Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Good morning, committee members.
My name is Dave Seymour, from Ameresco Canada. I'm vice-president of our eastern region, based here in Ottawa.
Our company was founded in 1973 in Toronto. Our specialty at that time was energy management engineering. It was innovative at the time and our focus was on existing buildings mostly, but we were also involved in some new construction or new building innovation in those days. Along the way we've been acquired a couple of times, actually. We're now known as Ameresco Canada.
One of our main businesses is energy performance contracting, which you have been introduced to, I believe, in previous briefings. That business involves the creation of energy savings or utility savings, operating savings, which in turn fund the capital cost of the improvement measures that are installed. We'll get into that a little bit more.
I would have to say that this business is evolving over time. We're looking more at comprehensive performance improvements of existing buildings, not just energy. It's the total building performance. Again, you'll see in my comments where I'm going with that.
I will just tell you a little bit more about Ameresco Canada. We've completed approximately $1.3-billion worth of energy and facility renewal projects in Canada. If you add to that our U.S. portion of business, that number increases to about $4 billion in improvements, company-wide. We've saved our Canadian clients over $500 million in cumulative operating savings, with about 250 projects or so completed in a variety of different sectors. The first branch office of our firm in Canada outside Toronto—our head office— is here in Ottawa. I opened that 20 years ago. We've worked on approximately $150 million of projects locally in eastern Ontario and western Quebec, and we now have offices across Canada in most of the major markets.
I'm providing this information not to advertise, but just to give you an idea of the perspective, or our point of view, as a practitioner in energy and building performance.
As I continue with my remarks, I have a few slides that I will be showing you. These are case studies, if you will, of some of our projects that we've completed for federal clients over the last 15 years. These projects have been successful, they're meaningful, and I believe they are indicative of the ample opportunity that still exists for Natural Resources Canada's federal buildings initiative to flourish. And we'll come back to this towards the end of my remarks.
Ameresco is also a founding member of the Energy Services Association of Canada. Peter Love, our association president, appeared before your committee earlier this month to provide some information about energy performance contracting and the federal buildings initiative, and the benefits of those. I don't want to repeat his remarks, but I am here to support his comments and suggest that there is plenty more opportunity for these types of projects. It is a great way to make improvements to the cost-effectiveness of government operations, to reduce the impact on the environment, to create jobs now and in a green sector, as well as to fund some much needed facility renewal or infrastructure improvement within the government workspace. Much of this can be accomplished without needing new federal funds.
In previous briefings, you've heard about the significant utilities' savings potential from energy efficiency projects, the opportunity for greenhouse gas reductions, and the creation of good technical jobs. You are likely hearing more from your facility managers, as they face accumulating deferred maintenance backlogs or infrastructure backlogs. Some other terms you may have heard of are facility renewal, or capital asset renewal requirements, within their building portfolios. These accumulating costs point to a risk in their ongoing operations, and it is a concern for all property owners and managers.
This asset deterioration challenge is a significant one and it's a looming source of debt for all concerned. McGill University has published some information on the size of this infrastructure deficit, which has been estimated to be somewhere in the neighbourhood of $250 billion to $325 billion for the Canadian municipal, provincial, and federal infrastructure combined.
We refer to this challenge as an asset sustainability challenge, but it can also be an opportunity in terms of identifying innovative solutions and sources of funding to address at least some of the cost challenges.
Like business, governments are looking to avoid putting significant funds into their own bricks and mortar, but to invest this money in places that would best serve the citizens of the country and in programs and further development of our priorities as a society.
Of course some capital investment is required to support government operations, but there are other ways to get some of this work done that leverage existing external financial and technical resources. Energy performance contracting and the federal buildings initiative program can be put to work to be one of the solutions that would support government efforts in getting more done with less. As a taxpayer, I want the government to be considering all avenues to get the most benefit out of each and every tax dollar.
With this observation or comment on facility renewal or infrastructure renewal, I've just added one more good reason to consider utilizing the federal buildings initiative for making improvements to many facilities within the federal portfolio.
Treasury Board statistics for the federal real property portfolio as of 2011 indicate there are some 39,000 buildings, leased and owned by the government, having a floor area of 27.6 million square metres. The data also references 73 custodian organizations, so the building portfolio is huge. The portfolio is aging, and it's getting to be a larger source of debt in terms of the outstanding obligation to keep facilities operational and functional. Also, if the number of custodian organizations is correct, there is a significant logistical challenge in getting things organized, approved, and implemented. Facility and asset managers have a challenge.
There have been about 80 FBI, federal buildings initiative, projects completed over the past 20 years, with an invested amount of about $312 million, which save approximately $43 million per year. We know there are many other projects that have been completed by various custodial departments that have some form of energy efficiency improvements included in the scope, which have gone undocumented or were at least not monitored.
However, there are many more opportunities available for consideration. Most of the projects that were done 10 or more years ago are ready for a second look, as these early adopters were likely looking at their projects with a somewhat shorter term view, so there could be good savings potential available. We know that to be a fact with some of the buildings you will see on the slides in front of you.
Now, to summarize the case studies we have shown on the slides and others I will make my way through, they include a number of the projects that we've completed and that my team in Ottawa specifically has been involved in. I'm sure you will recognize many of the national capital region buildings in these pictures. I've not shown all of them, but these are the more recent ones.
These implemented projects have a total investment of about $49 million and resulted in utility savings of about $5.9 million per year. The average performance increase is about 29.9%, with 19,000 metric tonnes of CO2 equivalence of greenhouse gas emission reduction.
We know there are more potential savings to be achieved within a number of these facilities. They may be smaller projects, but they would still be viable projects.
The challenge is not one of applying certain new technologies and getting the energy savings that would come out of them. There's no panacea there. As with so many other challenges we face, we have a human factor challenge. The challenge we face is identifying and assigning the right people, and enabling them with a challenge and clear objectives to make things happen, using programs that already exist. The appropriate technologies will be brought along with this effort.
Thank you to the committee and for listening. I look forward to questions and comments later on.