Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak to you today.

I think what I bring to this table is not so much something specific about transmission but kind of the forgotten resource, which is the deep geothermal heat beneath our feet.

Geothermal Canada was formed in 1974. This is our 50th year. Canadians have been active globally in geothermal energy, but not in Canada. Why? There are a number of reasons, but what I want to bring to the table today is really what geothermal energy is.

It covers a spectrum of technologies. That spectrum of technologies starts with ground base. This is shallow geothermal. These are heat pumps. Often you will hear somebody say, “I have geothermal.” It is most likely that they in fact have a ground-based or geo-exchange system.

We move to conventional geothermal, which is a deep extraction of brines naturally occurring in the subsurface and extracting that energy from them to produce power or thermal energy.

There's a lot of research and development today around what are called advanced systems or engineered systems. In fact, the American government has invested approximately $300 million in the last two years in the advancement of engineered geothermal systems.

As a note, there are over 16,000 megawatts of geothermal power installed globally. That doesn't sound like very much, but we have to remember that geothermal is baseload—it is firm and dispatchable—and that 16,000 megawatts is equivalent to 5.5 billion megawatt-hours annually.

I want to make 10 points about geothermal. It can help in Canada's decarbonization. It can provide baseload electricity as well as thermal energy. I want to stress that these facilities do not require battery backup or storage. They are grid stable and are able to provide dispatchable power on a 24-7 basis.

They provide a heat option for northern communities and allow for decarbonization without reverting to heat produced by electrical means. They provide a potential energy source for off-grid communities—indigenous, remote and rural—as well as rural industry, like mining operations.

Geothermal energy systems can be used as part of a hybrid system when combined with waste heat recovery and other forms of renewable energy, such as solar and wind, and can help reduce the dependence of remote, rural or indigenous communities on hydrocarbons.

Conventional deep geothermal facilities are carbon neutral. Work that I and my colleagues have been doing with the University of Alberta has shown that we can actually do carbon sequestration, so we can take a geothermal project and make it not just carbon neutral but carbon negative by sequestering carbon that other emitters are producing.

Although conventional geothermal has a high CapEx, it has a very low OpEx, and it is deployable in many parts of Canada. Unconventional or new generation geothermal, such as these advanced and engineered systems, will potentially have a higher cost, but these systems are under development, and as I've already said, the American government has invested more than $300 million in EGS, engineered geothermal systems.

Geothermal can support food stability by producing locally grown food. With additional research and testing, a small portion of the existing drilled wells, particularly the deep wells that have what's called a high water cut, have some potential to be, in fact, repurposed to produce an energy stream, either as thermal or as electrical energy.

Exploration and development of geothermal energy uses Canadian technology. This is something that we know how to do. We know how to drill and we know how to explore the deep subsurface. In fact, the reason that Geothermal Canada has been around since 1974 is that Canadian expertise and technology have been deployed and been used globally —but not here in Canada.

Thank you.