Hello. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to our first sustainability event. My name is George Trisic. I'm the Chief Governance Officer and Corporate Secretary here at Algonquin. Maybe more relevantly, I'm the member of the executive team that has accountability for our sustainability program. I'm pleased to welcome you here today, and hopefully, a good number of you had a chance to avail yourselves of the Tesla shuttle we ran to make sure that you traveled here sustainably. Without further ado, I'm going to introduce Ian Robertson, our CEO, who's going to share with you our sustainability program, followed by a panel discussion. Ian, over to you.
Thanks, George. Well, the ride from the GO Station might have been sustainable. I'm pretty sure the GO trains, we got to do some work on that one as well. Anyway, thanks for joining us today and for everybody here in the room, but also those of you who have logged in on our live web stream. We're obviously, as George said, excited to have you here for our first sustainability morning at our lovely offices in Downtown Oakville. It's following the recent release of our 2019 sustainability report, and just from a timing point of view, we're promising to have you out of here by 11:30 A.M. As George mentioned, my name's Ian Robertson. I'm the Chief Executive Officer of Algonquin Power & Utilities Corp. and actually together with Chris Jarratt, who's one of our panelists today, one of the founders of Algonquin Power.
Let's spend half an hour draining this slide. No, I'm just kidding. Actually, I'd like to start by welcoming a special guest here, Milla Craig of Millani Inc. She's kindly agreed to join us as our panel moderator. We're actually hoping that with Milla's extensive consulting experience in the ESG area, she's going to help focus the upcoming discussion on the most relevant issues to ESG-minded investors and analysts. Joining Milla and myself today are three panels comprised of our senior leaders. They are going to discuss how our business strategies reflect our commitment to sustainability. The approach here today is actually intended to go beyond the typical focus on economics and augment that discussion with how environmental, social, and governance considerations are impacting our business. At our heart, we actually believe that a commitment to sustainability is correlated with the creation of economic opportunities.
As a shameless plug for our upcoming 2019 investor morning, being held here in Toronto on December 3rd and in New York on December 6th, we'd like to invite you to attend the event to see how we're going to focus it on how we're capitalizing on those opportunities. Maybe even as a teaser, to talk about an exciting announcement or two. With respect to the agenda, we'll be structuring the discussion into three panels, one for each of our E, S, and G. Firstly, we're going to discuss the environmental aspects of sustainability. We're going to take a short break, and following that, we'll continue with a panel focusing on the social considerations of our business, and then wrap up with a discussion of how governance relates to our commitment to sustainability.
I'd like to invite everybody in the room, please, as the discussions are going on with the panels, I'd invite you to frame up questions. We've allocated time at the end of each panel for Q&A. Consistent with our commitment to safety, we actually have a program where we start every meeting where there's more than five people in the room, to talk about safety. To my account, there's more than five in the room here. I think what I'd like to do is call on and perhaps welcome, the newest member of our executive team, Kirsten Olsen, our recently minted Chief Human Resources Officer, maybe to stand up and give us a quick safety moment. Kirsten?
Thanks, Ian. Good morning, everyone. George mentioned earlier the Tesla shuttles that I know some of you had a chance to take from the GO Station. I appreciate as well some of you may have driven here in an electric vehicle. Some of our employees are. You may have seen we have charging stations in the parking lot. In the context of that, some note, if you've ever ridden in or driven an electric vehicle, that they're quiet, some say dangerously quiet. I think it's important to be mindful that if you're driving one, pedestrians may not know that you're there because they don't hear you coming. Likewise, if you're walking around electric vehicles, just be aware that they might be driving toward you, even if you can't hear them.
While I'm here, for those in the room, I'll also just point out from a safety standpoint that if you do hear the fire alarm, the emergency exits, there's one behind us here. You would come out and turn left. Otherwise, at the back of the room, you would head out and head straight back towards reception. I don't think we have any fire drills planned today, so if you hear something.
It's real.
It's the real deal. Thanks, Ian.
It's like the bomb squad. If you see me running, keep up. I wouldn't be like George Costanza, just so it's clear here. Before Milla gets started with the panelists, I did want to take a couple of moments to give and share an overview of how we're becoming more deliberate and transparent with our communications around sustainability and ESG. I'll start with the observation that sustainability isn't something new to us. In some respects, it's not even something we do. I'd observe that it's something that we are. You trace the roots of this organization back 30 years ago when we were the developers of run-of-the-river small hydroelectric generating facilities. It's probably fair to say we were green before it was kind of hip to be green.
Even fast-forward today, $11 billion U.S. organization, we continue to focus on the creation of new renewable energy sources and finding ways to meet the needs of our 800,000 utility customers by running our utilities in a sustainable manner. I think we take pride in the fact that the way we operate our business is going to make a positive impact on the lives of our customers, of our employees, and the communities that we serve. The issue of the 2019 sustainability report, which in some respects is being celebrated by the event today, is, from our perspective, the next step on our journey to sustainability. It's a step that will be providing a more formalized approach to integrating sustainability into our business, a step where we're clearly articulating how we're making positive changes to the internal and external environment in which we operate.
We believe that intentionally embedding sustainability into our business will actually deliver on the three elements of commercial success from my point of view. First of all, it'll create loyal and satisfied customers, which is kind of strange when you think we're largely in the utility business, but they are getting greater choice in the provision of their utility services. We want to create and maintain a satisfied customer base who are loyal to our brand and value it and are served by engaged, talented, and safe workforce, and who are funded by patient and committed investors. We're confident if we can get those three elements right, that commercial success through new investment opportunities is going to follow. In thinking about the future, I think we believe that the most significant risks that the world faces relate to the impacts of climate change.
Disruption related to the transition to a low-carbon economy may be viewed as actually creating threats, but to these entrepreneurial eyes, we see opportunity. We believe that our stated mission to provide sustainable, clean energy and water solutions that create better everyday lives and inspire communities is closely aligned with a number of the United Nations' 17 Sustainable Development Goals. At its heart, sustainability, from my perspective, is a shared responsibility to leave this planet in a better place than we found it. In fact, perhaps it's about how do we conduct ourselves so that meeting the needs of our generation doesn't make it more difficult for future generations to meet theirs. Our sustainability report, and in fact, our sustainability policy, have positioned our commitments to sustainability in the context of a curated list of six of the UN's 17 SDGs.
This list represents the six areas where we think we can have the greatest impact. I'd like to give you a couple thoughts on each one of these six SDG foci. As we think about where this organization can have its greatest impact, it seems commonsensical that our involvement in renewable energy brings the climate action SDG to the fore. Last year, our sustainability policy codified our commitment to the global goal of limiting planetary temperature rise to less than two degrees Celsius this century. To do our part, we're going to continue to focus on, first, decarbonizing our non-regulated renewable energy generating portfolio, and second of all, reducing our utility customers' reliance on fossil-based energy sources. We set some pretty impressive goals for ourselves, and you're going to hear more about those from our panelists.
With respect specifically to climate action, we're committed to reducing our CO2 or greenhouse gas emissions by 1 million metric tons. To put that in context, that represents a 20% reduction in our 2017 emission levels. We believe that the key to customer centricity is to provide affordable utility services delivered by an empathetic organization. While we know that our rates compare favorably with neighboring utilities, our research shows that customers want more than simply fair rates. They want their utility services delivered in a manner which is consistent with their own ESG objectives. Our commitment to the affordable and clean energy SDG is embodied in our goal of building and commissioning 2,000 new megawatts of solar and wind capacity. We're confident in our ability to meet that goal.
We already have 800 MW worth of new wind and solar capacity in construction today, targeting completion by December 31st next year. Our panelists are going to tell you a story about one of our keystone projects, a project where we're building 600 MW worth of new wind capacity for our regulated utility customers, an investment that's going to save our customers $300 million over the life of those assets. Perhaps, I would say equally importantly from the ESG perspective, is going to occasion a shutdown of an existing coal facility. As you're likely to hear more at our upcoming investor day, the provision of clean water distribution and wastewater services is an important part of our business. It's easy to imagine that the cost and complexity of continuing to secure water sources for our customers is impacted by climate change.
Drought, dropping aquifer levels, I'm sure common sensically sound like there's something that we have to deal with. We're committed to maintaining healthy water ecosystems by employing best practices with respect to efficiency, conservation, and water reuse. In our case, sustainability within our water utilities is generally focused on reducing the environmental impact of our customers' use of fresh water resources. An example that I'm very proud of is in Arizona, where our aquifer replenishment facility, affectionately known as the Liberty Aquifer Replenishment Facility, or LARF, I didn't pick the name, is projected to recharge 78 billion gallons of fresh water back into the aquifer over the coming century. One of the distinguishing characteristics of this organization is our think global, act local business model. I think our local, responsive, and caring operating model is focused on creating and supporting resilience in the communities we serve.
Our 2023 goals include an ambition to achieve top quartile customer service, as measured by J.D. Power. Today's panelists are going to tell you more about how we're focused on creating great relationships across our business, including our work with local suppliers, vendors, and contractors. I hope that it's obvious that we care deeply about the overall well-being of our employees, and we do want to champion a more just society. To attract and retain the team members of the future, we're dedicated to lifelong learning, professional and personal development, and providing challenging assignments to our workforce. I believe that the only real sustainable competitive advantage that an organization can have is its culture. Those initiatives that I described, they're key to building and maintaining the culture in this organization.
