Toronto Talks

How Canada's Energy Advantage Could Unlock Billions in Growth with Michele Harradence

• The Toronto Region Board of Trade • Season 1 • Episode 15

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Canada sits on 150 years of natural gas reserves, yet we watched helplessly as Europe begged for energy we couldn't deliver. 

In this episode, Michele Harradence, Executive Vice President and President at Enbridge Gas, reveals how Canada's energy infrastructure challenges are costing us billions and why the time to act is now.

Michele and the Board's President and CEO, Giles Gherson explore:

  • How Enbridge's $350 million PREP project unlocked $4.5 billion in potential investment opportunities in southwestern Ontario
  • Why Ontario's 300 billion cubic feet of natural gas storage helped stabilize prices during Winter Storm Elliott while other regions faced crisis
  • The productivity gains from utility integration, including how Enbridge returned $100 million in savings to Ontario customers
  • How renewable natural gas and hydrogen can work within existing infrastructure as part of Canada's net-zero transition
  • Why declaring energy as a national interest and streamlining regulations could position Canada as a global energy leader

Michele also shares how generative AI is transforming customer service, why natural gas provides the flexibility needed for a 24/7 economy, and what it will take for Canada to capitalize on growing global demand before other nations capture these markets.

From the Toronto Region Board of Trade, this is Toronto Talks. Toronto, let's talk about our energy needs. The energy sector is critical to North America's quality of life. And I'd say as Canada, we're just incredibly blessed with the abundance of the natural resources that we have. And I think we need to embrace that advantage again. We live in a region powered by a vast and often invisible network of infrastructure that heats our homes, fuels our economy and underpins every facet of modern life. That energy system is under pressure to keep up with a population and economy that show no signs of slowing down. In this episode, we're exploring what it will take to make our energy infrastructure more resilient and productive. From pipelines to peak day planning, we'll talk about how Enbridge is navigating this complex landscape. Guiding us through this conversation is Michelle Herodins, Enbridge Executive Vice President and President of Gas Distribution and Storage. Michelle recently sat down with our President and CEO Giles Gerson. Here's their conversation. Tell us a little bit, I think our listeners should be interested to know a little bit about yourself and how you've ended up in this a really vital role. Sure. Well, you know, I could go back a ways, but maybe I'll start with the abbreviated version. So I actually grew up in the Toronto area. Mississauga went to Arendelle Secondary School. And my family's originally from the Maritimes, so very Canadian. And my, you know, I'm an engineer and a lawyer by training. My dad was an engineer, and I think I just kind of seemed to intuitively pick up stuff. I remember him bringing home a video of a fully automated warehouse. This would have been back in the 70s that he had designed. Yeah, it was very cool. And he brought in, remember back then when we had the big VHS and the TV on the card, he brought that to the living room. And he had brought it from work to show this thing he had worked on. And I watched it over and over and over again. So there were probably some early signs. We were living out in Halifax then, and I was maybe grade four. There were probably some early signs. Wow, that's amazing that they would have even been there. Yeah, it was really neat. They had all these robots on tracks and stuff. But, you know, by the time I went to university, so I think you said you went to Queens. That's where I did my engineering degree in mechanical engineering. Graduated in the early 90s. I would say, so my father by that point had moved more into the petrochemicals business. And so I had the engineering degree. It was the early 90s. Was really, you know, as we know, things were a little tough in Ontario at that time. So I was kind of going, do I go out to work? Do I stay in school? What should I do? And I decided to go to law school. And at the time, I was doing a lot of environmental remediation work as a summer student. And I remember, again, my dad influenced my life. He was in the petrochemicals business, as I mentioned earlier. And he had this attitude of, I'm so tired of people telling me the best way they're going to clean this up. They need to start thinking about how we not make this mess in the first place. The first place. And, you know, that kind of got to me. So I went actually off to law school wanting to do environmental law. I thought that would be a great combination, and I certainly have touched on it many times over the years, but I also wound up realizing that I could combine the engineering degree in law in things like I actually wound up doing defense work for architects and engineers, so I went to New Brunswick for law school, just where my family's from, then practiced law in Halifax for a while, and did defense work for architects and engineers, construction claims, environmental litigation, things like that. Where the rubber hits the road. Yeah, I really enjoyed it. And I'd worked pretty hard to get that engineering degree, so I didn't want to leave it behind. And I wanted to combine the two. And then I wound