Hello everyone. I'd like to call the council workshop meeting for June 22nd to order. Uh it's 5:00 p.m. Mr. Clerk, what regrets do we have for this meeting? >> Uh we have regrets from Councillor and our mayor. >> Thank you. Councillor, there any declarations of pecuniary interest? >> And regrets from Elger. >> Okay. Thank you, Mr. Clerk. >> [snorts] >> Thank you, Councillor Duddeck. Um I see no declarations of conflict of interest. And that brings us to our discussion item, which is uh the consultations be having been and are likely continuing to be conducted by the province of Ontario with regard to their policies for local distribution companies, of which we have one. And uh our local distribution company is here to alert us as its shareholder, as its major shareholder, to um to what's going on. And uh with with that, I'd like to recognize uh Rob Lister, David Brennan, and Harold Holloway from Oakville Enterprises Corporation. Um Mr. Brennan, are you starting off as chair? Well, welcome. You You have the floor. And uh and because you're the topic, I'm I'm not going to conduct any time limits here. This is very important to the town. >> Okay. >> What I was about thing about opening, I'm going It's 5:00. Is that still good afternoon or is that good evening? Good afternoon. It's good afternoon. Then I thought, "Good day." Good day. So, anyways, thank you for having us in. Um our Jack >> We want to get our presentation up there. >> Oh, I'm not ready for it. But is it coming? >> Well, yeah. >> I got an opening. >> Well, let's hold the part you're okay with. >> [laughter] >> There it is. [snorts] Okay. Uh anyways, good day again. Um so, there will be, as you've heard, three of us talking. I'm doing the opening, then you're going to hear from Rob Lister, and then Harold Holloway, who's on the board and brings great insights from his work at TD in financing many of the energy sector financings over the last 60 70 years. 20 years. Many years have will bring insight on the financial aspects that are impacting all of us and then Rob will close. So [snorts] that's the order of things. Our objective today can be sort of summed up in two words. Educate comfort. First, educate you and inform you and answer any questions you have on the impacts of the government's new integrated energy plan that's coming into place. And second, comfort. Give you as the assurance that OEC through its board Rob Lister and Rob Lister senior leadership team that we've been on this are on it and will continue to be on it and keep you informed on any impacts for Oakville and OEC. So back in back in June 12th of 2025, the Ontario government released the energy for generations and integrated energy plan known as the IEP for the next 25 years. It's the Ontario's fourth long-term energy plan in the last 20 years. And this plan as they're quoted as saying is this plan is intended to coordinate the electricity natural gas and hydrogen sectors to support economic growth while emphasizing affordability security reliability and clean energy. So they're and not needless to say electricity distribution is a critical area of focus for this energy plan. And there's a recognition that there's a need to expand, modernize, and fortify the current electricity distribution system. So, given this full cast a strategic advisory group, the panel for utility leadership and service excellence, PULSE, it's a very catchy name, was established by the Ontario government with the five members you see listed there. And their role is to provide distribution-related support and recommendations to help facilitate successful implementation of this new integrated energy plan. If you move to the next slide, please. This slide highlights the wide areas and range of areas where insight and advice is needed from this panel. Among other things you can see listed here is there's a there's a need for a significant infusion of capital to fund growing infrastructure needs, future-proofing of Ontario's grids, standardizing service standards amongst all of the LDCs, improvement in operational and customer service, and probably from our perspective most important, addressing ownership, governance, and investment models, and minimizing barriers to investment. The next slide, please. Oh. My lovely assistant is here to help. Thank you. Uh the pulse panel has had extensive meetings with municipal officials across the province and with AMO, the Association of Municipalities of Ontario, and has got a lot of good feedback. Uh and it's the It's interesting to note that in these panel discussions, they have made it clear that they're not considering mandatory LDC amalgamation, which had been one of the notions before that had been seriously considered. Rather, it's focusing on enabling growth and providing flexibility. And while the panel has submitted its recommendations to the government earlier this year, nothing has been released to the public at this time. And the panel continues to be engaged with the industry. So, we have nothing formal from them at this stage. And however, it's important to remember and note our context. With the municipal election coming up, disclosure of what their plans or recommendations are may coincidentally wait until after sometime later this year. But with that, I will now turn it over to Rob to take us further. >> Thank you, Mr. Brennan. Good