Our annual corporate scorecard, by which most of the people in this organization's compensation is tied, is connected to reaching top quartile status in terms of employee engagement, as measured by our annual survey. I'm proud to say that we're currently above average from an industry perspective, but we recognize we have more good work to do. Lastly, but certainly not least, in order to successfully navigate the challenges we have in front of us, we need to make sure that we're capitalizing on the talents of every member of the team. We recognize the powerful connection that diversity and inclusion has with business success. By fostering a supportive workforce, encouraging business practices which are free from barriers and bias, we're able to attract and retain employees with diverse backgrounds, talents, and perspectives. The result is greater collaboration, creativity, and innovative thinking.
We're committed to surfacing and, in fact, celebrating our differences. One of our specific ESG objectives is our commitment to the tenets of something called the 30% Club. Our 2023 goal is to have at least 30% of our senior leadership positions filled by talented women. While we're proud that today a third of our executive team and our board of directors are represented by females, we continue to drive our utility business, and you can imagine it's a business which has historically been male-dominated, to achieve that goal. Executing on a commitment to sustainability demands a commitment to good governance. In our case, we've taken significant steps over the past year to strengthen governance and to increase our transparency around sustainability.
Sustainability is embedded in our board of directors' mandate, a mandate which is fulfilled, as George Trisic had mentioned, by delegating sustainability first to the board's governance committee and then to responsible executives within the company. Lastly, in summary, I'm hoping at the end of this morning you'll agree that we've articulated an impactful set of ESG objectives and have identified the right opportunities and efforts to reach these goals. I believe that we're eager to be part of the solution, to be a leader in the transition to a low-carbon economy, to make a difference. I think it's clear in our purpose, sustaining energy and water for life. It's easy to think, though, of what we're doing in the context of our own lives. Sustainability is about focusing on the expected challenges of our children's grandchildren.
I'm invigorated by how much there's yet to do, and I hope in telling our story, it inspires each of you to join us on this journey to sustainability. With that, please join me in welcoming Milla and our first panel to the stage to start that deeper dive into how ESG issues and opportunities are being identified and treated within our company. Milla?
Good morning, everyone. Thank you, Ian. It's a real pleasure to be here with you this morning. [Non-English content ] I come from Montreal, so I need to obviously do the bilingual part of the day.
Are you ready? A warm welcome to all of you here with us today, and those of you who are on the webcast as well. As mentioned, my name is Milla Craig, and I'm the Founder and President of Millani. We are an ESG consulting firm based out of Montreal, and we have a very particular niche in this market where we work very much with the investor community and with publicly listed companies, as well as other capital markets players. It's been a real pleasure for us to be working alongside of the team here at Algonquin over the past year, and helping them on their journey to getting to additional disclosure around these ESG issues for you. Before we get into our panel, however, a couple of housekeeping items.
Maybe the first and foremost, I did hear, not to make anybody feel guilty, but I did hear a phone going off. Perhaps we'll just ask everybody to just remind you to flick it off to vibrate. Secondly, we are webcasting today, as mentioned, perhaps just be mindful, as you're exiting out, that there is a camera there if you don't want to be on the camera. The third element is just simply, for the washrooms, if anyone does need, out through the corridor, out to the main security, and just in front of the elevators, you can find the washrooms. We at Millani, we hear over and over again from investors that they don't want to tell companies how to run their business.
What they want to hear is they want the companies to be telling you how they're running their business and how ESG issues are important to their business. Helping Algonquin identify and communicate these ESG issues of what is most significant to the business has been an important part of the work that we've done here. For many companies that we work with, they're innately focused on and are managing ESG issues. They just don't realize the value that it brings to you in the marketplace, and particularly those that are increasingly focusing on ESG issues. For both shareholders and debt holders. Whoops. As is often the case, Algonquin is not different. Today, we have a great lineup of individuals from Algonquin's teams to provide you exactly that, more context on what we have unearthed as we've done the work together with the team here.
We're going to be highlighting some of the most significant ESG issues, what they are, how they're being managed, and how they connect to the value of the business. With that, we're going to get started. Our first conversation this morning will be on the environmental aspects of Algonquin's business. Obviously, for a utility, and Ian spoke about that, in a utility and a renewable energy company, the E is the one that comes first to mind for most people in the market. I would say from our perspective, climate change is the 2019 issue in ESG. Much of that focus has been driven by something called the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, or the TCFD. The conversation is moving from what's your GHG footprint to actually what is the impact of climate going to be on your business?
The first panel, we're going to dive into talking about the context for Algonquin of these environmental issues. We're going to talk about some of the opportunities, but equally about some of the risks that may be lingering out there. With such, I think we'll get started. We have three wonderful people up here. I'm going to ask you just to introduce yourselves very quickly, and then we'll get into the conversation. Shall we start with you, Johnny?
Good morning, everyone. My name's Johnny Johnston. I'm the Chief Operating Officer here at Algonquin for both our Liberty Utilities-regulated business and the unregulated Liberty Power organization. I joined the company back in January. Moved here from the U.S., where I spent about half my career, over 20 years, in the regulated industry.
Great. I'm Jeff Norman. I'm the Chief Development Officer, which means I'm responsible for growth and strategy. Growth comes through both our internal development and acquisitions. I joined 16 years ago, and it's amazing the change in the economics of renewables since the time that I joined and where they are today.
Hi. Good morning. Brenda Marshall. I'm the Senior Vice President for wind development with Algonquin. Joined the company just about a year ago. Have been in the power space for about 23 years. A lot of that time in more traditional utilities on the wrong side of history in terms of, I think, where the industry's going. It's been really great to join Algonquin and to be able to live out my own personal values through the work I'm doing. With the increased customer interest in renewables, it's also great to be selling something that people are interested in buying.
Super. Well, thank you. Johnny, let's start with you. Let's start with the market context. Can you provide the group here some insights on what are some of those external factors that are influencing Algonquin's approach to the environment?
Sure. I think maybe as Ian said, as you think about our organization, in some ways, we were focused on the environment and sustainability before it really became the important corporate topic that it is today. I don't see the external factors necessarily having a major shift in terms of our strategy, but I think it does have an impact in terms of how we engage with our stakeholders. As you think about the public at large, there's far more awareness today around the environmental impact of organizations than there ever has been before. Phrases like climate emergency or net zero even just a few years ago were not commonly used on social media or in the news, they're almost every day today.
For us, that means there's more interest in almost every activity our organization does in terms of what we're doing and what the impact is on the environment. For us, we have to do a better job, certainly one of listening to where our customers are at, and our stakeholders are at, and the public are at in terms of what concerns them, and then how do we engage back with that. Whereas I think in the past, we probably just kept our head down and tried to do a good job without having that conversation with stakeholders. That then flows through, I think, into government officials and regulators who have got more interest in the environmental space than they ever used to. We're seeing more regulation, targets, in some cases, incentives.
We're having to be way more proactive in terms of how we engage with our regulators. And I think we've got some real success stories there in terms of if you look at our regulated businesses, almost all of them now have decoupled rates, where we've been able to separate the revenues that we need to run our businesses from the consumption of our customers, which allows us to really work with our customers in helping them use less of the commodities that we're providing to them, and still run a successful business. It's also technology is important and getting the support from our regulators of putting that in.
We've got a battery pilot in New Hampshire, which is maybe a good example of the partnership there, where we're putting batteries into customers' homes behind the meter that's going to help them to save money, help us to better balance the system and bring down the rates for all customers, and of course has a good resilience benefit for them as well. Finally, I think environmental elements, it's personal for our customers, our employees, and of course, our investors. When I talk about our customers, I don't just mean the 800,000 water, gas, and electric customers that we serve. It's our commercial customers that are starting to partner with us on the unregulated side on the renewable generation business that want to be part of the solution.
Next week, we have groundbreaking for our 500-megawatt wind farm, Maverick, down in Texas, where we've got a couple of commercial customers that are delighted to be partnering with us to get renewable energy into their businesses. On the employee side, this, I think as Ian said, it's actually a key retention and attraction tool for us. Our focus on the environment is one of the main reasons that many of our employees join this organization. They want to be part of creating that future. For our investors, people want to put their money to work in making a difference. For us, that means we've got to be more transparent and share all of the good things that we're doing.
I'm looking forward to hearing the feedback from the folks in the room here, one, on the sustainability report that we put out last week, but also from this morning's session, if that's giving you some of the information that's going to be helpful to you in your roles.
Perfect. Can we take that then, can you talk to us about where the opportunities are to create the value, the environmental value out of the operations at Algonquin?
Yeah, absolutely. As an engineer, you won't be surprised to hear we started with data to make sure that we understood and got some external support to make sure that we're measuring the right things in a consistent way to understand really where we stood as an organization as to where we could have those impacts. If you look on page 11 of the sustainability report, you'll see where those impacts are, and it's clear that the area for us to have the biggest impact is around the emissions from our fossil electric generation fleet. 3 million metric tons a year come from there.
Those of you that have been coming to our investor days for a while will know about our Greening the Fleet initiative, the 600 MW of wind that Ian talked about putting into our Missouri utility. That's going to enable us to close, in the next six months, Asbury, the only coal facility that we fully own. That's a 200 MW plant. It's been providing reliable service to our customers for over 40 years. The team that have been running that have done a fabulous job. We're at a point in time where economically, environmentally, the best thing we can do for our customers is to bring that plant to a close. That's going to have a significant impact for us. That's around 1 million metric tons a year that's going to come out of our overall emissions.
Before we did that, when you looked at our fleet as a whole, get my numbers right, the carbon intensity of our fleet as a whole is 24% less than the U.S. average. We're starting from a good place. We have a far more sustainable fleet than many of our competitors, but that incremental million metric tons is going to bring that number down by another 20% in terms of the overall intensity of the fleet as a whole. A major impact and a step change for our business going forwards. We have a number of gas utilities. Gas is really important to talk about in this space, particularly when you look at some of the older mains that we have, cast iron and bare steel, sometimes known as leak-prone pipe.