up with an opportunity, fast forward to 1998, I wound up with an opportunity to move out to Calgary and work for Shell as a lawyer. And they were negotiating what became the contracts for the first oil sands project to be done in decades. That was all sands, was it? The oil sands project? Well, all sands would have been in the 80s, so this was the Athabasco oil sands project and what became the Albion mine and the Scotford upgrade. And I always say that then Shell decided, here's the best way to test a lawyer is make them live with the contracts they wrote. So they asked me to move back into an engineering role on the project, which was a little tough on the brain for a while, but wound up working in a project management role on what became that first big oil sands project to come on board by then in the late 90s. I think we started up around, yeah, in the early 2000s. So it was, it was transformational for the company. It was a really neat spot to be. And I spent probably about 17 years working for Shell, a variety of different roles in North America, overseas. And the last role I had with Shell was running the refinery that they have out in Sarnia. So it was back in Ontario. And then an opportunity came to join Spectra, as they were called then, which a lot of us as Canadians know the West Coast system, West Coast pipeline, and they had gas plants and that. So they asked me to come out there as the VP of Operations and Environment, Health and Safety. And about two years into that role, Enbridge acquired us. So it's kind of funny. Oh, I see. That's how you ended up at Enbridge. Yeah, that's how I wound up at Enbridge. And I say it's kind of funny. I think I just kept avoiding head office, because when I worked for Spectra, it was in Calgary. And then when Enbridge bought us, I moved to Houston. Sorry, when I worked for Spectra, I was in Calgary. The head office was in Houston. And then Enbridge's head office was in Calgary. So I headed for Houston and was the chief operations officer for the gas transmission business, which is a really large business. The West Coast Pipeline system is certainly in there. And in the U.S., we probably moved 20% of the natural gas that moves around the U.S. and into the Gulf of Mexico from Texas to the U.S. Northeast, and did that for several years. And then three years ago, was asked to come as the president of the gas utility business, which back then was... In Canada, I guess. In Canada. Yeah, it was just in Canada. So come full circle 30 years later back to Toronto where I grew up. And at that time, we had just been merging what folks would remember as the old Union Gas and then Enbridge Gas, or even before that, a lot of folks still refer to Consumers Gas. That was who was our gas provider when we moved to Mississauga back in 1980, it was, from Halifax. Yeah, so it was doing that. I think about two years into that, we had the opportunity to look at acquiring three really premium natural gas utilities in the U.S. and they're in Utah, Wyoming, Idaho. That's one of the large utilities, along with an E&P business that supplies the gas, and then North Carolina and Ohio. So we're 4 million customers in Ontario or thereabouts. We're in Ontario and a little bit in Quebec, and then that added another 3 million customers. So that's 7 million homes, schools, hospitals, businesses that we supply natural gas directly into, and that makes us North America's largest natural gas utility platform. I mean, apart from the breaking rights, which are impressive, those geographies are very separate, right? Ontario, and then, as you said, Carolina, and then the West. What's the logic behind those? Is it scale? Is it scale pure and simple? Because there's no connectedness, really, is there between those markets? Well, I think, I mean, Ohio, of course, is right on the other side of Lake Erie for us, But utilities are, by their nature, they're really regulated at the state or provincial level. So you're looking at how productive is the jurisdiction. Is it in a jurisdiction that has growth, that has a predictable regulatory framework? So what we do at the end of the day is we invest our capital in infrastructure, utility-type infrastructure, and we earn a return on that. We're not exposed to commodity prices, so we don't have lots of variability like big oil and gas companies or something like that. We're utility, so we invest, and you earn that steady, predictable return. So that's really what we're looking for is the growth and the productiveness. To really scale. I mean, it brings us to scale. Yeah, exactly. So good utilities in and of their own right, and then that opportunity to now look across the board and say, hey, you know, we have meetings all the time that are, well, we're really good at doing this in Utah. I wonder if we could do that somewhere else, or we're really good at this in Ontario, I wonder if we could do that in Ohio, things like that. Well, that's interesting. I think it's worth talking a little bit about the importance of energy infrastructure, since that's your business, to the Canadian economy. I think people perhaps don't appreciate just what role it plays. We think about pipelines, for example, but all the energy infrastructure that we have. We don't see a lot of it. If you're living in downtown Toronto, you don't think about it. You see the gas plant here and there. You don't really see it, though. But it's important stuff. It is important stuff, and it's interesting. I don't know if as energy companies or more infrastructure companies if