environment, than, you know, driving a car. Or there's no way that we're going to be able to electrify everything the grids can't support it. Or it may be solar panels actually create more emissions when you produce them than they save in their lifetime. So these kind of, like very dominant or kind of reoccurring pieces of information, and when people who are not thinking about this a lot or deeply as much as maybe you or I or people who are listening to this, so when, when people encounter these, this kind of information or confusion about what are the actual solutions, they really don't know what to think, right? So, like, a third of us sit within that category, right, of I actually don't know how to make sense of the information that that I'm hearing, right, and I don't trust so much of it, because I know that, you know, I know about misinformation. I know that I shouldn't be, you know, trusting everything that I hear, etc. So that's kind of the deal with the movable middle, right? So they're belief climate change is real, they're not climate deniers. They just may be conflicted or undecided or just not, you know, as informed, because they're not thinking about it on a daily basis. So, you know, as an example, when we talk about the challenge, you know, part of this is really, I think, being more clear about the cause of climate change, but also, what are some of the challenges that we're seeing that are related to climate change within our communities. You know, I was listening to a program, CBC program, the other day, and there's an entire community in Newfoundland that's actually moving back from the water. And this is, you know, after the aftermath of of hurricane Fiona and whatnot. So, you know, some of the challenges that we're seeing, what's the challenge that we're trying to overcome? And ideally, I would right size that at a community scale, right? So people feel overwhelmed when it's my personal, individual problem, but if we can begin to talk about this as a community challenge, then people are much more likely to engage because they don't feel like they're in it all on their own.

14:34

Playing into that idea that it takes a village to tackle climate change, let's go to one of our other popular shows this season with our guest, Nicholas Rivers, who's an associate professor of Public Policy and International Affairs from the University of Ottawa. I had a great chat with Nicholas about the role of public policy when it comes to action related to climate change, and we can't really discuss the world of energy in 2024 and not talk about one of the biggest and maybe most misunderstood topics in Canadian energy, carbon pricing. Carbon pricing is one of those things that we all hear about. We all kind of have an idea of what it is, but maybe it's not exactly what we think it is. So, it was really helpful to get Nicholas to break it down for us and to help us really understand it. So, let's have a listen to my chat with Nick Rivers about carbon pricing.

Nicholas Rivers  15:32

Let me start out by saying, What's the point of carbon pricing? Because I think it's not evident for lots of people. It seems like a crazy idea. The basic idea is that we live in a market economy, and a market economy is one where the market responds to the cost of producing something and the desire of people to buy something, and so the market sets the prices, and the market determines how much gets produced in response to the prices, and how much people buy in response to the prices. It's not directed by some other entity, and the market economy tends to work best when the prices of things reflect their costs. So, if I want to go buy some bread, the idea in a market economy is that the price of the bread that I buy should reflect the cost to produce the bread right, the cost of the grains that are used to make it, and the cost of labor and the machines that are required to make it. And if that does reflect the cost, and there's a motivation for the bread maker to make the bread for me and so it'll be there when I want to buy it. And the idea that behind this carbon pricing is that there is a cost to me producing carbon emissions, right? So it the cost is it makes the world a little warmer, and there's a cost in lives and livelihoods and Well Being from climate change, but I don't pay a price, right? I don't pay the cost. I'm not required to pay the cost, because this is a non market good. No one's producing climate change. It's a public good. And so the idea behind carbon pricing is, hey, the market doesn't work for this kind of good. One way we can fix it is by attaching a price to carbon emissions. So it's just like bread. When people, you know, use it, they have to pay the price to reflect the cost. And so that's the kind of basic fundamental. And the idea that economists have had for a long time is that if we properly price carbon emissions, people are going to use an awful lot less of them, because now their actions now their actions reflect the costs. Okay, so, so that's the kind of basic idea behind carbon pricing. Canada has brought in a carbon price federally in 2019 provinces implemented carbon prices, some of them much before that, so Alberta brought in an industrial carbon price in 2007, BC brought in a carbon price throughout all emit for all emitters in 2008 and Quebec as well. So, the federal carbon price now is kind of the law of the land, in the sense that in that 2016 meeting that I mentioned, where the federal and provincial governments agreed about carbon pricing. The agreement was, we should all have a carbon price. Let's like this a level playing field. Let's all do our piece. And the federal government kind of took that message back and developed a federal carbon pricing benchmark, which said, hey, provinces, you can do your own carbon price as long as it's at least, you know, this certain level of stringency. But if you don't do it, we'll bring in our federal carbon price instead. Okay, so provinces have the ability to do something on their own, and if they don't do anything, the federal government will bring in a carbon price. And so what we've got now is a kind of a system that's a bit piecemeal, where some provinces have a their own carbon price, and other provinces have not implemented a carbon price, and the federal government has brought one in their place. The Federal carbon price has two parts. One is a consumer facing part, so for people like you and me, and for people or for for institutions that are not giant emitters, like a university or hospital or a mall, for example, they all are subject to what the federal government calls a fuel Levy and what the rest of us call a carbon tax. Big industrial emitters, like a pulp and paper plant or a steel plant or a big electricity generator are subject to a different scheme. It's still a carbon price, but the way it works is a little different, and it's called an output based performance standard. So I'll speak about each of them briefly on the industry side. The way it works is that each facility that produces a lot of emissions gets a target, and it's usually a same target for everyone in the sector. So the target could be like the target is for a steel sector you got to produce steel with a carbon intensity of less than, say, one ton of carbon per ton of steel that you produce. So they get that target, and if they manage to get their facility emissions below the target, they get a reward in terms of a carbon price. And if they if their emissions are above the target, they have to pay a carbon price.