Leak-prone pipe means that methane is leaking out of them, which has major safety impacts. Actually from an environmental perspective, methane has a carbon or impact in terms of global warming 25 times greater than CO2. Really we need to focus in there. The good news for us again is I think we're ahead of the curve. Only 3% of our entire set of gas mains is leak-prone pipe. Of that 3%, 38% of it we've already replaced. We're well on our way. Last year, we replaced another 33 mi of that pipe.
Over the next decade, we're effectively going to completely eliminate the greatest source of emissions from our gas system as well. Going back to the data, when you look at actually our day-to-day operations, it's not the most material impact in terms of from an environmental perspective, but it's an important area nonetheless. As we go through today, folks will hear more around how we're looking to put solar facilities onto our water sites to reduce electricity usage there. How we're being more efficient in terms of how we use water, putting wastewater back into the water table, and then our fleet. We have a large number of vehicles, I'm sure you can imagine, and we've been changing those out to low and no emission vehicles. 28% of our vehicles today come into that category.
As technology evolves, particularly for the larger trucks that you can imagine that we need for the work that we do, that number is only going to increase. Finally, it probably goes beyond our own internal emissions, and we sort of talked a little bit about it earlier, but the biggest impact for society as a whole, as we look to move to a net carbon neutral world, is really around efficiency and how can we partner with our customers to help them to use less.
Well, great. Well, thank you. There's obviously lots of great opportunities.
Lots going on.
In the investor community, we want to look at both sides. We want to also hear about some of the risks. Can you give us some sense of what are some of the operational risks that Algonquin has to contend with as you're thinking about the environmental side?
Yeah, maybe a couple of things. The biggest one for us for sure is the weather. Whichever bit of our business you look at, climate change has been real for us. Whether it be the increased storms that we're seeing on the electric side of the business, potential flooding on the gas side, water availability for our water business, there's real impact of weather on our operations. What that means for us is that our engineers are working hard proactively to go, "What are the investments that we need to make to make sure that we can continue to provide safe and reliable service to our customers?" We've got a significant investment portfolio in that space that we'll talk more about next week at Investor Day next month. I think the other area of risk, for us, is just the pace of change.
I'm talking a little bit about it over breakfast this morning. Things are moving really fast, that's a real challenge for us, but it's an even bigger challenge for regulators and for the government to keep up. Working closely with them to go where can they help make a difference. One area may be worth talking about is renewable gas, a critical part of decarbonizing the whole energy supply chain. It's a relatively new technology, maybe like wind was 40 years ago when it came into North America. There need to be the right incentives in place to support that new technology to become commonplace. We're working hard with our regulators on that.
Perfect. We will be opening up for a couple of questions at the end before we go to the next session. If there's more questions for Johnny. Jeff, I think we'll move over to you. Obviously, there's a number of pieces of the business here. We talked about a lot of them on the ESG basis when we were doing our work with you. Perhaps we'll start with water.
Sure.
What are those environmental influences that are at work here in the business? Where are some of the initiatives that Algonquin's doing on the waterfront?
Yeah, no, certainly. Maybe before digging right into the environmental impacts, I'll just put it in context in terms of water. When we started in the utility business, the first acquisitions that we made were actually small water utilities in Arizona. We've grown that business to be 164,000 customer connections between water and wastewater, and we're very keen on continuing to build it because we think it's an important part of our platform. When you think of the first thing you do when you buy a utility, from our perspective, is try to align the interests of the environment, our customers, and our shareholders. Johnny made reference to decoupling, which is breaking down that relationship between the revenue from a shareholder perspective and the volume that you deliver to customers.
If you can break that, which we've been successful in doing that in many markets, you can then take and pursue the cheapest form of conservation or environmental protection, which is conservation of water. That is where we start. Ian pointed out the LARF project, and just a little bit more context on that LARF project. If you think of when you got up here this morning and you ran water and it went through the cycle of coming out of your tap and going down the drain, well, it comes out of Lake Ontario, and it goes right back into Lake Ontario. We're extremely fortunate to have that here in Ontario. In Arizona and California, we're drawing water out of aquifers, and when it goes through the normal waste system, it doesn't go back into those aquifers.
The LARF treats the water and allows reinjection into those aquifers, which are under strain from a sustainability perspective because of growing populations and incremental farming. The 78 billion gallons over the life of that project going back into the aquifers is extremely important. Financially, it was a relatively minor investment. It was only around $7 million. It is an investment that we get to earn on, which kind of brings that alignment. It's just doing the right thing. If you go back to water, I don't know if anyone's had the opportunity to haul a bucket of water up a hill, but it's unbelievably heavy. I think people often forget that one of the big things when you waste water is you're wasting the energy that it takes to pump that water.
We have, as Johnny pointed out, been very deliberate in replacing the power that we're using in our water facilities with renewable power, through the installation of solar panels, which once again, kind of hits on the three things. It's the right thing for the environment, it's the right thing for our shareholders, and it's the right thing for our customers because there's savings there. We're very proud of doing those things in the water sector from an environmental perspective.
Great. Well, let's then move into the energy sector. What are some of the initiatives that are happening on that front? Can you talk to us about that too?
Yeah, no, the power sector is really the change, and I mentioned that I joined 16 years ago, and when I joined, solar and wind really didn't make economic sense. You needed extreme incentives to make them work. We've seen such a transition in that. That transition, in terms of that low levelized cost of energy that you get from renewables, really allowed us to grow Liberty Power the way that it has. By initiatives like the Customer Savings Plan and Luning, which I'll talk about a little bit, which is another utility-owned solar generation asset, we've been able to grow both Liberty Power and Liberty Utilities while doing the right thing for the environment. I think the magic really comes in the knowledge from renewables and being able to apply that to the utility mindset.
Our California utility, which is on the border of Nevada and California, was initially served by NV Energy. We wanted to build a solar facility to supply renewable energy to that facility, but the economics didn't pencil initially. We dug into our toolbox from the Liberty Power side and said, "Well, we use investment tax credits to take and drive down the cost." Nobody had done that on the utility side, and there was a bunch of things that made it complicated. With good legal help, and support from the regulator, and support from our customers, we were able to do it, and that allowed us to deliver renewable energy from that solar facility at a competitive cost and have an investment for our shareholders.
Once we had that set up, we got pretty excited when we bought Empire District Electric in Kansas and Missouri, principally because it is really windy. We knew the power of wind and the power of this tool in terms of putting investment tax credits. Johnny mentioned the Customer Savings Plan, which is 600 MW of wind. 300 MW of that is under construction right now, and the two other 150 MW projects that are part of that have just commenced construction as well. In addition to the environmental benefits, it is a billion-dollar investment, which is a significant benefit for our shareholders, and it is delivering $300 million in savings to our customers over its life. We just see that as a win, and win. We are not stopping there.
The California utility, being California, there's great support from customers and from the regulator to go to 100% renewable. We are hard at work at saying, how do we take and go from that initial 50 MW, the Luning facility, and take and replace all the energy needs of our California utility with renewables.
How about Johnny brought up natural gas.
Yeah.
Can you talk to us on that front as well, Jeff?
I'll do the same thing as the water. It's a little bit of a template, but natural gas is an important part. Our customers use it primarily for heating their homes and heating their businesses and running appliances. Natural gas is a great clean fuel. We serve about 338,000 customers now. We see that continuing to grow. Once again, our regulatory team has been hard at work each time we buy a new distribution system to take and get that decoupling so we can promote conservation. The conservation is key to reducing costs for our customers and advancing the project. The other thing that's important is renewable natural gas.
I believe that we're going to see a parallel to, if we go back 16 years to when I started and we had RPSs, renewable portfolio standards, which drove things that were not economical to happen that were important, such as wind and solar. The costs of those came down to the point that they can drive themselves. I believe we're right at the beginning of that for the gas sector, and that there's going to be a significant opportunity for both the Liberty Power side in building out RNG facilities for other utilities and building it in rate base for our own utilities.
Great. Obviously, I would love to dive into some of these questions, but time doesn't allow. That's a great overview of what's happening here in North America. The other piece of Algonquin is thinking beyond the boundaries of North America. Can you talk to us a little bit about what's happening or what the thinking is in the international front?
Yeah, I think the macro drivers that are creating the opportunities here in North America for building up more renewables are the same, and they're happening globally. It's really the same business plan, except on an international footprint. It's utility ownership, greening those utilities, and building privately owned utility, or sorry, generation assets that are wind, solar, and the infrastructure to support them. From a business model, very similar. From the process for doing that, we've made an investment in Atlantica Yield, which gives us good recurring dividends, and we've supported their renewable fleet. It gives us a footprint that we can expand upon.
We've also moved forward with the acquisition of the Bermuda Electric Company, which currently is primarily fueled by thermal fossil fuels, and we see that as a little Empire, effectively, Empire District Electric, in that we can take and start to put renewables into that. We were really excited when we saw the regulatory agency put forward that they want an 85% target of renewables. Same thing.
Same thing. Keeping on that, Brenda, let's switch to you. Can you talk to us a little bit about Algonquin's current efforts to bring new renewables into the generating fleet here?
Yes, absolutely. There's lots of exciting things going on in the development front. We're seeing lots of opportunities out in the market right now, driven by a nice confluence of customer choice and also government policy responding to environmental initiatives. As I mentioned, I came on about a year ago. We've also brought on another colleague of mine, Michael Dilworth, and he's heading up our investments in the solar space. We're really moving forward and trying to capture the opportunities with all engines on full throttle. I think that one of the really key things that we're seeing in the market at the moment is that customer choice is really coming around to where we've been for a long time. We're feeling very confident about making our 2,000 megawatts by 2023 goal.
