Are we able to speak to the motion in Committee of the Whole? Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Once again the opportunity here is clear. I am aware that this opportunity, with such short payback time, has been proposed by the Arctic Energy Alliance in the past, and I’ve drawn on some of their analysis to make my comments. I have commented on some of this already, so I won’t repeat that.

I will note there have been a couple of changes since that work. First of all, the government now subsidizes more of the energy consumed than they used to and that’s because we’ve taken the cap from an average of 700 to something well above that. We’ve actually dropped it in summer to 600 when energy use is low and raised it to 1,000 when energy use is high. So the net impact is we are subsidizing those dollars considerably more.

So the payback time calculated a couple of years ago was in the order of one to two years. Payback time now would be less than that and, again, Mr. Chair, I want to stress we are looking at increases to electricity costs of 7 percent every year for three years followed by another at 5 percent in the fourth year. Who knows, those could be higher by the time we get there. Hopefully not, not if we take good moves to address the costs. So the payback time, again, this is no-brainer kind of stuff. I am very perplexed why this hasn’t been done before, but it’s a very concrete project and I think we can make an investment here, have the money to reinvest next year, or certainly by the year after and keep going. From that point on, we will be saving millions every year compared to what we are spending now in subsidy dollars for these highly inefficient hot water heaters.

If I could just mention how they are so inefficient, electric hot water heaters in thermal communities,

the sequence in diesel fuel is used to generate electricity at about 30 percent rate of efficiency. So two-thirds of that goes up the pipe. We take that third of energy and we use it then as electricity to heat hot water. Again, efficiency is maybe 40 percent. By the time all is said and done, we’ve used about 10 percent of the electricity in that litre of fuel and the rest is dissipated.

We have a huge opportunity to triple that efficiency with a single move that doesn’t cost us anything over a two-year period because it’s got such quick payback time. I’d be happy to put numbers to this, have the Minister put numbers to this. I suspect he could have it if he wanted. If he called the Arctic Energy Alliance, he could probably have this by coffee time tomorrow. So this is not a big thing to update these numbers.

Again, I will leave it at that, Mr. Chair. There is no reason not to do this whatsoever. Mahsi.