Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good afternoon, Power Corporation folks. I have just a couple of comments to make. Most of the things that I was going to say would have been said already concerning the power rates, concerning the low-water surcharge, concerning initiatives that are being undertaken by the corporation. I'm fully supportive of the direction that the Power Corporation appears to be going in the next little while. It's encouraging to see the joint venture that is being undertaken with the Snare Cascades. It's always exciting, at least in my opinion anyway, when something like that is developed because what it means is security of power for industry, commercial ventures and consumers. We've experienced all too often high costs related to developing businesses in the Northwest Territories and a large part of it is due to the high cost of power.
I think Colomac is an excellent example. They had to provide every -- they did anyway, I don't know if they still do -- drop of oil to generate every kilowatt hour of electricity to run their operation. The cost of that takes away a lot of potential, when there is hydro potential in that area. Hydro development in areas like that would certainly reduce operating costs and be much more beneficial to the labour force. We'd be able to create more employment if power is more readily available to the extraction industry in the near future. I think the diamond people are certainly anxious to know there's going to be stability of power.
It's exciting to see something like this go ahead because it exchanges a nonrenewable commodity with a renewable commodity, from the use of oil to generate electricity to a renewable supply of water. It's not only good for us, it's good for the environment as well. Something like that is very exciting and I want to congratulate the Power Corporation for those initiatives and, certainly, the Dogrib Nation for helping to launch something like that and get a piece of the action they so rightly deserve.
The other thing I noted was there was very little said about the nonrenewable sources of power, the generation of electricity through means other than hydro and oil. I guess we are kind of limited to what we can do here. We have an awful lot of sunlight and you could use photovoltaics but it is a very expensive proposition, even in the south, in California, where there is a lot more sun than perhaps we have here during the times of year we need it. And wind, of course, is limited to certain conditions. We've experienced what has happened in
Cambridge with the wind turbines there. The extreme conditions are pretty hard on equipment and I think its viability is probably questionable.
The one area that I think the Power Corporation must look at a little closer again is heat reclamation. I just can't help but look at the two or three acres of open water outside of the power house in Jackfish Lake. Under the extreme temperatures we've had, the lake still hasn't completely frozen over. It takes an awful lot of heat to keep water like that to keep ice off of it and it's such a shame that is happening when we're so close to major facilities. We have industry just over the hill from it. There is the Legislative Assembly building, for example. There are going to be years that it is going to put out kilowatts of heat into the water when they could be used, even for the short term. There must be something that could use such a resource.
I know that in some places, the Power Corporation has, in the past, experimented with reclaiming heat in Cambridge Bay, maybe lqaluit, and Inuvik. They were also involved with the water and sewer business as well and you could also use that kind of heat to heat water. We've got to be bold when it comes to instances like we see here. I don't think it's enough to say it's very expensive to do and probably not dependable because of power fluctuations. We know we're going to have cold winters and use up so many millions of litres of fuel just to generate electricity in this area and it's quite right that engineers should look at using the technologies of today to capture what otherwise would be wasted energy.
I certainly would encourage the corporation to continue looking at that. We're enjoying economical fuel rates right now, in spite of the fact that we do pay 60 to 70 cents a litre for gasoline and 50 cents a litre for fuel. It's still relatively inexpensive, when you look at it. Again, it's a non-renewable resource, its life expectancy is not that long and if we don't think of ways of capturing every bit of energy from its use, we'll certainly be looked at many years from now as a very wasteful society. We should show initiative by revisiting that.
I didn't have anything more to say, with the exception of wanting to comment again on the low water surcharge. We recognize that nature is something we can't control and we have cycles that come and go, where one year we'll have more water than we can use and it will run down to the ocean and the next year, we won't have enough. Last year was that kind of a year. This year with the snowfall, I'm encouraged to learn from your hydrologist that you are still optimistic that your water supply will be replenished. There's also the problem, they tell me, that the ground is so dry we may not get the fill of water we want and that's going to cause a problem next October or November when the surcharge comes off. so rightly deserve. I think I said when I appeared before the PUB on behalf of Yellowknifers that it would be nice if we didn't have to pay that, and there should be a contingency fund there to get us through the tough times. I'm encouraged to know that the corporation is looking at establishing that reserve fund. If they're not, they should be, but I understand they are. I think that a majority of people, when you talk about rate restructuring, will take into consideration that they will have to pay an extra half penny or quarter of a penny per kilowatt in order to build up an emergency fund for those times when nature takes a course that is unpredictable, like it did in these last two years when we thought we would have water and didn't.
I think people who pay power bills may complain, but it will be a soft complaint. When anything goes up, one does comment on it, but I think in the long run it will pay off. We won't be hit with these sudden high costs of our bills. I look at my bill every month and I see anywhere from $13 to $25 in one month --at Christmas time, because I use a lot of power during the cold winter --to pay for that low-water surcharge. It could have been worse, but it is the way that it is.
I will stop at that and just say to the good staff in the Power Corporation that have kept our power, here in Yellowknife, this year was a remarkable year. We haven't had any outages that we have experienced in the past through acts of god or accidents or something like that. We have been very, very lucky this year. We have kept our fingers crossed and it has come about that we have only had one or two outages for reasons that were beyond anybody's control. I think a transformer overheated or something like that -- or a connection -- and that was done very quickly. It was a slight scare for a while that we thought that we would have to rotate power. But it takes dedicated people to keep the operations of that size and that importance functioning and they are to be congratulated for their good work. With that, Mr. Chairman, that is all I have to say about it by way of comment.