we've done ourselves a disservice, but we try and make sure you don't see us. I mean, we're there. We're everywhere here. I mean, I say that to my colleagues here in Toronto, for example. We're everywhere. We're in your homes. We're in your businesses. We're supplying that safe and reliable energy. We do want you thinking about us before you dig a fence post. That's where we really try and push the call before you dig. The safety side's key. But I think for me it's always gone back to those fundamental building blocks that you need to sustain and improve quality of life. Food, water, energy. You need those three things. So the energy sector is critical to North America's quality of life. And I'd say as Canada we're just incredibly blessed with the abundance of the natural resources that we have. And I think we need to embrace that advantage again. We've kind of lost sight of that. It really, if you can get that infrastructure, so having the energy is one thing, but being able to get the energy where you need it is another thing. So whether that's natural gas, getting it from the source to the burner tip, as we like to say, electricity, same thing, where we generate it, where do we need it? And I think that when you look at businesses and industries, It's such an enabler of business, of productivity, and we're going to talk about that later. One of the things when we were buying these new utilities that they said to, they being governors and the presidents of the senates and things like that because we would go and speak to these governments saying we're here and consistently I heard, we have safe, affordable, and reliable energy here. Don't screw it up. We know how important that is to our economic development and our economic framework. So I think that recognition's been there in some jurisdictions, and we need to lean into that advantage we have. I mean, one of the examples I love to give here in Ontario, we had a project that we built last year, PrEP we refer to it as the Panhandle Regional Enforcement Project. And Panhandle is our big system that's in southwestern Ontario. We have a huge, huge natural gas storage facility not far from Chatham. It's one of the largest in North America, and I don't think we realize just what a powerful tool it is, but it ensures that safe, reliable, and affordable energy at all times. We put the gas in in the summer when it's cheap, and then when prices are blowing out elsewhere in North America, we're good here. We've got that energy. What's the scale of that in terms of how much it augments supply? So it's about 300 billion cubic feet that we have of natural gas, So it can push out up to six or seven billion cubic feet a day if it needs to at its peak. So and probably just need about two, say, to come into the GTA. Some of it, about two thirds of it, it's regulated. It's, I would say, owned and operated for the rate payers, the customers here in Ontario. And about a third of it is commercially traded and unregulated, we would call it. It now, and we've seen this phenomena over the last few years when there have been significant storms. We saw it again in January of this year. It really backs up all through the middle of the continent. So it is making sure that gas, for example, can flow into Chicago by backing up the gas that might be flowing out of the Marcellus, say out of Ohio or Pennsylvania. U.S. Northeast, same thing. We push energy south. We push energy north. And it helps us with the affordability side of things. I often like to point to, I think it was Storm Elliott that we had back in 2022. Gas prices were $50 in the U.S. Northeast. They were $15 in Chicago. We were $5 here in Toronto, and that's because of Don. That's because we have that reliable access. So in any event, the PREP project was to add more capacity to move that gas, and it was for southwestern Ontario, supporting the greenhouse growers we have there, supporting power generation we have down there, and even residential development. It's about $350 million that Enbridge invested in the project to bring that gas to those customers. And it was projected, and this is all evidenced before the Ontario Energy Board when they approved it, to unlock $4.5 billion in investment opportunities in Ontario, including some planned EV battery facilities down in Windsor and St. Thomas. So huge enabler. That's an interesting point, just in and of itself. When people think of electrification and the transition, they don't tend to think of natural gas, right? And I know we've had conversations in the past about the sheer scale of the natural gas contribution to our energy supply during winter, for example. And I know there's been this sort of over the last number of years, you've heard political leaders talk about, particularly municipal ones in some cases, talk about, well, we don't want any more connections with natural gas because we're moving to electrification. And I think it's worth just repeating what you told me about just, you know, on a peak day in February, in winter, how much we actually rely on natural gas for heat, you know, but in terms of the scale of natural gas consumption, essentially, versus the grid, the electrical grid. 100%. So I think what I shared with you, and I don't know that we do a great job of getting that message out, but on those coldest days, and we saw it again on January 21st of this year, The natural gas system here in Ontario provides up to four times the energy that the electricity system provides. So we're not there to necessarily always be there