Trevor Freeman  20:32

A financial reward. So they get some sort of incentive to being below that benchmark.

Nicholas Rivers  20:35

They basically get carbon credits, which have a financial value bet you so you can trade them for dollars. So that's the way it works. On the industry side, on the smaller emitter side, like you and me, it works a little differently. There's a levy on fuels. So any fuel that we might buy, like natural gas or gasoline or diesel, that contains carbon or releases carbon when it's combusted, is in a fee is imposed in proportion to the amount of carbon that's released from that fuel when it's burned. But and you and I are required to pay that fee. Now, we don't pay it directly to government. It's imposed at the retail level, so the you know, the gasoline station will pay the fee on our behalf, but then it'll raise the price of gasoline in the amount of the fee. Gotcha, that's the main part of the system. The other thing with respect to this consumer carbon price is that all that revenue that government collects is put into a pot and then it's rebated back to us. And you've probably heard about this, if you check your bank account, there'll be a Canada carbon rebate in your bank account, or at least, each household will get one, not each person. That's right, so it depends on who files their taxes first in each household who gets the rebate. So you want to be the first in your household to get your taxes done, but the money basically is raised from consumers in proportion to how much fuel they burn, and then the government collects it up and rebates it back to consumers equally for all households. Okay, so a lot of people are confused about this part. It's like, Why? Why would they go to this trouble? Why would they raise money and then rebate it back and this is an important point. This isn't a traditional tax, right? In a traditional tax, government implementing the tax to raise revenue to, you know, buy, build a bridge or to fund a school or something like that. That's not what's going on here. The point of this fuel Levy, or carbon tax is to provide incentives for people to change their behavior, and in particular, it's to fill fix this market failure we talked about earlier, where the cost of carbon emissions isn't reflected in their price. And so when the carbon price gets high, it will make a lot more sense for us as individuals to choose the Low Carbon action as opposed to the high carbon action, save money doing it. And on the rebate side, the rebate side, the rebate is designed so that we don't get punished, we don't lose our you know, we don't become lower income as a result of this. And so it goes back to each of us equally. So no matter whether I do this, you know, whether I take the Low Carbon action or I don't take the Low Carbon action, I get the same amount of rebate back regardless.

23:19

I was really glad to have Nicholas explain carbon pricing to us on that episode and in that conversation, it seems really complex at first, but really when you break it down, it's fairly easy to understand, regardless of how you feel about it. It's not that complex of a topic. So speaking of complex things. Our next highlight takes us really deep into the nitty gritty of electricity grids, which is the world that I live in. So I had this really interesting chat with my colleague, Jenna Gillis, who is the director of distribution engineering and asset management here at Hydro Ottawa. I talked to Jenna about the technological advancements that are happening in grid modernization and more specifically, what Hydro Ottawa is doing on our grid modernization roadmap. Jenna explained how this exercise of modernization is so critical and crucial to get us to that future of energy that we can envision where we electrify things, where there are distributed energy resources, there's more automation. We're more efficient on our grid. In order to get there, there's some work to do. So let's listen to what Jenna had to say about building a grid that's ready for the future and delivering more reliable and sustainable energy.