You've heard a lot about the 600 MW that we've got in our Customer Savings Plan on the regulated side of the business. We've also got about 1,200 MW in late-stage development on the unregulated side of the business, and that's about 200 MW located in Canada and about 1,200 MW across five different states in the U.S. As we roll out those investments, that's really going to have a profound impact on changing our generation portfolio. As of 2018, we were about 52% renewable by generation, and as of 2023, we're going to be in the 75% range. We see those investments as both being really profitable opportunities. As we expand our renewable footprint, we're also getting a lot of diversity out of those new investments.
We're diversifying into new technologies, we're diversifying our geographies, we're diversifying our customer base, and we're diversifying the markets that we play in. We're really looking forward to those opportunities.
In order to do that, obviously maintaining a social license to operate within those communities is extremely important. It's one of the criticisms that we hear sometimes about the sector. Can you talk to us a little bit about what Algonquin's doing to maintain that strong social license to operate in those communities where you are expanding?
Yeah, you're right. Social license is a hugely important part of what we do in development. The environmental side plays a lot into that. I think people in host communities are understandably concerned about what the environmental impacts of new development is going to be. I think that's very true for the folks within our company as well. Nobody gets into renewable energy development because they want to hurt the planet. As part of our development process, we do extensive studies before we're actually able to construct facilities. I think, one of the things that really sets us apart, that we spend a lot of time on, is screening opportunities up front so that we just avoid getting into areas where we're going to come into conflict with other environmental priorities like protecting endangered species.
Okay. All right. Well, thank you. Thank the three of you. I see our time ticking here. We're going to open up to the room to see if there's any questions. We have time for a couple of questions. Yep, there's one here in the front row.
Sure. Rob Hope, Scotia.
Sorry, there isn't mic. Yeah.
Rob Hope, Scotiabank. Thank you. I want to get a sense of how your framework for evaluating M&A has changed as you're now looking at more ESG factors. For example, let's say you're taking a look at Empire 2.0, which will have a lot of coal and will, let's say, decrease the quality of some of your ESG scores, but on the other hand, give you an opportunity to improve that asset.
We certainly value the ability to be active in making that change. When we set our goals, Ian referenced early on that there will be some spikes as we do acquisitions and then change. We would not want to buy a coal facility Empire 2 if we felt we wouldn't be able to Green the Fleet. We would actually be even more motivated to buy it if we feel we can because it creates incremental investment, which is good, plus it's doing the right thing from an ESG perspective. I don't know, Rob, does that answer the question?
Yes.
Yeah, thanks.
Any other questions in the room? We have time for one more before we go to our break. Yeah, there's a gentleman here. There's a mic just coming.
Hi, Andrew Mantina, Industrial Alliance. Reading the Farmers' Almanac, it's talking about the solar flare. Okay. The weather's been getting colder. They're saying that we may be going into a period of much, much less sunlight and colder temperatures. Does this affect basically the solar aspect of your business?
Who would like to take that one?
You want to take it from operations or do you want to share it, or what do we think? I just buy them, you have to operate them.
Yes, you can see the great teamwork that we have here.
Not our problem.
We spend a lot of time, I think, as you heard from sort of Brenda, thinking about facilities as we set them up upfront. Once they move across into operations, we work very carefully in terms of having a view of what we're expecting each of the facilities to produce on a week-by-week basis of tracking that. Certainly, in terms of the performance of the solar facilities that we have today, here right now in this year, that's for sure not a problem for us. Our facilities are operating really well and we're seeing the expected production coming out of them. Going forwards, we'll always keep a view on that, but certainly has not been a problem for us to date.
I would just add, sorry for throwing the question your way, but teamwork. I would add that we do, and we are actively looking for both what will be the long-term impact of climate change on our wind fleet in terms of changes in wind patterns and the long-term impact on the solar fleet for different things that can happen. Generally speaking, it feels like it's very marginal on where it is, but it is a complicated question, and it will require ongoing study and ongoing reporting.
Perfect. Well, thank you. We're going to take a short break just so that everybody can refill their coffee mugs here. We'll welcome you back here. We're going to reconvene right at 10:20 sharp, and we'll be starting back with the social panel. These gentlemen and lady will be available for questions on a one-on-one basis if you have any. Thank you.
[Break]
Hello. Excuse me. I don't think this is working. May we ask everyone to come back into the room and to take your seat, please?
I'll go around.
Thank you, Ian. Please. Excuse me, everyone. Could we invite you to take your seats, please, so that we can get started on time? I know the networking's too great, eh? No one's listening to me, George.
All right, everyone.
Thank you, Ian. Over to you.
David, we're sitting down.
Thank you, Ian, for helping get everyone back in the room.
Just join a little later.
Thank you. Welcome back everyone. Our next panel conversation this morning is going to focus on the social aspects of Algonquin's business. For many, the social issues may tend to be the issue that is the most challenging to value. Our experience is that the social issues are truly where some of the most intangible value sits, however. There is a growing acknowledgment that these underlying elements offer a great opportunity to learn about the culture of an organization. Of course, there's no culture without leadership and people. On this session, we're going to dive a little deeper into some of those interactions with key stakeholders, like employees, customers, and the communities. Let me introduce Jen Tindale, Brent Baker, and Luiza I'm going to get your name wrong.
de Camaret .
de Camaret. I'll do the same. May I ask you to just introduce yourselves very quickly about your role and your connection to the sustainability efforts?
Certainly. I'm Jen Tindale. I am the Chief Legal Officer here at Algonquin. I joined the company just under three years ago. I am a member of our Ethics and Compliance Committee, and I'm also the chair of our Disclosure Committee. Outside of those formal roles, I enjoy being an active executive participant in our employee development initiatives. I'm looking forward to talking a little today about how we're building a workforce for the future.
Thank you.
I'm Brent Baker. I'm the National Vice President of Customer Experience, and I came by way of the Empire acquisition January of 2017. I'm really focused on the customers. I started out as an engineer, but I've lived in the communities that we serve. I'm going to talk a lot about how we get engaged in our communities, and it's really been a part of my career growth and ties well to what we're trying to do as a company.
Thank you. Luiza?
Yeah. Luiza de Camaret. I'm in charge of supply chain, fleet, and facilities for Algonquin. The group was established a couple of years ago. We've been definitely maturing on our journey. Sustainability was always a part of our portfolio, and hopefully, I'm going to share some examples with you, and you're going to see that. It definitely comes full circle working for Algonquin. I started my career back in Brazil, where I'm from, as an environmental researcher for an economic group. It's great to be here.
Super. Thank you. Jen, we'll start with you. As I mentioned earlier on, the E is maybe the easier part.
Easier, yeah.
Easier to understand.
Right.
The S is the one that people have a bit more of a challenge. As we launch into this next panel, can you talk to us a bit more about the workforce here at Algonquin and, in particular, the relevance of that workforce to the sustainability efforts?
Absolutely. Sustainability here at Algonquin is really at the heart of our why. We have a goal of making a meaningful contribution to a sustainable energy and water future, and that contribution comes from our people, our workforce. They're supported here by a culture that promotes their development, their performance, and equally as importantly, it promotes the sharing of their ideas. For that contribution from our workforce to be sustainable, we have to make an investment in our employees, a deliberate investment, a continuing investment, and we sometimes refer to that as our workforce commitment. The commitment actually starts before people are even technically part of our workforce. In our recruiting, we use a process that has been recently overhauled to remove unconscious bias, promote diversity, and attract talent that has a passion for our sustainability goals.
Once they're on board, the diverse perspectives and ideas that those employees bring need to be nurtured and encouraged. We need to surround them with an environment that supports their health, their wellness, their safety, and we need to make that investment that I mentioned with a view to the future. More specifically, with a view to their preparedness for the transition to a low-carbon economy.
Okay. You've talked about the culture. Certainly with the work we did, we certainly touched on that as well as one of the significant elements relating to ESG here. Can you talk to us about what it is about the culture, why it is so supportive, and how the company is working to maintain that culture?
Absolutely. One of the first things I noticed actually when I came to Algonquin, that really struck me was the apparent sincerity in the belief that better ideas and better outcomes come through collaboration of diverse contributors. Sort of a hard thing to explain. You almost have to feel it. I have to say that as a female executive coming in from outside the energy industry with a legal background, I arrived, and I felt it. On my first day, I had a sit-down with our CEO, Ian, and we had a frank conversation, not unlike many we have had since then. Listen, I will tell you, I will always remember how he encouraged me to weigh in on every topic.
He even went so far as to acknowledge that people that weren't used to having someone like me in the building may not think to include me in their conversations or in their meetings, that I should invite myself in, elbows up if necessary. He assured me that those self-invitations would be welcomed and that it would be enlightening for all involved. I have to say, a story about needing to invite yourself in does not sound like a story of inclusion. Here's the thing. When you have a CEO who is so passionately promoting inclusion, coupled with someone like me who seizes the opportunity to jump in and contribute, the effect is almost contagious. What happens is those people whose conversation I joined the next time may even consider me part of their shared passion and invite me back.
In turn, I may be the person who invites the input from the next one. The next one might be a millennial, perhaps with an international perspective, maybe even with a disruptive perspective that pushes us to think outside of our comfort zone, and on it goes. I will say, I'm not meaning to suggest that all of our progress on diversity and inclusion comes from this intangible culture that you've got to feel, although that is super important in my perspective. There are a number of deliberate initiatives that we have also undertaken that I should mention. Back in 2017, our board adopted a diversity policy. In that policy, we defined diversity as any characteristic or quality that can be used to differentiate groups or people from one another.