every day that there's an energy demand. But those peak days are critical. You could replace it all. I mean, this is already infrastructure that's bought and paid for and in the ground. You could choose to replace it all, write that off, replace it with something different. But it's not like it's there for your constant baseload need. We're really fortunate here in Ontario with the investment we've done decades ago in nuclear. We have hydroelectric power. We have a good suite of renewables. And we have gas-fired generation for that electricity. But when you have that coal to stay and you combine it with the need, the pull-on gas that we have for everybody's furnaces in their home, it's up to four times the energy that the electricity system is capable of providing. And we have a prediction from our ISO, from our independent electricity system operator, that over the next 25 years, that energy, or that electricity demand rather, should increase by 75%. Yeah, that's right. But even then, you still need more natural gas because as you point out, four times, not twice. Exactly. You still have those peaks. So we're big proponents of energy efficiency. We really believe that our job is to be there on that coldest day. But if we can build homes more efficient and use less energy just in general here, that's absolutely the best bang for your buck from an investment perspective and that sort of thing. But we're there to make sure on those coldest days that people are safe and warm in their homes. That's something that's incredibly important to us and our employees take very, very seriously. I think most people at the end of the day. I think most people it is, exactly. But go back to the energy corridor that people talk about. Because there, I think, again, the assumption is, I think, that this is really about exporting, for example, LNG. That if we were to build another pipeline across the country or through Quebec to the Maritimes, that you would have the opportunity to convert that natural gas to LNG and ship it to Europe where there's a desperate need. Is there really a market for Canadian LNG in Europe, do you think? and is that the core reason for building out the energy corridor here to get natural gas across the country? Or are there other reasons as well in order to supplement what we currently have domestically? Well, I think there's no question that the more we can get Canada's energy to tidewater, the better we are. We're blessed to have abundant resources. We really, I think, need to shift our thinking into recognizing that there's an ecosystem we can build around that. But getting that energy to Tidewater is key. I think a lot of us were disappointed when the Europeans came calling a few years ago when we didn't help them.- Right. - I mean, that's just not the right thing to do.- Germany, yeah, yeah. - Yeah, and we have this abundant resource, and yet we weren't in a position to help them. That just struck a lot of Canadians as wrong. It certainly struck me as wrong. I was embarrassed as a Canadian that we can do more when we have what we do. It felt very, quite frankly, almost selfish. So I think that's what you're hearing a lot. I think there's also a recognition--- But this is a very expensive pipeline build, right? I mean, you've got to have a return on investment.- I think that's the challenge. So I think at the end of the day, we do need to take a business lens to all of these things. I mean, we know that in the Canadian context, anyhow, most of our energy comes from Western Canada. The trip to Tidewater is a lot shorter west than it is east.- Well, absolutely. That's why it makes abundant sense. You can just see that business case. And you have, of course, the Asian markets that you're now much, much closer to. That's what's so popular by the LNG Canada. And even the Gulf Coast, of course, you have to come through the Panama Canal or something like that. So I do think from a macro perspective, things will shift around and it'll go where it needs to go. But I think looking at what's the most efficient and effective way to get that energy to markets is usually going to be your best bet. I do worry sometimes we need to recognize there could be unintended consequences of our actions as well. So my job is to look out for Ontario rate payers for our customers. And when we look strictly, for example, at natural gas, you know, years ago, Energy East was a big pipeline and that was on the books and being considered. Here in Ontario, we were quite concerned about that because it meant reusing some infrastructure that carried natural gas. And I said, okay, but where are we going to get our natural gas from? We still do depend a lot on TC's main line that comes from the west. And it's really important how it comes down from the north to feed our northernmost communities. I wouldn't want to see that go away. That's a critical piece of infrastructure for how we service our customers here in Ontario. And I don't think it's fair that Ontarians have to pay if it goes away, let alone, of course, having us, if we're not getting that gas from the north, having us get the gas from the south and becoming more dependent on, say, gas coming from the U.S., I don't think is what we're looking for at the moment. So we just need to make sure we look at all aspects of it. So when you think of the corridor, though, what would you think would be the two or three biggest reasons from an Enbridge perspective of the value of building out the energy corridor? I think the notion of identifying energy