evening, Council. Great to be here. This slide, I just wanted to uh demonstrate the engagement that OEC and Oakville Hydro has had in this pulse panel process through the Ontario Energy Association, which I'm a board member of that association. Electric Distributors Association, which we're quite involved with. GridSmartCity consultations, the mid-size utility alliance, which popped up as a result of this process. And then uh about a month ago, I spoke at the Council for Clean and Reliable Electricity on the panel topic. So, just to give you a some insight that we've been very engaged in this process. Um So, the drivers of pulse, why why are they doing this? So, there is it is anticipated significant electricity growth, and I'll speak more about the ISO projections in the next slide. Ontario is making significant investments in nuclear power, and they've committed to well, they're planning on doing about 25 gigawatts or 25,000 megawatts of new nuclear. The um the current capacity of the uh province is around 38,000 megawatts. Um but the peak is sits around 23,000 megawatts around there. So, it just gives you a feel for the the amount of new generation that's being anticipated over the the forecast time period. Uh the concern, as Mr. Bannon mentioned, was that the LDCs wouldn't have the access to necessary capital in order to grow their plants in order to align with the growth expectations and the co-generation capacity that would be available in the province. And then uh we're going to speak more about the pills regime, payment in lieu of taxes, which prevents or is a barrier to investment from outside third parties in in utilities due to taxes, which makes it more difficult to access capital for building this transmission system. So, the electricity growth outlook. So, the ISO is forecasting that electricity consumption demand will increase 65% over the next 24 years. That's about 2.1% per year. Now, their this forecast is based on what you would call terawatt hours or megawatt hours. Electricity distributors look at megawatts or gigawatts, the actual peak demand. We don't get so concerned about how much electricity gets consumed over the year, it's how much gets what the peak load is in a particular day. The forecast from the ISO for the peak load is um considerably less. It is Look at my uh it 52%. So, 65% for consumption, 52% for the electricity peak demand growth, which is about 1.7% uh per year uh 52% over 24 years. So, considerably less than the than the consumption. Uh I I was at an ISO meeting uh this morning. So, uh last year the production was a 75% increase in electricity consumption. They bumped it down 65%. So, this morning they articulated some of the factors. So, residential growth is less than what they had anticipated. Commercial growth is higher than they had anticipated. Large step loads, and these would be like manufacturers coming into the province and and starting up a significant load. That has been less than anticipated. Data center load is up relative to what they were anticipating. EV charging is down. And the not demand side demand side management is up, which means that means less electricity consumption. So, those are the factors that went into moving from a 65% increase in or sorry, 75% increase in electricity consumption to uh 65% over the uh the 25-year time period. This is just illustrates This is right off the ISO website. This is their electricity consumption forecast. The middle uh line there just showing the 65% uh 65% growth. The um what What contributes to electricity growth? There's just a quick list there. New data centers and that will that will not be ubiquitous. That will be in in certain centers around the province. Housing, electric vehicles, manufacturing conversions, home heating conversions, and then economic growth with new customers. So, uh material growth in uh or any growth in uh in load will of course require new electricity distribution assets uh to support the increased electricity demand. So, I I thought I'd just share with you a little bit of the history of the Ontario LDC. So, in 1995, there were 815 municipalities in Ontario and 300 local Well, they were called municipal electricity utilities in those days. So, there were 300 of them. Municipal amalgamations have reduced the municipalities to 444 currently. Hydro One purchased 87 of the LDCs. There were 95 left by 2005, and now we have about 57 left due to um other purchases and mergers. So, there's 57 LDCs in the province currently today, plus or minus. So, 30 years ago in May, the Donald McDonald report came out and this was a report that uh was really a precursor to transitioning the uh the electricity system in Ontario. It was the framework for competition, distribution sector restructuring, and the the high-level recommendations that came out was the recommendation to have fewer local distribution companies, corporatize municipal electric utilities, uh and transfer them to the municipality and that's why the town of Oakville um took ownership of Oakville Hydro. Implement a regulatory scheme where none existed before uh to the Ontario Energy Board. Prior where prior it was Ontario Hydro that would provide the regulatory rate approvals for the local utilities. Also, the restructuring of Ontario Hydro into the many different companies that exist today. And then one of the recommendations