Most importantly, it recognized the value of diversity to corporate performance, and it mandated that diversity be included in both the consideration and the selection of candidates for our board of directors and for our executive team. Currently, we have 33% of our board members that are women, and women represent 30% of our executive team. We are meeting and even exceeding some of the goals of the 30% Club, in which we are members, and tracking quite strongly against one of those 2023 sustainability goals that Ian mentioned at the outset, which is for us to exceed a target of a 30% level for women in leadership roles right across the organization. That was dating back to 2017. In 2018, we actually introduced a Diversity and Inclusion Council here at Algonquin, and that council really champions diversity and inclusion as fundamental to our purpose.
One of their main mandates is to help create some resource groups within the company that are intended to really support an inclusive workforce. Our LGBTQ council would be a recent example of that, and certainly our 10 Lean In circles with over 250 participants are another excellent example of sort of the empowerment and support that can come, in that case, in particular, for women in our company. Most recently, I can think of an example this past fall in Niagara Falls, where we recognized an opportunity at our leadership summit in Niagara Falls. We had 230 participants there. Noting that inclusion is not necessarily always something that comes naturally, we used the opportunity to have an expert-led workshop, which was designed to sensitize our employees to the unconscious bias and introduce some tools for them to squash it. I have to say, our employees really embraced it.
It was actually emotional for some, and for me, that was the most recent example of that sincerity that I mentioned at the outset of my remarks. Here, we really do believe that diversity and inclusion is not just healthy, it's not just respectful, but it actually really does lead to better outcomes.
That's great. Those are great initiatives. You talked about the 2023 goal on women. I think 30% women in leadership. If I recall, Ian also spoke a 2023 goal about engagement.
Right.
Can you talk to us where you are on that path towards meeting that goal?
Right. Yes, indeed. One of our other 2023 sustainability goals is to achieve top-quartile employee engagement, and as I think Ian acknowledged in the opening, we are tracking at above the average for North American utility companies, and we're committed to taking action to continue our growth as an employer of choice. We seek to educate, to develop, and to empower our high-performance workforce. That workforce has to, as I said before, support their health and their wellness, and it has to include a positive safety culture. In 2018, we actually invested over $1.8 million in employee training. We really do champion here the concept and the expectation, in fact, that our employees are lifelong learners. Beyond the typical training that you would expect in person, online, and targeted leadership training, we have a number of other programs that are quite valuable.
First, I'd mention our achievement fund, and that's a fund that provides $4,000 annually, up to a total of $30,000, to any employee that would like to pursue some education from an external institution. In this changing world, where we're moving to this low-carbon economy, you may imagine that there are plenty of offerings out there that are non-traditional, that actually will serve to equip our employees to be not just ready to survive in the new economy, but actually thrive in it. Now perhaps I should go to the other end of the spectrum, away from the more academic offerings, and acknowledge a program that we call our Interconnect Program. This program is intended to provide an opportunity for employees to get practical experience in an area of the business that is outside of their usual profession or discipline.
We found this to be quite effective in opening up the perspective and the appreciation of the diversity in the business, but also of the environments in which we work, and we strive to make a positive difference. Finally, I should mention that fundamental to employee engagement is the strength of our safety culture. We really do strive for zero injuries, and our lost time incident rate is world-class. Our 12-month trailing rate is actually 0.04. We have a number of formal programs that have supported the build and continue to support the maintenance of that strong safety culture, and those include an annual Safety Leadership Symposium, an ongoing Safe Start Training Program that is personalized to all of our employees.
It escaped me. The Smith Driver Training System. Beyond that, listen, beyond the programs, we do continue to really make the most of evolving technology, and we've also made some adjustments to our incentive programs as well. The idea there is that we want to encourage better reporting and more timely analysis, not just of safety incidents, but perhaps even more importantly, near misses and safety concerns. We're hoping that with that initiative, which is sort of an ongoing process, that we will be in a position to predict risks associated with safety, and more importantly, prevent occurrences.
Thank you. That's great. You've hit on a number of the most relevant issues, one being the employee retention and attraction issue that comes up for all companies these days, but also safety. Thank you very much, Jen. Obviously, employees are a really important piece of the backbone of the business, but so are customers. Brent, let's move over to you. Can you talk to us a bit about, on the utility front-
Yeah
What's happening on the customer side?
Yeah. Glad we started with employees because they're the ones that deliver that great experience that we expect to give at every one of our communities. It is our goal at Liberty Utilities to be the favorite utility, no matter where we serve. If you are one of our customers, we really want you to realize how much effort we're putting in to making your life better. We do that in many different ways, and I'll go through some of that as we think about this. Johnny mentioned, really, the needs of our utility industry changing. A lot more young people are becoming our customers. We have millennials and younger generations that are now our customers, and they expect to have choice in everything they buy, including utilities.
They're figuring out ways, whether it's through solar or some other tool, for themselves to find a way to have choice. They also want our values to align with theirs. When they buy products, we see it all the time in the news, they want the company they buy products from to align in value with them. We find that to be something very important, that we look to our customers to find out what they really expect and to meet that. Utilities now have to begin changing their thinking to address these. With increased competition coming into the market, whether it hits our regulated market in every way, we're changing our business to be as though we're in a competitive environment every day. We're focusing on delivering the highest level of service to our customers in everything we do.
Given everything you've laid out, can you talk to us about what are the steps that Algonquin's actually taking to deliver, meet, and exceed those customer needs then?
You bet. Yeah. We are committed to being a top quartile customer satisfaction company measured by J.D. Power. We talked about that by 2023, to be in the top quartile. That's great to get to that point, and we can talk about we've hit that metric, but really, what we want to do is provide that great relationship with our customers so that the regulators support the work we're doing, and that we're doing the right work for those customers, and that our city leaders, we've got mayors and city managers that really are the ones that support our efforts, and we make sure we're heading the right direction. J.D. Power will be the way we measure that.
There are six components in there that we can look at the social aspect of what we do, the billing and payment, and the traditional customer service items that we need to measure. We will have accountability through them. We begin focusing on really key drivers that help us improve that satisfaction. The first thing we talk about is reliability. On the gas and water side, it's about that quality and safety. On the electric side, it's SAIDI and SAIFI, or duration and frequency of outages. We want to make those as infrequent as possible and as short a duration as possible. We have a lot of good engineers. I think Johnny mentioned our engineers working hard to make sure that our systems always work well.
We have to make sure we have resiliency in place, that if we ever do have an outage or a gas issue or a water issue, that we can restore as quickly as possible in a way that customers don't feel that impact. We now have an innovations team that's underneath me that has a customer solutions focus that's looking for what customers really want next. We have things like energy efficiency tools that will help customers know more about their usage and use energy better, to the battery storage project that we talked about behind the meter in New Hampshire that we're looking at in California and in the central region as well. Electric vehicles and smart cities, all a part of that focus on the future and how we become a leader in the industry and in our communities.
With the favorable cost of renewables, we're now able to deliver renewable investment in a way that drives down cost for customers. One of the harder conversations for us to give is anytime we have to increase a cost of any kind. Our focus is to invest capital that has a long-term savings for our customers. The final thing I'll talk about is our Customer First initiative. We're moving our technology to be more modern so that we can respond to customers in a more timely way, that we give our employees the tools to be able to provide the services customers want. It's a customer information system. It helps on procurement. It helps across the company to make sure we're running more efficiently, but it really enables us to respond quickly to customer demands.
Great. One of the other major stakeholders, and Brenda spoke about it earlier.
is about the social license with the communities.
Yeah.
Can you talk to us a little bit about the communities and what that relationship is?
You bet.
purposeful?
Yeah. I mentioned in my opening remarks just growing up in a utility that serves my family and my friends, and you kind of learn what it's like to be in the community, and you realize how much a utility is a part of making a community grow. Our biggest effort that we make is to make sure our communities are successful. Economic development, one being key, workforce development, second. Our approach is really to be local and caring and to know exactly what they need in each community. The social license that was talked about by Brenda comes from those city managers and mayors that believe in what we're doing. We actually last year did a community partnership survey that reached out to our top 30 communities to find out what they want.
We wanted to know from a sustainability effort, do they already have a sustainability vision of their own? From things like streetlights or renewable natural gas, whatever that might be, we wanted to hear from them what it is that they're expecting on their own to do, and what do they expect of the utility. Remarkably, over 60% of those surveyed want the utility to be a big part of that. Over 80% of them have a renewable future of some kind that they have thought of, but I will admit that they are not as advanced as we are here. We have a great opportunity to really help people understand what that vision looks like. We developed some of our strategies around smart cities and some of the renewable movement that we can make around those conversations that we've had.
Additionally, employees live in the communities that we serve, so they're very familiar. They volunteer, they're on boards, they're on city councils, city boards, that kind of a thing. We also give them three Liberty days a year to volunteer their time to be able to get involved and give back to the communities. Really, that's where we find out where our donations should go. As from a grassroots perspective, we hear about what the needs are in the community, and we learn from that. I did mention that smart city goal that we're trying to develop, that really came from a little bit of a partnership with our cities and with our own thoughts about where we should go.
We developed that community partnership survey, and it's actually now become something that EEI is using for the rest of the industry to show how you can get involved with your community. Something we want to kind of brag on and highlight is that we kind of came up with this as a way to have a conversation. I get a call about every other month from a utility somewhere in the U.S. that's calling me saying, "Hey, how did that go? And what did you get out of it? And how can we use that survey?" It's been really interesting.