corridors makes a lot of sense. We see that in other jurisdictions. It's not an uncommon thing to do to say this is the land, call it the geography, that we're going to select to do this because then all of your impacts are in that one place, whether it's your impact on Indigenous communities, on the environment, things like that. You pick what makes the most sense to go through from all of those factors and then you identify it and you basically stay there. So in that sense, I think it makes a lot of sense. It still has to be going to the right markets in the most efficient way possible at the end of the day because I don't think we can afford to do everything out of the goodness of our heart or out of a desire. Pipelines are expensive to build, right? And you have these lengthy pipelines, and the question is, again, what's the throughput going to be and where's the market, right? Well, and fundamentally, I don't think we can lose sight of the fact for our energy our biggest market is south of us. And we have steel in the ground that takes that energy south. So that steel that already exists, that's right-of-ways that already exist. So we believe that we should really stay focused on making sure we have effective working relationships north-south and then building out infrastructure where we've already got that steel in the ground. That's the minimal impact that you can have is go where you already are and make it bigger. But you've got the shut-in gas issue in Alberta still, right? You've still got much greater capacity, I think, right? I think so. I think there's still opportunity for sure. And I mean, I think, you know, at the end of the day is what's competitive. One of the things that I think we don't even always recognize, I used to spend a lot of time in our gas plants and on our system in British Columbia, way up in northern B.C., the Horn River Basin, the Liard River Basin, they're named after these two big, gorgeous rivers that I think most Canadians have never seen. And there is more dry gas up there than North America would need for the next 150 years. Gas, what does that mean? It just means it's got less, say, components of oil or other things in there, so it's easier to turn it into the type of gas you want for LNG. So it's kind of a lighter gas? Yeah, you don't have to clean it up a lot and get what would be considered impurities out of it. It can, you know, there's a little bit of processing. So again, closer to the Pacific market, so there's an opportunity there. We're not even touching that stuff because it's still the furthest away from markets. So we have abundant supplies that I think, looking at how we make those economic I can get those to market is key. So as Enbridge, we're involved in one of those offshore terminals, or one of the LNG terminals, rather, with fiber one, and looking forward to seeing if there's not more that come along. It makes a lot of sense. But we've got to get there in a reasonable time frame at the end of the day. I mean, I do think we have a second chance to move the nation forward. There's no question the global demand for gas is still there and the customers are growing. But, you know, and the coastal gas link, which is, for example, the pipeline that goes to LNG Canada, took over 10 years. I mean, in that decade, the U.S. has become the largest LNG support. I know, I know. We've doddled, really. It drives me crazy. Yeah, I know, a lot of people. Well, especially because having worked in that industry my whole career, I would tell you we are so responsible as to how we do things. You know, Canada is among the most responsible producers there is. So to not have that energy flow to markets and get displaced by, instead less responsible energy. But one of the American LNG is actually Canadian gas that's converted to LNG on the Gulf Coast and then shipped as U.S. LNG to Asia, right? Yeah, well, and they've been able to also move. I mean, in the last decade, I mentioned I was on our U.S. gas transmission system for the last number of years, and we had a system, our Texas Eastern Pipeline system, was built in 18 months during World War II, and it was built to take products out of Texas up to Boston, New Jersey, New York, because the German U-boats were bombing as they tried to take them by ship. They built this pipeline in 18 months to bring refined products like gasoline and diesel up to the boats to then ship over to the war effort. And we then converted it after the Second World War to natural gas. That, for decades and decades and decades, the gas flowed from Texas and Louisiana north. We reversed our system about a decade ago so that we could move from the Marcellus type, Pennsylvania, Ohio area south, so that it was possible to do that. We almost virtually always flow south and have for years now. It's actually pushing into Texas, into Louisiana, then to the Gulf Coast, and then off to markets. It's completely changed the dynamic of how energy flows. You know, one of the things in this whole interesting discussion about natural gas, I mean, one thing that always strikes me is there's sometimes, you know, in the public discourse, a sense that there's a contradiction between using our abundant reserves of natural gas, or hydrocarbons, and transition to net zero. And I remember having a really interesting conversation with a member of the former British cabinet who was in the Treasury Department, was a junior minister, but he made an interesting point about Canada, which was he said, you know, when I look at Canada, to me, if you