was to create an electricity market. So, that was 30 years ago. And then, the Electricity Act 1998. So, when they created the the So, they government took the recommendations of the Donald McDonald report. And so, through the Electricity Act section 142, they corporatized the utilities as I mentioned. And for a period of 5 years, municipalities had the opportunity to to um create a holding company. In our case, originally it was Oakville Hydro Corporation. We rebranded it to OEC in 2015. But, that was the holding company. Uh Oakville Hydro Electric Distribution was the utility. And then, we had a few other um small affiliates. So, this clause facilitated investment vehicle for the municipalities. So, the municipalities could invest through the holding company in order to um generate essentially non-tax revenues um for the for the municipality. Uh and at the time, the government expected that municipalities would all monetize within a few years. And so, it's been a little bit of a uh issue for the provincial government because there's still 57 utilities. And um that wasn't the original model of the uh Donald McDonald report. In 2012, the David McFadden report with Marie Elston and Floyd Laughren went through a process. And I I I did uh present to that particular panel uh back at that time. And uh the their major recommendation was eight to 10 large regional uh distributors was what came out of that. And then, the CD Howe CD Howe report in March 2013, essentially their recommendation was don't force mergers. Instead, abolish taxes that constrain the private sector investment into the utility sector. So, those were part of it is that the government's been at this for a long time. And then we had the Ontario Energy Board Act same time period 1998. And so, the regulator's job is to protect consumers and promote economic efficiency and cost effectiveness. Um and through the the OEB regulation, they they provided the justification for using affiliates and shared services in the utility organizations. So, not only are the affiliate and and the shared service models permissible, they were encouraged. And they were they're very specifically aligned with the Ontario statutory and regulatory objectives. So, LDCs have had the latitude to engage in non-utility businesses to leverage their resources and reduce costs. The The essence was that through scale and efficiency, they can reduce costs to the benefit of the of the customers, which is what we've done at Oakville Hydro. We've we've reduced the cost of operating Oakville Hydro through the scale that we've developed through through OEC. And just a footnote, there's about 12 LDCs that did not take advantage of the opportunity to create a holding company structure in in Ontario at the time. So, at this point, I'm going to ask Harold to come up and he's just going to talk a little bit about the pills regime and the taxes. Harold. And that button right there. >> Thanks, Rob. >> [clears throat] >> Good afternoon. Nice to uh to meet everyone. I've never been before at council. Um as Rob said, uh it's my pleasure to sort of discuss a bit the tax regime. Uh as he indicated, it's extremely important to this sector, both obviously uh encouraging investment and of course getting the uh investment in the assets we required. Maybe the best [clears throat] uh place to start, actually, would be uh April 1st, 1999. I'm not going to go through the next 26 27 years, but that was when uh Ontario Hydro broke into five companies, and those five companies we all know well, OPG, uh now Hydro One, it had a different name back then, uh the uh uh uh ISO, the uh Electrical Safety Agency, and uh the OEFC. Um I was part of that. I uh probably spent 200 days of my life at uh between uh being at the ministries at and as well as the head office of Ontario Hydro, and um the reason this is important is because when it was restructured, there was a significant amount of stranded debt that was created. And that was created because of the value of the assets that were put into those five entities, and the amount of debt those uh businesses couldn't support that amount of debt. They would not have the correct rating, it would be too highly leveraged. So, you think a 60/40 it couldn't couldn't hit that. So, there was an amount of stranded debt that was left over. And of course, we've all been paying for paying that down over many, many years, and one of the ways uh they did it was through these set of taxes. Um there were other revenue sources, and and I won't get into all of the revenue sources for this purpose, but there was multiple ways that the OEFC, who is the entity that was responsible for managing the stranded debt, uh ultimately, um you know, has been paying it down. So, the amount of stranded debt was 19.4 billion um in 1999. And the first uh of these taxes, the payment in lieu of taxes, which I'm sure you've heard many times through Arab and others' presentation. Um, it is basically to create a level playing field. So, first of all, the whole idea of of this, um, reorganization was to create competition in the market. So, bringing in the Fortis's and the Alectra's or the TransAlta's and so forth. And if you had entities that were tax exempt, which municipal-owned entities like, uh, Oakville Hydro are, then it wouldn't be a level playing field. So, they had to create some mechanism, and