Thank you very much.
I'm going to rely on David as my technical assistant here with the slides. We'll see how technically savvy he is.
Thank you for inviting me to attend. My name is Stephen Carpenter. I'm with Enermodal Engineering. I've been working in and consulting on energy-efficient buildings for over 30 years now. We're one of Canada's largest consulting engineering firms working exclusively in green and energy-efficient buildings.
Like David, we have a large portfolio of buildings, and I'm going to draw upon the experiences we've had with those. Since the time is short here, I'll run right to the conclusions or the recommendations on how I think this committee should proceed.
I'll start with a little bit of background. I apologize, I'm an engineer, so I only think in numbers. I'm glad Thomas introduced some of them.
The first slide I have up here is just to put everything in context. It shows the average building energy consumption. You will notice that it varies by building type. MURB—what we would probably call apartment buildings—is on the left, and on the far right are hospitals, being the highest energy users. Consistent with what Thomas just said, and using the same units, the average of all of those buildings is somewhere in the range of 300 to 400 kilowatt hours of energy use. That's electricity, gas, oil, whatever—all the energy combined—and then divided by the floor area of the building. You don't have to worry about the units: we'll call it 300 to 400 “apples”, if you prefer.
Looking at the big picture, that's where we are today. I should mention that this is all Natural Resources Canada data.
Next is a very interesting slide. It shows the energy performance of buildings. It shows current energy performance but also date of construction. At the far left are the early buildings, built before 1920, but their current energy use. At the far right it shows current energy use.
Probably the surprising thing for most people on this committee is that there's not a heck of a lot of improvement from 1920 to present. We see a little bit of a drop between the seventies and the eighties. The seventies were the bad guys from an energy point of view. Some of us older people remember the OPEC oil crisis and things like that. We saw some increased awareness in energy. That's when we first started seeing energy codes.
People have talked about the need to get to net zero and so on. If we continue on with the same path we're on, we've actually calculated when we're going to hit net zero: the year 3300. I won't be around for that event. I guess my point is that I think the track we're currently on isn't going to get us where we need to be when we start looking at the issues of energy use. It begs the question, how do we achieve more energy-efficient buildings if the track we're currently on is not getting us there fast enough? I'm pleased to say that I agree with my two previous colleagues that the answer is not new technologies. It's not like we're looking for a silver bullet. It's all about better policies and processes.
I'll take the rest of this presentation to talk about some of those policies and processes that I think would benefit.
First, set mandatory—and I would underline the word “mandatory”—green and energy targets. In other words, for both your new and existing buildings, we want to set targets that must be achieved. It's not an option. I think Thomas made a very nice explanation of what the private sector is doing. For them, it's mandatory. They have to do it.
I agree with Thomas' recommendation to continue to use the LEED gold for new construction, for all the new buildings. I also support Thomas in terms of using LEED EBOM, with EBOM being the existing building target. LEED gold is for existing buildings. Again, the private sector is doing it. I think the federal government would be wise to follow suit.
LEED deals with all attributes of green. I think it's also important that we mandate specific energy intensity targets. There are many aspects to green in terms of recycled materials and indoor air quality and so on, but I think it's just as important that we set specific targets for energy efficiency. Thomas alluded to those.
I've just pulled up, in a matter of a few minutes, some of our numbers and come up with some ideas. If I'm looking at existing office buildings, Thomas mentioned the average new building being about 330. We would think that any new office building should be around 250. That's about a 25% to 30% reduction or whatever the number is.
There is another system—I don't know if you would call it a rating system, but it's a benchmarking tool, I guess—called Energy Star. It came out of the U.S. Department of Energy. We're probably all familiar with it from our computer monitors and so on, which are Energy Star. There is an Energy Star for buildings in the U.S., and it's now being adapted to Canada and will be released shortly.
It's a scale that goes from zero to 100, so zero is the worst energy performance building in the world, or at least in Canada, and 100 would be the best performance building. Again, on the target, I had suggested that for federal government buildings, if it's an existing building you would want it to be in the top 25% to show leadership. That would imply an Energy Star of 75 or greater. I should mention that EBOM has a minimum threshold of 69, so if you want to get into the program, you're pretty much going to be there. In new offices, because you have more ability to incorporate energy efficiency features, I think you can set a more aggressive target, so I've suggested under 200 kilowatt hours or an Energy Star grade of 85.
The next slide is about the performance of LEED buildings. As I indicated in my introductory remarks, we've worked on a large number of LEED buildings, close to 200 now. The red line on the graph is what NRCan says is the average energy use of typical buildings. The green bars are the various LEED projects that we have worked on and where we have actually monitored the energy performance, so those are real energy numbers. With the exception of one or maybe two buildings, all of the LEED buildings are performing better than the average building; the green line is more or less a fit to that. We're talking about a 30% reduction just by incorporating a LEED mandate into your program.
Next—and I appreciated Thomas' earlier comments—I'm talking about how energy use should be under 200. Without pumping my chest too much here, this slide shows our head office in Kitchener, Ontario, recently completed, with a monitored energy use of 68. Again, an average building is running around 330. It's 68, and you can trust me: we're a private sector company and we have shareholders that expect us to have a return on their investment and so on, so this was all done within reasonable financial numbers.
We're an Energy Star 100, which says that we're the top building. We're also a triple LEED platinum. I've also put down there the construction costs. At $250, that's both the base building and all the tenant fit-up space. For those who are familiar with construction costs, that is by no means a scary construction cost number. I was suggesting $200 as a starting point, but I think that we as an industry can certainly do much better.