use your natural resources effectively, you're going to lower the cost of capital for the transition to net zero. If you kind of starve yourself of your natural resources, you're going to raise the cost of capital. It's going to be more expensive. The transition to net zero will be actually more expensive. And I thought that was an interesting point that a lot of people never really mention. And I'm sure from your perspective, that's got to be the way you see it. Oh, absolutely. I mean, investing in that infrastructure, well, even as simply as I think what I said earlier, We have infrastructure that's in the ground. And a few years ago, we had a lot of folks saying, no, no, it'll be a stranded asset. We won't use it in the future. You can't build any more. That doesn't make any sense. Which always struck me as how could that be? I'd like to say carbon molecules don't need a passport. They don't need a COVID vaccine. They can cross borders. So how would leaning into our natural advantages not be a good thing at the end of the day? Let's get that responsibly produced natural gas to global markets. Let's use it effectively here. We still have in Canada power generation that's on coal. Yeah, well, in Atlanta, Canada. Exactly. And, I mean, it doesn't mean there's not other things that we can move to. But even, I mean, as Enbridge, we have four business units, one of which is our renewable power business. You know, we've been in renewable power for decades now in North America and in Europe. We think it's part of an all-of-the-above solution to energy. but at the end of the day, the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine. But people do need to stay from warm in their homes. They need that energy there. My boss likes to say this, our CEO, Greg Ebel, likes to say, you can't run a 24-7 economy on part-time power. And it's true. So how do we get that resiliency that we can get from, say, natural gas that can fire up for that peak when you need it, and then we can bring it back down again. That's fine. Now, we haven't really talked about productivity as such, but although we have been talking about productivity in a kind of, without really referencing the word, because almost everything you've said has been really about the productivity of the Canadian economy and the American economy come to that, using the efficiency and effectiveness of natural gas as a source of heat and power. But just, you know, at the Toronto Regional Board of Trade, we have the Business Council of Toronto, which we created a year or so ago, you're a member of it. It really is our CEOs who are leaning in on productivity, how we turn around our productivity lag, because we've fallen far behind the US in terms of our productivity, our GDP per capita, we know that. And now we have a government in Ottawa that says it really is determined to also turn this around and make us more of a productivity leader. Now that's going to be a big lift for the new government, but certainly the business community here is very eager to see that and play a part of that. But talk a bit about that from an Enbridge perspective, the role that Enbridge can play in turning around our pretty severe, I would say, productivity crisis. Well, I think I would start with, again, that access to safe, reliable, and affordable energy. I mean, if you have that, if it's there, it's available, it's affordable, it's cost-effective, use it. Exactly. And I mean, we just need to look at the impact, for example, of taking off the residential carbon tax. I mean, we were at a point where it was costing more than the actual natural gas commodity was. And that doesn't mean necessarily carbon tax is a bad idea per se, but it did mean that from an affordability perspective, folks were pushing back and some were questioning whether it was moving the needle. So that's, you've got it, use this natural advantage that you have. But I think one of the things that's interesting, as a regulated utility, we're incented to drive productivity. And our job is to continue to make things affordable for our ratepayers. And that's an expectation that's set by our regulators. So, for example, if we want to invest a lot of capital in growing, and there is a lot of demand on that. There's a lot of demand, just like we talked about, for more energy, for data centers, for things like that. There's that capital to invest. But then our rate payers who are, for example, here in Ontario, don't want to pay for it all. So what are we doing to make sure that we're not trying to grow the share of wallet, for example, is something we talk about. So we're always looking for ways to improve that productivity and drive those tangible benefits to our customers and then return them to our customers. We talked earlier about how we integrated Enbridge Gas and Union Gas. We, what we call rebase, but we went back to our regulator for new rates a couple of years ago. And with that, we handed back over $100 million worth of productivity savings out of bringing the two utilities together. That made things better. Our obligation was to make things better for our customers here in Ontario. But we'll look at things, we'll certainly look at things that we can do from an operational efficiency perspective. So, for example, here in Ontario, I think we lead North America in electronic billing. So instead of paying for the stamp, mailing it out, we bill, I think, over 65% of our customers are on e-mail. And that's unlike other jurisdictions? Other jurisdictions have lower adoption, so that's a great