With our commercial and industrial customers, I've talked about economic development, and it's really about attracting those industrial customers into our service territories and our commercial customers to be successful. That has to start with a conversation with them to be able to be a part of either a new location to our service territory or an expansion. Companies like Owens Corning, La-Z-Boy, and Simmons Foods have asked us specifically, "How can we get more sustainable energy from you? Because we have sustainability goals as well." "How can we expand in your footprint?" We offer things like economic development riders. We're right in the mix of helping them grow and making sure we provide their ability to be successful.
That investment in our communities is not just at the city council level, but it's in our key accounts and making sure they thrive and succeed as well.
Well, that's a great segue into Luiza.
As the investor community looks at this, one of the big areas that they want to look at, and they want you to be looking at and bringing forth information on, is on your supply chain as well.
Yeah.
Can you talk to us a little bit about that, and in particular, how suppliers and business partners impact your sustainability objectives?
Sure. Yeah. Suppliers and business partners are an essential part of Algonquin's approach to sustainability because our supply chain is long and interconnected. That means that the sequence of events doesn't start or stop with us. On a positive side, suppliers that are strongly aligned on social and environmental factors can definitely contribute to our goals. If that's not the case, we could be unnecessarily exposed to risks. We're very explicit on our supplier code of conduct in terms of the importance of sustainability to our procurement practices.
Okay. There's a lot to think about with the suppliers, obviously. Can you talk to us about where the focus areas are with-
Yeah
your suppliers?
Yeah. Going back to the supplier code of conduct, we expect them to operate in a sustainable way to minimize the negative impact to the environment as much as possible, and to have a positive relationship with our communities. Beyond the code of conduct itself, we have a few significant initiatives that I think would definitely benefit our sustainability approach. One is sourcing locally. Local care and local support is one of our company's core values, and it brings obviously tremendous benefits to the local community, but also positive environmental impacts. The second one is we've been working on expanding and diversifying our vendor network with programs such as our supplier diversity program that started in California, and we're now making an effort towards a full rollout across the company.
Just to be clear, a diverse vendor would be minority-owned, meaning women, LGBTQIA+, Indigenous, and African Americans, as well as veteran-owned. We measure the success of the program by the percentage of spend with such vendors vis-à-vis our total spend. Last but not least, our supplier risk program, we're in the process of implementing. Basically, we're going to be monitoring key vendors throughout the life cycle of their contracts from multiple angles, including sustainability, and that's going to improve the reliability and safety of our assets.
That's great. The other piece of that is obviously we can look at the supply chain, but we also need to look at your own facilities.
Yeah.
Can you talk to us a bit more about how you're setting an example for those suppliers through your own operations?
Yeah. We have, I would say, numerous initiatives that support our sustainability goals. I'll just list a few. The main one I would say from my perspective would be fleet. We committed back in 2012, this is definitely not new, to greening our automotive fleet. Since then, we've been investing our capital dollars and shifting to low emissions and electric whenever technology is available, to the point that now 53% of our medium and light-duty trucks are actually green. This is not easy, because in such an M&A-oriented organization like ours, we keep on acquiring businesses that don't necessarily have the same standards as we do. A good example of that would be Empire, that had a few green trucks before the acquisition in 2017, and will have, by the end of this year, 51% of their fleet being green.
All of that is done through, obviously, active research on green fuels, but also in the case of heavy-duty trucks, where this is not an option, we've been installing generators. This is quite significant because heavy-duty utility trucks idle in park for 65% of their time, and for each hour of idling, it corresponds to 25 mi of driving. Again, very significant to lower our carbon footprint. Another good example would be our telematics program. We install devices in all of our trucks, and we monitor driver performance, not to discipline people, but actually to capture information about how they're driving and customize their training. Again, that improves our safety metrics. From a facility standpoint, we've been doing a number of things. Recycling, we've implemented recycling in all of our facilities. We've invested in green infrastructure, such as this building that is LEED certified.
We've been educating people on water conservation. In our operations, we've been retreading tires, investing in technologies such as drones. We've installed 20 different charging stations across the company, and in Oakville alone, we saved 14,000 kilograms of CO2 with the 11 charging stations that we have on our parking lot.
Great. Well, thank you. There's obviously lots of initiatives going on here, and hopefully you could see that there is value to these. At this point, we'd like to open up again to the room for a couple of questions. Is there anybody here that has a question for our panelists? Hand one up. There's one in the back. The other one will be up here afterwards.
Manish Goswami, CI Financial. One of the points brought up was hiring without biases. I was just kind of curious what the first screens are and how you do that. It sounds really good.
Well, we've actually made quite a change in our approach to recruitment recently. We brought in people with experience in identifying where those biases exist. Where in previous times the identification of candidates would be through more of a who knows who network and would be met with perhaps a person or two who look remarkably like each other and come from a similar background, now we actually have our recruitment specialists involved every step of the way. The way that they go out and search for candidates is much more sophisticated, using sort of analytical tools and, as you may imagine, sort of the social media web to access candidates that may not otherwise have even heard about our opportunities under the old model.
When the influx of candidates presents itself, we now have a, I will call it, a much more diverse panel of individuals who assess the incoming applications and sort of cull that down to a smaller group that is going to be entertained through an interview process. One of the really unique things that I learned about when I was trained on some of this recruitment process that is designed to eliminate some of the unconscious biases, we have this method now where we do, I'm going to maybe perhaps mischaracterize it as a type of a Skype interview, but it's a video interview where the candidate and the interviewer, which includes one of these recruitment professionals, can see each other. There are questions that have been designed to sort of really unearth inputs from a variety of types of people.
Not just people who are typically polished and ready to do well in a corporate interview, but to really try and suss out the innovation and the creativity of people that we think can contribute to our business. It's been remarkably successful.
Good. Thank you, Jen. There was a question up here in the front as well.
Thank you. Rupert Merer from National Bank. Jen, this is a question for you, too. You mentioned some employee incentives towards safety goals. Is there alignment between compensation and the other ESG goals within Algonquin?
Other than safety?
Other than safety.
Yes, absolutely. We have quite a sophisticated scorecard. It sort of trickles through the organization from a corporate level down through more of a team or divisional level, and then on to the individuals. When I referenced the safety-related adjustments, what I really was getting to was now that we've become a little bit more in tune with how these ESG metrics flow through our business, one of the things that we noticed was sometimes in an effort to try and achieve great safety statistics, what we may have inadvertently been doing was creating a bit of a situation where an employee was loath to report something because they didn't want to impact a metric that would cause them to be compensated less.
We have flushed those types of things out, not just in safety but in other respects as well, to try and really make sure that we don't create a motivation that is not aligned with the importance of the goals that we've set for ourselves.
Perfect. Well, thank you. Thanks to the three of you. I think this has been a great panel. Thank you very much, and I think we're just going to switch over here for the governance session. Again, thank you very much. While our panelists are coming up, maybe I'll just start to chat quickly on the governance side. Obviously, governance has been traditionally where most of the investors seem to begin their ESG journey. It tends to be the area where most of them feel comfortable as well. Obviously, the governance of an organization is the basis by which all of these initiatives that are being brought forward can grow and prosper and can be growth vectors for the organization.
One of the biggest shifts we've seen is the shift of climate change, actually, from being viewed as an E issue to one where it's now actually being viewed as a governance issue. As well, we're continuing to have a greater level of scrutiny around these issues like board diversity, compensation, and at the forefront, corporate culture. In this panel, we're going to make the effort to provide you with insights about how sustainability is being put into the governance structure here at Algonquin, how these risks are being highlighted, and how they're being built into the risk management system, and also about how we can create value and how they will continue to create value. With that, I'm going to ask the three of you to just quickly introduce yourselves as well.
Good morning. David Bronicheski, Chief Financial Officer for Algonquin Power. With Algonquin Power for, I guess I'm in my 13th year now. I've been here through most of the very rapid growth that we've experienced over that period of time. When I joined, we were about $800 million and largely focused in hydroelectric power generation and some water utilities in Arizona. Fast-forward to today, and we're almost $11 billion U.S., I'll say, and have since expanded into wind, solar, and the full spectrum of utilities here, now I can say, in Canada as well as the U.S.
Great.
Hello, I'm Mary Ellen Paravalos. I'm Chief Compliance and Risk Officer for the company. I joined last year. I have over 20 years of experience in the energy industry across various disciplines. My role here at Algonquin is to help to promote and enable a strong risk management culture, a strong compliance culture. We see it as being really fundamental and important preserver to our business value proposition, our business value creation, and that includes our sustainability activities that you're hearing about today.
Thank you.
My name's Chris Jarratt. I'm one of the co-founders, along with Ian, for this organization. We've been here probably 30 years. It's more or less all we know, all we've done. I'm Vice Chair of the company. I'm also a director, and as a director, I'm a member of the Governance Committee, as well as the Risk Committee. I suppose if I had one objective here on this panel, it's to share with you some of the insights from the board and how they approach ESG and sustainability.
Let's start with that, Chris. Can you describe some of the fundamental aspects of the governance practices here at Algonquin as they relate to sustainability then?
Sure. Maybe without going into all the specific details, I think I would say it's from the board's perspective and also management's, it's founded on three main beliefs. Probably the first one is that good governance instills stakeholder confidence, and stakeholder confidence creates shareholder value. That's the first belief. Probably the second belief is that there's a strong connection between ESG and corporate performance, which is reflected in all aspects of the business. From operations, which we believe are more efficient, less wasteful. From our employees, we've heard a little bit about that already. Commitment, higher productivity, retention, as well as attraction, and that's a huge part of it as well. Also from our stakeholders. We believe that if you have a strong alignment, it creates a strong alignment with your stakeholders, and that improves brand equity.