Jenna Gillis  24:40

So our overall grid modernization strategy is guided by five key objectives. So I'll go through each one of those and give you kind of a high level blurb on what it is that we're trying to achieve with grid modernization. So the first one is enhancing reliability, so the more monitoring. Using devices, you have in the field to understand the state of the grid, the more remote capabilities you have in order to operate and, you know, isolate and restore the better reliability you have. The ultimate goal is moving towards an automated process where you have all of the foundation of the equipment, the communication channels and the auto the analytics to make decisions, and you can get outages restored much more quickly. The next one is what we call flexibility. So adaptive grid flexibility, so we want to make sure that the grid is dynamic to all of these changing energy demands that we're seeing come online. So things like heat pumps or electric vehicles or solar generation or battery we want to provide more options for the connections and be able to have the grid respond dynamically to these changing conditions. Next one we have is fortified resilience and robust security. So resilience is really about the ability to do to withstand disruptions. And I'm talking about that from, you know, a physical asset perspective, but maybe also a technology perspective as well. We want to make sure that we have a good diversity to be able to recover from disruptions. And we know there will always be disruptions, as we've seen, kind of with the weather in the little last little while, and then as we get more and more connected, we need to make sure we're safeguarding assets from cyber threats core to everything we do. We do, we want to make sure that we're thinking about the customer, and so we're looking towards strengthening customer engagement empowerment. So we've talked about, you know, getting more data back from the field and being able to unlock new new ways of doing things, new tools, and providing some of this information back to the customers to help them be better informed about their energy uses and their their low profile and what they want to do with their equipment. And then finally, sustainable decarbonation and renewable energy integration. So we really want to look at reducing our carbon footprint by optimizing our planning and operations processes. So we talked about a little bit about automation, you know, that will reduce our need to roll trucks for crews to physically go out in the field and operate devices. And basically everything above we talked about was, you know, being able to incorporate renewable energy sources. We want to make sure that we have the ability to bring these resources online and leverage them. So hopefully I've done some justification in terms of, you know, mapping out how complex this actually is to deploy. And so our grid modernization roadmap is set out basically a set of initiatives over the next 10 plus years. So we've kind of, you know, got it, got a good handle on the objectives we want to unlock over the next 10 years. And so we've laid out, what do we need to do to unlock those, and what's the timing of that? So we also need to understand that this is going to be dynamic and constantly evolving with, you know, technology or market drivers. So you know, the this roadmap is only as good as it is today, until, you know, something changes tomorrow, and we recognize that this is going to have to be dynamic and evolving. So due to the complexity of it, we decided to basically bucket the program into six different component layers so that we can really get a sense of how one feeds into the next, as I kind of talked a little bit about the pyramid before. So the first one is physical infrastructure. Number two is sensing and measurement. The third is communication. Fourth is data management and analytics. Number five is control and optimization. And then finally, the last, number six is business and regulatory. And so all of our initiatives fit underneath one of those six components. And with all that change, we need to have the right people. We need the right people, we need the right skill set. And some of these skills are things that we haven't done before. So these are new responsibilities, new skill sets, to the organization. And I'm going to put a little plug in here is that we're hiring right now. So take a look at our careers page. If I if I've painted an exciting picture and you want to be a part of this, take a look. We're hiring some of those skill sets today, and this stuff is going to span multiple years, right? So I feel like in the past, we kind of had, you know, like, oh, well, that's a five year program and then, and then you're done. No, like, this is going to be a continuous evolution, and these can span multi years. And I talked about it before. We need to be able to adapt and pivot to meet the requirements of technology and our customers, and we need to expect that. And so we need to build the that ability to stay dynamic through these multi year programs, to make sure that, you know, we maybe we need to change what our grid modernization objectives are halfway through. And that's okay. We can do that.