one. We added interactive voice response to our call center a few years ago, so it allows our customers to self-serve. We're certainly going to make sure we get feedback. Lots of us have gotten frustrated at being in that endless loop of self-service, but it's reduced our call volume. So again, it allows some of those simpler things to be handled, for example. We are spending a lot of time looking at how we can use generative AI on that customer experience. So for example, right now, we're using generative AI to look at interactions between our customer reps and our customers. And that gets us more accurate insights both into how our agents are performing. So are they calling up the right information quickly? But also, how are our customers feeling? It's a good way of maybe even getting ahead of something and go, huh, there's an emerging issue going on in Oshawa, and we better understand what's happened here sort of thing. Or there's an issue with the way the bills went out this month. We want to obviously not have those things happen, but it allows us to pick it up more quickly if it does. It allows us to target and coach our customers' reps faster. I think it's easier for them to have a better employee experience because they now, so basically the generative AI is listening and popping up, here you go solutions.- Oh, like questions and prompts.- Exactly, and I've sat next to our customer service reps to listen in on these calls over the years. It's amazing what they are able to pull up and just the complexity they have to deal with, but they do seem to like the generative AI helping them along with that too. And again, like I said, those customer pain points, it can help deescalate those because we catch them earlier. Certainly, we're tailoring our energy solutions for our industrial customers. That's one of the things I'm actually kind of excited about with the new utilities that we've added. We have, for example, steel-making customers in Ontario that are also in Ohio. Okay, not surprised. Or automotive manufacturers that are in North Carolina and here in Ontario. So we can now look at some of the solutions, the energy solutions for one or the other and extend them beyond. We're also starting to look at it from the long-term planning of our system. So when we go to, for example, build a project like the prep one I described earlier, we're using that to say, okay, what's the best predictive model for where things are going from an energy demand side, and will they need all this gas? Let's make sure we don't overbuild, for example. Well, that's pretty important. Or even on our renewable power system does the same thing with the solar farm that we have here in Ontario is looking at, okay, are we meeting the energy demand? Are we ready when called for? Imagine something like weather and us being able to predictively model, okay, what's this going to do to our system? Where is the gas going to be asked for the most? And is everything ready to go? Do we have all the capacity we need? So really efficient delivery of gas to your customer. Also in your business, there's new products, right? Or new products that are developing, like renewable natural gas and hydrogen. We haven't talked much about hydrogen. Tell me a bit about that because, again, a productivity related to technology, new product opportunities. What about, how do you see the RNG and hydrogen markets developing? Well, I think fundamentally what we're looking at, again, to me it's about customer choice and understanding what the opportunities are and how it can be part of the suite of solutions. If we start, for example, with renewable natural gas, I mean, we're extremely committed to net zero emissions by 2050 from our operations. So we've been modernizing a lot of our own infrastructure. But low carbon solutions is something we've been delivering here in Ontario for over a decade. And I would add, without any regulatory support to do so. We've been doing it because we believe it's the right thing to do. And it's been what our customers have been asking us for. So as Enbridge Gas, we've been able to be a bit of an incubator for Enbridge overall in trying new technologies, seeing what our customers have to say. And RNG would be a good example of that, working with landfill operators, for example, to capture that natural gas. So methane, is that essentially? It is methane, and it's in many ways the easiest one. It's what we call a drop in fuel. I mean, it has the same characteristics of natural gas because it is natural gas. And there's two things. You take it from a landfill and you kind of converge it with a stream of natural gas? You blend it into your system. I mean, sometimes it needs a little purifying, but it's doing two things. One, that methane from the landfill is not just going to the environment. We don't want that to go to the atmosphere. We want it to capture it as the first thing. It's a GHG, for sure. But then, you know, if you think of reduce, reuse, recycle, it recycles methane into the gas system. It brings it in. It's got the same characteristics. It's very simple to do. And, in fact, I've been in some meetings. I was up in Ottawa a couple years ago for a region there, and they were showing me maps of the whole area of eastern Ontario and the Gatineau area of Quebec, and they had cows plodded on it because they were showing me where the dairy farms were, and there was more methane. Where the methane's going to be found. Going to be in things like that. Well, how extensive is that then? How extensive