the mechanism was payment in lieu of taxes. So, any entity that's up to 10% owned by municipalities is still tax exempt. And And that's very And And by governments and other agencies, but that's extremely important for this conversation. Um, so when that was created, um, that seemed like, again, a good idea, but, um, what it what it done is it's it's limited the amount of investment that could come into an entity like Oakville Hydro. Because, as you can imagine, you can only sell 10%. So, it's not a big equity check. And for medium-sized and small-sized LDCs, it's quite frankly a very small check, um, on an equity basis. So, that was the first, um, set of taxes that were put into place. The next two are kind of tagged together, and they do because of they cross over with regards to crediting against one another. The first is the transfer tax, and this is a one-time tax, which is meant to compensate the OEFC, uh, for the PILs that it would no longer receive if if an entity suddenly wasn't in the PIL system. So, when that happens is when an entity sells an entity a a shareholder, a municipality, sells more than 10% of its LDC, for example, then it would no longer be in the PIL system. It's now in the regular traditional corporate income tax system that we think about. And the tax is now instead of 100% going to the province, would be shared like it is between the Ontario government in this case and the federal government. So, um to the province who's using this to pay down the stranded debt, when this was originally created it was like, "Well, this is not exactly what we would want." So, they created this this transfer tax regime and it's a formula. The second was a departure tax and this is in essence another um capital gains tax in another definition. So, the first was just to keep them whole on the PILs. The second is saying, "Well, municipalities, you're selling um an entity and you're may getting a capital gain. We want to share in it." So, that's the province um looking to capture uh part of that capital gain. Um over the years from 1999, there's been a variety of periods when these two taxes have either been lowered, the percentage that they would be um have to pay in a tax, say 33% down to 22 or down to zero and things of that nature, or now um eliminated for a time period. So, um as as Rob was mentioning, um there's been a variety of of reports and different opinions and uh the government currently um has uh waived the transfer tax 100% and the departure tax with regards to the portion that's a capital gain. The reason that statement I just made is important is because the wave is not on any type of recapture um gain, a depreciation recapture. Again, it's it's another one of these aspects of of accounting where you're writing down assets and if you sell it for a value higher than what you had depreciated, there's a gain recapture and you have to pay tax. That's again important so the very last sentence where we talk about it being waived up to December 31, 2028, the depreciation recovery or recapture is still applicable. And I'll just talk about how that affects um sort of capital decisions and our barrier to to private uh capital. I guess I don't have to look up there. I can look right here. Um everybody will be wondering what I'm looking at. Um so you're the reason it's important is because if you did move out of the PIL system, you're losing the tax-exempt status and of course a portion of the taxes are going to be paid to to to the government. So the entity that's selling is is losing a bit of their um current uh investment and it makes it economically unattractive and the reason again is there's a complete um valuation of the entity as if it was 100% sold. So if you sell a portion of it, there's a mechanism that makes it a very unattractive feature to to sell a portion and not all. So um a lot of companies we would do um little charts that showed sort of the the sweet spot of where you might want to consider selling a percentage. The other is the ongoing tax friction which is back to this depreciation recapture that I mentioned. So even though you know, government is is looking to to encourage and and help promote investment in LDCs with the um with the um moratorium for those number of years, there's still that potential for the recapture and a reason it's so important for um a utility is of course the life of the assets for utilities are long. Uh you know, 40 years and we have the experts here that can talk all about the assets, but at the end of the day, there's likely going to be some recapture. So, that is taxed at your marginal tax rate, which for a corporation is 26.5%. Um uh with regards to as opposed to the capital gain portion, which is taxed more attractively. So, there is still a detriment that's quite significant as people look at how to fund um this capital investment. So, overall, um unfortunately, it does distort uh capital decisions. It limits consolidation that may occur, and it's uh course deferring private sector participation. So, ultimately, the risk is of course um the grid investment doesn't occur as quickly um as as is needed um as people try to do it on a measured basis, but it might need to be done quicker than than that. Um that leads us to the final slide I'm going to discuss, which is just basically quickly, you know, the the financing options and