As I said in my presentation, a number of REALpac members own or operate federally leased buildings. When it comes down to making major energy retrofits, it becomes a capital cost, a capital improvement project. Whether it's a federal tenant or a private-sector tenant, they still have to look at the costs and the relative payback and where they're going to get their money, and then they have to look at the relative business model.
So when we look at major energy retrofits and the four categories I mentioned in the appendix of the package I gave you, those have come from discussions with Finance and NRCan as we have tried to narrow down this project to a more manageable scope. We started out with a larger and really a broader realm of products, but to us these fall into the category of being cost prohibitive in terms of installing and purchasing high-efficiency boilers and chillers. Also there are major costs associated with installation and the work that comes with it. So it's not just simply a matter of attaching it to your old HVAC system. A lot of residual work comes with it.
When we look at the cost of it right now, there is a much better business case for installing a mid-efficiency boiler rather than a high-efficiency boiler. You are obviously going to get higher energy savings with a high-efficiency boiler, but the actual cost and the payback period do not quite make sense. For a number of our members who do have private-sector money as part of their business model of real estate investment trust publicly traded companies, they need to justify major energy retrofits, and major building retrofits in general, to their shareholders.
We think this would make the financial case and the business model a lot more favourable. It would allow them to spread the money out; it would allow them to get these high energy savings; and it would at the end of the day create more money for the federal government in the long term through tax revenue and through the additional work that comes with installation.