Thank you very much.
I sent in ahead of time a one-pager. If people can have that one-pager in front of them, it would help them understand better what I'm going to talk about. I'll be very to the point and get right at it.
When we talk about buildings, there are two types of buildings in my mind, the new construction ones that are coming at you and the existing buildings. It's the existing buildings that I'm going to talk about today.
The federal government, obviously, owns buildings and leases buildings, and from what I understand, more and more you're moving towards leasing buildings. Where you deal with existing buildings, and you own them or you lease them, you have two different approaches about how you take on energy efficiency and conservation measures in those worlds.
What I'm going to talk about first are the buildings that you own. What happens in our industry—and I run and own a company called Global Resource Efficiency Services, and we've been doing this for a long time—there are two approaches to take when you're dealing with existing buildings and upgrading them for efficiency. One is a tactical approach and one is a strategic approach.
The tactical approach is what's happening too much, too often every day: your building managers, the people who run your facilities, are faced with crises. Your roof is leaking, your windows are going, the boiler has blown. What you're doing is reacting to those problems and solving them as best you can.
The other thing that happens very often with your people is they're getting approached by many companies. This is a growing industry and people are coming to your people saying, “Hey, I've got a light. Why don't you buy this light”, or “I've got a monitoring tool”, or whatever. And they try to sell these technologies to your people. That's all fine and dandy, but we don't believe in that approach. We believe in what this one-pager is talking about, which is our GRES service model. We like to attack renovations to existing buildings through a strategic approach, and it follows something that we call AIM—audit, implement, and monitor. Basically what we're trying to do is create a strategy that will allow your building people to make the right choices, make sound, intelligent choices about how to move forward in terms of energy upgrades.
In the tactical world, a lot of companies will come and say, “Let's do a lighting upgrade in your facility”, and away you go and you do that lighting upgrade without any consideration for the impact it's going to have on the heating and cooling of your facility. Lights give off a lot of heat. When you pull out the old technology and you put in, for example, LED lighting—we just finished 90,000 square feet of that—you're removing all of the heat generation that's coming from that lighting. You need to adjust how you run your heating and cooling in your facility.
In our work—and I'm going to get right to the point here in terms of the audit, implementation, and monitoring world—in the audit world you start to do the planning that is required to make those good, sound decisions. In that planning process, you're looking at what your long-term plans are for building renewal; that's very important. How soon, over a 25-year period, are the components of your building going to break down, and when will you have to deal with that?
We want to understand that because energy efficiency measures can help attack some of those problems. If you need a new roof and it has to be replaced, maybe that's the time to put solar PV on the roof, as an example. It gives you those opportunities to make those kinds of decisions when you're doing that kind of planning.
In the audit stage, you're doing an assessment of where you're at. What's your baseline of energy consumption for gas, water, electricity, and so forth? What are your building renewal needs? What have you done so far? Where is your energy intensity index that you should be looking at for each of your individual buildings? What are your policies, procedures, and so forth? What you get out of that top part when we do that kind of work is called the strategic plan.