solutions and this of course could be many many many pages of of discussion, but you know, really kind of break into three buckets. If you're a larger LDC and you're looking for a good amount of of money, whether debt or equity, but then in the case of equity, you of course have the people that you would expect, the pension funds, the infrastructure funds, or the third-party investors such as Enbridge. Um so, those are are are out there. Uh for a medium-sized LDC, they still would have, you know, potentially those same parties, of course, but for the smaller end of the medium-size, they would have to start looking at some sort of consolidation financing. Universities do that. Some of the biggest ones go to market by themselves, like University of Toronto, but some of the smaller ones, there's a mechanism that the province has put into place to help fund those those entities and make the size of what they're looking for large enough to attract investors and to be quite frankly make it worthwhile for for the investment that they're putting into it. And of course ultimately mergers, you might have to merge in order to get the size that you need in order to get up to that higher level to attract some of the the bigger players. And the small LDCs quite frankly are at at a disadvantage and that's when you have to start talking about merger or sale, but municipal equity injection which of course is never a popular topic or depending on the project there could be project level financing. All this to say is each one of these it it's they're not exclusive. You could be doing these simultaneously. You could be doing a project financing at the same time as you're looking for, you know, an equity investment and so forth, but these are sort of some of the uh general parameters that you know, you could look at it this way to kind of get a feel for where and what options are available. And with that I will pass it back to Mr. Lister. >> Like so. So this one slide uh outlines sort of the themes that were discussed in the consultations from the pulse panel that uh so some of the recommendations presumably uh were based on some of these themes that were were discussed. And so the um the first one under good utility practices and operational excellence, the discussion was around the uh utility preparing a 10-year capital plan having that refreshed every 5 years and filing it more formally with the regulator. Which isn't a big deal. Uh 10-year capital plan supported by financing plan uh shows the source of the funds to meet the the plan and uh the the nuance of this is that they would also be looking for municipal shareholders to that'd be you guys to sign off on the obligation to fund. And that would be a new thing for the municipalities to um to wrap their um arms around. Barriers to investment uh Harold spoke to that. One of the the discussions was to lobby the federal government are the ones that have to give the permission for the pills regime, which is the 10% to move it up. Lobby the government to get the government to move it up to 49% so the utilities would not be exiting the pills regime and be able to attract uh third-party investment and not have all the taxes that Harold spoke about. Um and then again on the departure tax span extend the current uh relief period that's in there and then also include the depreciation recapture part that's um that is still out there. Then the uh the MADs uh test, that's mergers and amalgamations, acquisitions, and divestitures. So when you do a merger and acquisition, you have to submit to the OEB. It's a very long process, like hundreds of days for them to review to ensure that there's no harm to customers. So one of the recommendations or one of the themes was to try to either eliminate that process or reduce the time frames um so it wasn't such a a lengthy period. And then a fair amount of discussion around good governance um boards should have skill-based uh directors and uh public reporting of the skills that they bring to the board and also there's some discussion about limiting the number of municipal representatives on a board to three municipal representatives and um and less than a third. So that was the sort of the themes that were discussed about in the pulse process. And then as it relates to Oakville Hydro, uh this slide um really my message is that Oakville Hydro has no financing issues in order to meet the the 25-year load forecast that the at at a macro level that the ISO has put forward. Our peak demand has been about a growth of about 1% per year. It's been pretty flat. Uh not climbing yet. The our consumption, that would be the megawatt hours, has been less than 1% uh per year. That where the customer growth has been closer to 2% and that's what you would have been experiencing with the um the the growth of housing um new uh new new housing developments in the in the town. Right now, we estimate that we have about 100 MW of unused capacity on the system. That's 25% over our current peak load and that represents about half of what we're going to need to 2050. So, we have a fair amount of capacity uh that we can deploy. It's not necessarily always in the right place, but it's essentially at the macro level in the town. We have that capacity. Uh we anticipate that any additional financing needed for uh investing in the to increase our capacity, we could do