The other one that Mary Ellen's going to talk about is risk. We believe it reduces risk for the organization, especially in reputational risk, which is key, and I won't steal your thunder, even though that's a core competency of Algonquin. Just one thing to point out is, from a governance perspective, we've been improving our governance for years. It's a journey we've been on for some time. There are things you can point to. Jen was talking about diversity. That's been reflected in the board as well. As Jen said, we don't think of diversity on gender or anything like that. It's actually more thought, and so diversity of thought. We brought in directors from Canada, the U.S., international experience, all to reflect the assets and the businesses we own.
We've got things like a robust internal audit committee that, or audit function that reports directly to the audit committee. Rather than list them all, I think one of the ways to show how we've improved it is if it's hard to quantify good governance, but one way you can do it perhaps is reflected in The Globe and Mail's Board Games. When I think back to when we first started tracking that, I think it was 2013, we were a dismal ranked 171 in the process. I think last year we were up to 38th. Basically bottom quartile to top decile in a five-year period. I think the fact that we're not the only ones who are trying to improve our governance scores, so we were able to achieve that alongside everyone else who was in that race.
We're quite proud of that, and I think that just shows how much of an emphasis we've put on governance.
In order to do that, you've obviously put some specific processes in place at the board. Can you talk to us a little bit about those, Chris?
Sure. The board has delegated the authority for ESG and sustainability to the governance committee. Having said that, it gets reported at the board level quarterly. If not every board meeting, it gets talked about and discussed. There's lots of direct links that have been implemented between sustainability performance and other aspects of our business. It's tied to the compensation throughout the organization. I think it got mentioned earlier, executive scorecards have always been tied to sustainability. One of the areas that we've put a little bit of focus on recently is the whole strategy and sustainability. The sustainability lens is one that we use when we do our board strategy sessions. It's one that we certainly use when we make acquisitions. That's been a bit of a focus area for us as well. Human resources, of course.
The board has overseen the development of a sustainability team, which is dedicated and has executive oversight as well. George Trisic introduced that at the very beginning of the day.
Great. What are some of the specifics on what Algonquin's doing to establish some of those sustainability objectives, but also on the day-to-day operations here?
Yeah. I think we've heard, I won't go into too many of the specifics, because we kind of talked about them already. We do have, of course, comprehensive training for all employees. We've got a strict code of conduct that every employee has to read and certify every year. We have a robust compliance program. Notwithstanding all that, it really does come down to culture. I always think of a culture, it's like the safety program. You don't have a great safety program by having manuals and policies. You have a great safety program through a cultural awareness and a cultural mindset. We've done the same thing for sustainability and ESG. We've also retained several experts in the field, and we're always aware of what the ESG trends are and try to stay on top of that.
Getting back to it is tied to all aspects of the business, the compensation, the strategy, risk management, as well as the evaluation of the strategic risks. I think it's probably worthwhile saying that there's a belief at the board that if you understand the strategic risks better than your competitors, you'll perform financially better than your competitors.
Chris, when we had the opportunity to work with and interview a lot of management, the management team, and yourself, vision was the word that came to mind. Can you give the audience a bit of a sense of what do you see? What's on the horizon?
Yeah. I think sustainability has been in our DNA since day one when we started building small hydro sites. Ian and I were both enthralled with this, owning a generating station that's going to last 100 years. Just a little bit of a side story. I remember one of the first projects we ever looked at, it was a retrofit of a project. It had two turbines in. One was built in, I think, 1904, and one was built in 1909. They still referred to them as the old and the new units. We were always enthralled by that. This idea of sustainability and being around for the long term, that's not new for us. Probably what is new for us is, how do you disclose that? How do you measure it? Those are what's new for us.
That's where we're going to be putting a little bit of focus. I think the other thing, and I mentioned it a couple of times, is how it interacts with our strategy. Of course, we're always going to be trying to continuously improve our processes and practices. I think the other thing that I think it was Brent who mentioned it, is working with our stakeholders, and I'm talking our customers, all of our stakeholders, our investors, and how our efforts on sustainability can probably support them. I think we believe we're out in front of this. We believe we've got a pretty good program, and we're aware of it, but how can we help our stakeholders? That's probably something that's pretty big. Specifically, in 2020, we're going to be initiating the recommendations of the TCFD.
Where that leads us to is, I think it was Andrew, this question at the very beginning about how is climate change going to affect your assets? That's where that will lead to. We've done a fair bit of work on that already. That's where it's going to lead to on what we can expect on the assets that we have and how are we going to deal with that. I think lastly, we've always approached this business as some people might see challenge, and we see opportunity. How can we use this interest in sustainability and ESG to surface new areas of growth and new opportunities?
That's great. With all that growth and opportunity, obviously behind the scenes, you need a really strong risk management system. Mary Ellen, let's turn to you. Can you describe a bit the current risk management positioning here at the company?
Sure, I'd be happy to. It starts from the top, as Chris mentioned, with really strong board governance. In my role as Chief Compliance and Risk Officer, I report to Ian, and I report out quarterly to the risk committee of the board. Each of my peers on the executive team are all members of the Enterprise Risk Management Council. We really do set a tone and a focus on risk management right at the top. How our risk management program shows up embedded across our business is in a couple dimensions. First of all, it is proactive, it is anticipative, it is looking at a broad range of outcomes that may come about from risks. We also have developed over the last few years a keen sense of the common language and framework that we use to talk about risks.
What are the risk impacts, the likelihood, the range of outcomes, controls, and mitigation factors we're using throughout the organization, common language and common framework to help conversations around risk. The risk management program is embedded not only sort of in our day-to-day operations, Johnny talked about risk in our regular M&A and due diligence for companies or assets that we're thinking about bringing into the Liberty family, but also through a longer-term and strategic lens as well. Thinking about growth, thinking about existential risks, those are the kinds of things that sustainability definitely really shines through. Our ERM, Enterprise Risk Management team is centralized so that it can see across the width and the breadth of the business. We also have risk-trained risk advisors working across the business with the actual business owners, so that we can assess the risks.
We put the accountability for risks right with the business owners. We really drive that accountability for those who are responsible for their business units. What this gets us is a deep understanding of what our risks are and the ability to keep them updated as well. I'm happy to say we actually got an award for our best practices in ERM last year from the Governance Professionals of Canada for best practices in ERM. Really proud of that. Really motivates us to keep working.
Can we dive a little deeper into that? Can you give us some specifics, some specific risks that you do manage?
I can indeed. Johnny alluded to a few of them, and I can add to the list. When I look at actually our list of risks that we manage as an organization, most of them are actually sustainability risks. Things like health and safety, environmental stewardship, supply chain integrity that Luiza talked about, compliance are just to name a few. Johnny touched on operational risk, and I'll touch on another one that's been in the news a lot recently, and that's around California wildfires. Wildfire risk shows up in that obviously, it's a threat to people's health and safety and their lives, but also property. For utilities, it can show up as a risk to delivering service actually to customers.
We've seen in the past PG&E and Southern California Edison preemptively shutting off electric service to customers so that it reduces the risk of their conductors being the start of a wildfire. Pretty important. This certainly has happened more over the years as changing patterns due to climate change have seen. It certainly ties firmly in with sustainability. For us, we have a small electric utility on the east side of the Sierra Mountains. We've got two water utilities in California and also a solar and a thermal unit. Wildfire risk shows up on our operations out in California. We mitigate the risk in a number of ways.
From an operational perspective, we've made a lot of investments already and are continuing to do things like replace wood poles with steel, put up covered conductor so that should our conductor fall, it will not spark a wildfire. Things like adding sectionalizers into our distribution network, which are basically switches, so that should we have an event where we need to preemptively shut off electric service, we can do it in a very sort of targeted and strategic way. We don't have to shut everyone off. It also impacts our approach to vegetation management. As you can probably see why that's a pretty important thing that we do and also to reduce wildfire risk as well. Our vegetation management budget, I think, is sort of the second-largest expense that we have at CalPeco.
It's something for which we have a tracker in rates, and it's just one of our tools in our toolbox to manage risk. I'll also just mention that no matter where our facilities are, California or otherwise, our emergency management planning and our business continuity planning are pretty core and fundamental. We are always planning for something, an event that will be essentially unplanned, and so the ability to be prepared for a possible event is really important. I'll also note that our assets are quite distributed. They are across North America in investments elsewhere, across many jurisdictions, geographies, weather, as Johnny alluded to, modalities across electric, water, and gas. From a risk perspective, it's kind of an interesting characteristic of APUC in that all of our eggs are not in one basket. We actually have a number of distributed characteristics to our risk profile.
It also has an opportunity side as well. We can really think about best practices on one side of the business and applying them to an opportunity in another part of the business.
One of the other major governance issues that comes up all the time is cybersecurity. I'm assuming that falls in your camp as well.
It does because that is definitely a risk that all businesses face and most individuals face as well who have a computer or may have a smartphone. Cybersecurity clearly is a risk because we're connected to the internet and because we are using more technology in our lives and more technology in our business as well. Things like robust firewalls, things like anti-malware solutions are sort of core things that we apply. Cybersecurity does not rest just in a company's IT department. We really take a keen focus on the behaviors and our work processes that all of our employees take because they really are a driver and can impact how we see cyber risks, how we react to them.
We really spend a long time training our employees to be part of our line of defense as it comes to cybersecurity. Just mention one other thing around that is that it is important to think about security, not sort of in a silo or just like cybersecurity, as an example. Over the last year, we've created a holistic risk and resilience group at the enterprise level.
This team is to help us be effective at the organization across angles of risk management, business continuity and emergency management, and security angles across physical and security dimensions as well. It's really important to take risk and resilience and security in a holistic view to be more effective.