Teresa Sarkesian  29:39

 That was great, and this type of work on the electricity grid will ensure that we have a more robust and sustainable and smart grid that will enable all kinds of innovation, like more rooftop solar, more battery storage, and really empower our customers to be part of the energy solution. You can certain. Finally, count on there being more conversation about this on the think energy podcast. Moving forward, this next year, we're going to dive into even more details about some of the changes that are happening on our grid. So for our last highlight episode of 2024 my guest Theresa Sarkesian, President and CEO of the Electricity Distributors Association, painted this really vivid picture of some of the changes that she's seen over the past 15 years in the industry, and talked about the need to really ramp up electricity production in the years ahead. I think this is a really important one, because it does give us a picture of how far we've come, and reminds us that as much as it feels like we are on the cusp of change and a lot is going to change, looking forward, we can't lose sight of the fact that we've really started to evolve and change already and that some great stuff has already happened. It's a powerful message to close out our year end recap and a reminder that this is a marathon, the energy transition is a marathon, not a sprint, and it's not something that we're going to complete overnight. We're not going to get there in one night. So let's listen to what Theresa had to say.  I've been at the association now for 15 years. I'm just marking my 15 year anniversary. So feels really apropos to kind of reflect and look back. So I want to break down my answer into two parts. I'm going to talk to you about some, I guess, just my own personal observations about the electricity system writ large. And then I'm going to talk more about the changes in distribution. But some of the changes that I thought were really quite significant and profound, sort of when I joined the industry in 2009 I joined at a time when there was the Green Energy Act and the province was looking to connect all kinds of renewable energy generation to the electricity grid. So that was fairly significant. Another thing that was happening with the province is that they closed down coal fire generation that was pretty massive. In fact, I think at the time, it was the largest kind of carbon reduction initiative in North America. And I think even to this date today, I think it still is. So it's something that Ontario really has to be proud of. Another thing that you know at the time, I think that was fairly significant. In 2015 is just the expectation of what the demand would be. What was interesting, sort of like the past 15 years, the demand from customers for electricity was actually flat or declining, and that's all changed now, 15 years later, where we're now forecasting massive increases in in demand of energy, which could potentially be doubling in the future. And the other point I'd like to make is just the nuclear renaissance that we're having. I think when I joined the sector in 2009 I'll tell you, I think the public opinion of nuclear was actually quite low, and that's been completely turned around. Lots of geopolitical events around the world, I think, have driven that, and now that nuclear is having a huge Renaissance, and you're seeing, you know, lots of new investments in nuclear, and we're not talking about shutting down reactors anymore. We're talking about refurbishing and expanding. So those are some of the things that I've observed over the last 15 years that have really changed and for local distribution companies, I think what I have seen is a growing expectation by both government and the regulators for electric utilities to do more to both support the grid reliability and meet growing expectation from customers. So I started in the sector in 2009 it was right on the brink of implementation of smart meters and time of use. And what was interesting is that was mandated, and there were very few jurisdictions in the world that actually had mandated smart meters and time of use pricing. So again, Ontario is was one of the first. And so that was a big change for LDCs to move from, you know, smart meters and having to bring in that technology and also support the technology of time of use. I did mention the Green Energy Act at the time, we suddenly had to connect 1000s and 1000s of new solar and wind generation as well. And that was all new. There were no protocols. There were no standards for that. So that was fairly significant as well. And when I kind of fast forward to, I guess, more recently, there have been a lot of changes from government. I think they've really supported our industry. They understand the trust that we have with our customers, and they've implemented a number of new changes in terms of rate structures. They've asked us to implement ultra-low rate pricing that can support overnight electric vehicle charging, and they've also asked us to introduce a green button digital platform that allows customers to download their energy data and share with their parties. For, you know, different assessments and tools for lowering energy costs. But it's all not, you know, unicorns and kittens. There's challenges to for our sector, grid resilience was, you know, not really. People talked about it in 2009 but not like they're talking about it now, because of climate change and we are seeing more frequent storms, causing, you know, obviously outages for the customer, and also significant damage to the distribution grid. And I know that Hydro Ottawa has faced more than its fair share a very disruptive storms over the past few years. We have, yes, I can't remember which Victoria Day weekend or we had. I didn't ever know how to say it the direct show or the direct co direction. So there we were getting storms we've never even heard of before, and unfortunately, I think that is our new normal. So grid resilience is something that we are very concerned about, and we need to make sure we've got the appropriate investments for that. So those are just a few of the highlights that you know when I came into the sector, sort of things that were kind of ramping up, and then what's happening now? But I guess what I could say, the commonality is there's constant change in this sector, and what I'm seeing going forward is that change is going to be accelerated.

Trevor Freeman  36:11

Very cool. So it is really fascinating to think back 15 years ago and imagine that we didn't have smart meters. Our electricity demand was fairly flat and even declining. In some cases, it's so different than the world we're in today, and sometimes it's hard to even look at today. We're constantly looking forward into the future, and so it's important to remember where we've come from. So there you have it, folks, it's been a fascinating year in energy as it is. Every year, as I said at the beginning of this episode, I don't think there will be a year in the near future where we don't look back and say, wow, a lot has changed. A lot has happened. We've looked at everything from kind of the psychology of climate change to the nuts and bolts of grid modernization to the role of policy, and looked back at how our grid has already changed. It's really been a fascinating look back at some of these conversations. So as we wrap up this episode, I do want to extend a really big thank you to all of our amazing guests who have shared their expertise and their passion with us this year. A huge thank you to all of you, the listeners for tuning in and kind of diving into this world of energy with us, and that's really why we do this. It's to engage with you folks. And also we just really like talking about energy. We hope that these stories have kind of sparked your curiosity and ignited your imagination, maybe even inspired you to take some action, whether it's reducing your own carbon footprint, understanding, sort of your own energy needs, or how energy gets to you, supporting clean energy initiatives, or really just taking a bit of a closer look at the world of energy. With us, there is one more episode to come after this. It's going to be a feature on kind of the defining topic of the year. I won't give it away here, but surely you can guess what it is, and we'll chat with you again one more time before the end of the year. Until then, thanks for listening. 

Thanks for tuning in to another episode of The think energy podcast. Don't forget to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and it would be great if you could leave us a review. It really helps to spread the word. As always, we would love to hear from you, whether it's feedback comments or an idea for a show or a guest. You can always reach us at thinkenergy@hydroottawa.com