through the reg- through the regular Ontario Energy Board rate-setting process. So, we don't see that there's a need for to raise a flag and say, "Oh, we need third-party investment." Um we anticipate that the in the mid to late 2030s, the capacity additions that would be needed would also support the post-20 2015 needs. So, Town of Oakville's in very good shape as it relates to current capacity and our ability to uh to manage the growth that we anticipate's coming. And the other very unique thing that we have is if there was a need for uh investment and increased um capital into it, we OEC could uh always be the investor into Oakville Hydro and OEC has the the necessary resources in order to to deal with that. So, we're in a very unique position in that regard. Um and then at the OEC level, do uh increase the um the PILs rate to 49%, they and like the transfer and departure tax thresholds, then that makes it more attractive to attract a third-party investor should we want to uh should you want to do that um like we did with Enbridge and increase our ability to uh continue to grow the business. And I think that was it. That's that's the extent of our presentation today. So >> Thank you very much. Be uh let me ask if any members of council have questions. And if not, then I'll uh Councillor Longo does. Councillor Longo. >> Thanks uh your worship. Thanks for the presentation, Rob. Uh it's actually great to see that the OEC board and OEC management uh is watching this and part of it. Uh I had a couple questions. One was is the data center load that you're mentioning is that becoming a reality? Are you actually seeing these data centers actually being built in other jurisdiction? I don't think of any that are happening in the the Halton region or in Oakville, but are you actually seeing that becoming real? >> There is a small number of data centers that are um being uh installed across the province, but not a lot. There's certainly a lot that are being investigated. And and what can happen is like Hamilton will be looking at a proposal and let's say Mississauga is and they're going through the process, but it's the same data center. And the proponents are just looking at to see which municipality uh would would be the most favorable. So even though there could be a lot of a lot of discussion and a lot of proponents, the actual number of data centers that are um um like real right now is is quite low. However, the ISO does anticipate that there will be over time a significantly increase in the number of data centers um across the across the province and we've looked at that in terms of our um uh our our ability to um provide uh the capacity and uh we we feel that with the the the last at the AGM uh we presented uh a summary of the locations of within the the town that we could increase the capacity at the existing stations. We could build a new station in the mid-2030s and and um feel that would be more than adequate to supply any uh any loads that come along like that. >> Okay, thank you. And my second question is were there any discussions as part of the pulse uh you know uh process that looked at conservation kind of energy conservation or anything to help, you know, other than keep building, building, building? Is there are there ways of actually doing conservation to help you know, not need to do as much building? Was that at all talked about or is it uh was it all about just, you know, we will build it and they will come? >> It it's a big part of uh the the planning process. The IESO, who are the drivers behind the conservation programs, are very active in promoting conservation. Um More targeted than previously when it was like quite a blitz and it was focusing on residential. It's it's uh much more targeted and so that is a a big piece of the IESO's uh outlook. And also uh the demand side management also. Where there's a fairly large amount of capacity through demand demand side management, which means that when there's a need for capacity uh the IESO can uh get some um business who've signed up to reduce their load. That creates the the excess capacity and then that load can be aggravated and it gets get consolidated across the province. And so that's a it's kind of like a conservation angle also. >> Okay, and last question is related you mentioned there are 57 uh LDCs left in in the province. And you don't have to answer this cuz it's probably strategy you're looking at, but are we considered is OEC considered a smaller medium size uh LDC and are there opportunities for small to medium so opportunities for consolidation, uh, further acquisition, things like that. I'm assuming that's part of the strategy that you're working on. >> Yeah, there there's always opportunities for consolidation, well, periodically and and we have looked and and, um, made proposals on some over the years unsuccessfully. So, those opportunities are are there and we always look at them. I wouldn't say there's any just sitting right in front of us, but we always look at it as part of our strategy and have to assess whether that makes sense for the shareholder in terms of what that would entail. >> Okay, awesome. Thank you. >> Thank you, Councillor Longo. Um, uh, one of your questions reminded me that, uh, and you helped, uh, Mr. Lister, uh, explain even better that >> [snorts] >> we we're getting a consumption growth