Thank you. When I was on the sell side, and I know that there are a few people from the sell side here today, the last phone call I wanted to ever hear on the phone was from the compliance department.
Aw.
It is part of your role. It is part of your title. Can you talk to us, as we met with you and others, I realized how important that is actually to your business, and really in a positive way. Can you talk to us a little bit about that?
I can. We recently, last year, actually stood up the Compliance and Risk Office in the form that we have it today to really bring like-focused groups across risk management and compliance, insurance, and resilience to be more effectively impacting the culture and the organization as well. Besides our policies, it is important that we have these code of conduct policies and supplier policies that we regularly train folks on them as well. We also make sure that our leaders are showing up and talking to employees about compliance and risk as well. We use a number of channels here. We use our Executive Face-to-Face Road Shows annually. We use our quarterly town halls that are broadcast across the organization to be featuring topics around compliance and ethics and really driving that message home.
The other thing we're doing is making sure that employees have enough resources and that they feel supported when they have questions, concerns, or if they do see something that they want more information on. We've got a dedicated compliance team to field questions. We've recently stood up an ombudsperson service so that folks can actually talk to someone live through a workplace difficulty they may be wanting to chat through and seek solutions about. We also have an ethics reporting line, too. We have many channels to both help employees get their questions answered or if they have concerns, to help find solutions.
Perfect. Well, thank you very much, Mary Ellen.
Sure.
In our business, we've been witnessing a lot of capital moving around, a lot of it flowing out of Canada, to be honest. Increasingly that the E, S, and G issues are a big part of that decision-making process. David, can you talk to us a bit from the financial perspective? What do you view as the long-term benefits for companies that are having a strong ESG framework?
Sure. Well, I can only really speak for our company, and the way we look at ESG is really providing us with investment opportunities. Pretty much every dollar that we invest goes into some sustainability investment, and some are obvious, and some may be less obvious. We've got a $7.5 billion, five-year investment program, which we outlined at Investor Day last year. We'll be updating at our upcoming Investor Day as a little bit of an advertisement on December 3rd. With that, if you look at the various investments that we're putting in, one of the biggest ones is our investment in 600 MW of wind in Missouri. Once that build-out is complete, and that'll be complete sometime next year, we'll be in a position to be able to shut down the coal plant that we own there.
That's obviously a very obvious and direct example of investments that we're making in sustainability. I would argue indirectly, almost every investment that we're making is actually for sustainability. As an example, our bare steel cast iron pipe replacement program is all aimed at reducing methane emissions. Our automated meter infrastructure program that is in there is also aimed at that. We won't have to be driving around to read meters anymore, and probably even more importantly, this will now empower customers to be able to monitor their usage of electricity, natural gas, water, and to be able to take whatever conservation efforts they want. I could go on and on. We've got BELCO coming up that we're buying, and there's going to be a follow-on investment program there to green their fleet.
It really is all about creating investment opportunities is the way we look at it.
Perfect. In January, you issued a $300 million green bond. Can you talk to us a little bit about the rationale for that and perhaps a bit about the demand and the pricing, what benefits you saw out of it?
Well, we have a senior unsecured bond platform that finances our renewables program, and we have been issuing bonds on that program since 2010. This year was the first time that we actually decided to formally get the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval and certify it as a green bond. I would argue that every previous bond, we have got about CAD 900 million of bonds out there, every previous bond that we have issued could have and are really, in effect, green bonds. This was the first year that we did it formally. I will say, it did attract new investors to the bond platform. We were 3 times oversubscribed on the deal, so that was very encouraging. There were 65 investors, and we even had 15 new investors to our bond platform.
It clearly, I think, attracted new investors to our name. I will say we didn't really notice any difference when it came to the pricing of the bonds, because I guess green investors, they like green investments, but they also like the green, it would appear. I think in the long run, I'd say inevitably it probably will lead to better pricing. As more and more pools of capital start getting earmarked for green investments, I think that can't help but improve pricing going forward.
When we look at your CapEx plans over the next five years, a lot of it's in this renewable space. It's an inevitable question for me to ask. Do you think that there'll be more?
Oh, absolutely. As I said, with the $7.5 billion dollar pipeline, August we announced our Maverick Creek Wind project. It's almost a 500 MW project that we're building down in Texas. We've got our Sugar Creek Wind project underway. We're just finishing up on our Great Bay Solar project. I could go on and on. Really what that means is there will be follow-on bonds. We'll definitely be certifying our next utility bond. That'll be the first utility bond that we issued that'll be certified green. We'll be doing that towards the end of next year. Also another green bond on the non-reg renewable side of our business. I think the market should expect that we'll be coming to market in late 2020 or very early in 2021 with those green bonds.
Okay, great. Obviously we could go on and on and on, but we've promised that we'll try to get people out of here for 11:30 today. I think we'll open it up to some questions from the room. Are there any questions for this particular panel? There's a question here.
I don't think I need. Anyway, yeah. Andrew, yeah.
We have a home audience.
Yeah. It's the webcast.
What is your policy on growth of your dividends in the Algonquin?
Well, to this point in time, we've had tremendous success in growing our EPS. That's enabled us to grow our dividend. I'll say if you go over the last 10 years, we've probably averaged 10% or more increase in the dividend. For the next two years, 2020, 2021, we've committed to continued 10% increases in the dividend. Beyond that, I think our board will be focused on looking at our growth in EPS. As a management team, we will, as people will see, continue to drive EPS growth kind of 8%-12% annually, which should allow for an increase in the dividend of 10% continued after that.
I think the question the board wants to ask is whether, given all of the investment opportunities that we have in front of us, if there's more value creation to be had by actually retaining a bit more cash in the business. If our EPS is going up by 10%, 11%, maybe the dividend should go up by 8%, and you just improve the payout ratio. Right now our payout ratio is in line with the Canadian utilities, so about 75% or so of EPS, whereas the U.S. utilities are more in that 65%, high 60s range. I think there's an argument to be had that given that 90% of our utilities are in the U.S., that perhaps an improvement in the payout ratio might actually be more value accretive to our shareholders.
Thank you, David. This is a first for me, but the CEO wants to ask the question.
David, maybe you could, just following on that conversation about green bonds, kind of let people know some of the advances in terms of ESG-linked bonds and sort of the next step along on that path.
Yeah, no. We're actually seeing, you can think of it as almost like contingent pricing, where there's definitely parts of the world where you commit to hitting certain targets on the ESG scale, you might actually get some improvements in pricing. I think some banks even in Canada are starting to allocate specific pockets of money even for the revolver that we have. In there again, there's some certain targets that if you invest in certain renewables, they'll give you some basis points off of the credit facility for there. Again, longer term, we actually are expecting to see some more benefits coming from a focus on ESG.
Perfect. I know we're up against the timeline to try to get people out of here at 11:30. With that, I'm going to say on behalf of myself, it's been a real pleasure to be the moderator today, and I hope you've gotten some great insights. I again, want to thank our great panel. Please welcome in thanking our panel for their comments. Ian, I'm going to pass it back to you.
Thanks, Milla, I actually knew the answer to that question before I asked it. With the conclusion of the panel, I am going to call the event to a close. I guess I was hoping to kind of wrap up just a couple of what I like to think of the three most notable objectives and goals that we've set for ourselves. This idea of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions by 1 million metric tons, the idea of building 2,000 megawatts worth of new solar capacity. Perhaps the one that touches me the most is this idea of making sure that we take advantage of everybody in our organization by ensuring that 30%, at least, of our senior leadership is populated by talented women.
If there's a takeaway from today, I'm hoping that you got a sense that sustainability isn't, I want to say, just something that you hear from me, and I guess I was touched, and maybe I shouldn't be. By the depth of the knowledge and insight that everybody who sat on the panel brought, to me, the sincerity and commitment was undeniable. I guess I'll just say that at the end of the day, sustainability, maybe this is at the risk of repeating myself, sustainability isn't, A, new to us or, B, something that we do. It's really something that we are, and that while I'm immensely proud of what the organization has done, we are going to continue to assess our ESG factors.
You heard a comment about us moving toward the next level, which is this idea of compliance with the recommendations of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, but really is bringing these two things together, and I think we're committed to building on and enhancing the programs that we talked about today. With that, I would be remiss if I didn't end with a thanks to everybody, the sustainability team led by George and augmented by Shane and everybody else on it in terms of the preparation of that report, but also setting up an event like today. I guess I will just reiterate what I always say when I see these things is when it appears seamless and it appears effortless, it's because so much work went into it, and this is no different.
In addition to members internally, and I, again, I'd like to thank, obviously, everybody who on the business team took time out of their day to be part of this. We've also had help from the outside. Milla, not only in terms of hosting today, and thank you for that, but her and her team in terms of development of our report, our partners at Delphi in terms of helping us examine and verify our emissions calculation methodologies. You can imagine there's lots of subjectivity that goes into that. Of course, at the end, let's not forget our friends from Tesla, who graciously agreed to shuttle people to and from the GO Station because welcome to Canada from a weather perspective. I think altogether, I think the contributions of people who share a kind of a common understanding, this idea of sustaining water and energy for life.
With that, shuttles are available to take you back to the GO Station right up until noon. Thanks everybody for taking time out of your day. I would welcome, and I'm sure George would as well, unvarnished feedback in terms of did you feel like we answered questions? Was this a useful contribution of your time? I can't give you back the two hours of your life that you invested, but we can certainly make next year's commitment to this, take it in a different direction, or add or subtract features as that feedback. Please, unvarnished feedback always welcome. With that, thanks very much, and please safe home, everybody.