is RNG at the moment? I mean, people don't really think about it. They talk natural gas. They assume it's natural gas from the resource in Alberta. So I don't think it's ever going to meet 100% of our needs for natural gas. And our customers don't expect it to. Well, at the moment, one of the challenges we have here in Ontario, we have lots of things that produce it. We're capturing it, but it's going to other jurisdictions. The benefits of it are going to other jurisdictions. Why does that? because there hasn't been the regulatory support to actually bring it in as a part of our regulated utility. So we've been doing it, but we've been doing it kind of off to the side, I would call it, and making it available to jurisdictions like British Columbia have been buying renewable natural gas attributes from us for years now. It is more expensive. There's no question about that, that it's probably six times more expensive than conventional natural gas, because it's a different process to get it there. And that's why I think our customers, they're not really telling us it's a one-to-one replacement, but they see it as an overall component of decarbonization for them. And hydrogen would be a similar sort of thing. I mean, we're really proud here in Ontario, up in Markham. We were the first ones to blend hydrogen into the gas system in North America. And we're still doing that. And it was important to us to demonstrate that it could be done and that it could be done safely. What are the applications of that? Well, so in this case, what we do is we have an electrolyzer, so it's what we call green hydrogen. It's made by, we take power when it's generated at, call it lower system rates when they need, and originally was built as a bit of a sink for that electricity. And we produce hydrogen with it, and then we blend it back in the system, about anywhere from 2% to 5% hydrogen into the system. It's there. It works. It's doable. I'd say a great option for combustion engines as well to offset gasoline, things like that. The question is just we can only move at the pace that our customers want and can afford. So these are options we believe that are important to prove out the technology, demonstrate it works. But you kind of go into a bit of a holding pattern. Yeah, it feels that way. Unless folks are ready to pay for it. Now, we have made some significant investments in renewable natural gas in the U.S. through our gas transmission business. because we had regulated utilities like us as customers that were willing to pay for it, much like British Columbia is, you know, in different parts of the U.S. And why are they willing to pay this six times more then? Well, they see it as part of their overall plan to decarbonize their system or to reduce that. So it's part of the transition. To them, it's part of the mix, right? And it does fit with that, what we like to call that, all of the above solutions. The question becomes kind of how far you want to take it and how quickly you want to take it. I often think of it as if we go too slow, that's not good. You know, I don't think we can. Well, I kind of worry about that, yeah. So do I. I don't think, you know, my view as folks kind of want to debate climate change is, well, I don't think we can afford to be wrong, so how about we do everything we can that's reasonable to manage it? But then the definition becomes, well, what can we do and what's reasonable? We go too fast, we have an affordability issue, right? Well, that's that whole question about making the transition as cost effective as possible. Exactly. Last question, just really to get back into the new government. I mean, Enbridge, along with other energy sector leaders, did sign an open letter to Prime Minister Mark Carney urging him to take action to position Canada as a global energy leader and secure long-term economic prosperity. In your view, what should governments be doing to unlock capital and accelerate infrastructure projects? You know, I really believe, going back to me, where we started investing in energy is investing in our future. Having that reliable, affordable energy is core to our competitiveness. It's a national security issue, I would argue, and certainly core to prosperity. And we have such a wonderful opportunity to be a global energy leader, not just an oil and gas producer, but an energy leader. We have great resources. They are among the most responsibly produced, and we should be on those global markets. It's just, as a Canadian, it feels like our role. Think of how many go back to whether it's Pearson, our peacemaking efforts. We should be helping the world more than we are, and I really believe our energy can do that. So I think some of the things and some of the things we've spoken about doing is we need to declare that energy is in the national interest. We need the political will to support these projects, to see them through. And even when there's not 100% consensus on things, we need to simplify the regulations and commit to some realistic deadlines. For permitting and... Absolutely, for things like that. And because at the end of the day, we need to attract that investment. I find a lot of the conversations right now are making about,"Well, we've made it prohibitive to invest in energy, so let's make it not prohibitive." I'm like, "Yes, that's the first step." But you need to make it competitive as well. Attractive. Well, it's global markets and there's a lot of places where this money can go. So we need to attract that investment by prioritizing certainty,