that's only half of our, uh, customer and and home growth. And, uh, that says that efficiency is a uh, an element everything's becoming more efficient. LEDs versus incandescent and so on. Councillor O'Meara. >> Uh, thank you very much, Mr. Marin. And just to sort of, um, piggyback off of that, um, the UK just allowed, um, plug-in solar panels now to feed in and I know that many states are doing that. Um, that seems to be offsetting a lot of the energy and feeding back into the grid at times. Is that something the IESO is looking at? Is that something that the Canadian government is looking at allowing? Um, do you know if that's on the horizon in in discussions like this about how we can have sort of micro micro generation and and and helping to combat some of this? >> The ISO, um, I understand is is looks at larger type loads, 100 megawatts and and above and and programs for that type of thing. And, um, so I'm actually not aware of anything at the micro level on on solar panels. And certainly not like what the UK has right now. >> Okay. Yeah, thanks. I I know we tend to lag greatly behind what they're doing in in Europe and and in particular now what many states are allowing. Um so if I don't know where we might look into that, but perhaps there's something that you guys might be hearing through the grapevine that that we don't. But it sounds like a an incredible opportunity to generate euros to contribute to your own electricity needs on a per unit basis with a minimal amount of technology which is now anywhere I read from about 400 bucks to $2,000. You can you can have this and it can save you up to 60 bucks a month on your hydro bill. So I'm I'm be curious to see when who who who approves that technology, who who authorizes that sort of thing. But at some point it would have to come through Oakville Hydro if residents in Oakville wanted to do that. Is that Would that be correct? >> Yes. So Mr. Milks would be more than happy to look into that [laughter] and >> Thank you very much. >> thorough answer than what I can provide you today. >> Thank you. >> Yeah. >> Thank you, Councillor Councillor Ship. >> Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you, Rob. I have a question about this. So the OEC has opened the door to attracting third-party investors. So is any definition for this investors? Only limited for the domestic or is can be considered for the overseas investors as well? >> Well, that would be an answer for the shareholder. Um we have um we have we have looked at investors similar to strategic partners like Enbridge, ones that can help help us, we can help them. And and so far we've really only had discussions with domestic investors. Uh does not mean though that there could not be a place for discussions beyond domestic. >> Okay, thank you. >> Thank you, Councillor Mr. Lister. Um being mindful of the way sometimes the province from its very high perspective on all of Ontario has a tendency to come up with solutions for small entities that they drag the bigger ones into and then we all get we get the average treatment instead of the appropriate treatment let's say. And it seems to me that consolidation of LDCs is that still one of the top favored approaches that the province is looking at because of their fear that there won't otherwise be enough investment to grow the grid? >> It's it's a factor in the discussions about the the really small utilities and we're starting to see some of the smaller ones um do some merging or or or sale not having the capacity to deal with not only their investment but also just the it's getting more complicated to to run a utility with the cyber issues and the control operating control grid grid automation that type of thing. So they are wishful that and through the pulse process that uh uh that that might create some of the smaller ones to consolidate with with others or or to merge into some of the larger ones for sure. >> And do you have what degree of confidence do you have that there isn't going to be a let's merge everybody movement that sweeps us up? >> I have not heard of anything that recently that would suggest that would be happening and doesn't seem to be on the the front burner of the province's agenda at this time. >> In In your presentation you mentioned that they're still on the they're labeling consolidations as voluntary. >> Yes absolutely. Yeah, there is there is no no overt or regulatory pressure right now to to consolidate. >> I one of the reasons that I asked for this presentation council is that when it came to conservation authorities uh everybody got swept up in the consolidations that really originally started because of conservation authorities that were remote and or small and presented what they thought and Queen's Park was a was a problem that could only be solved by what we just went through. Mr. Lister, thank you and your team for for being on duty for us all the time and for this reassurance and we look forward to seeing you the next time. >> Great, thank you. Our pleasure to be here. Thank you. >> Council, can I have a motion to receive the presentation? Councillor Chisholm, thank you. Any objection? Mr. Clerk, there's no objection so that's carried and Council, that ends our work. Thank you very much for your time and attention. I look forward to seeing you later tonight when we meet again. >> Recording stopped.