Caneta Research Inc. is a small energy consulting company in the greater Toronto area. We have 10 engineers on staff. Our core business is done under a company called Caneta Energy, which does energy modelling and energy consulting in connection with a number of building owners who are trying to improve their buildings and trying to qualify for LEED.
We do not do full LEED facilitation per se, but we often become involved with facilitators who don't have an energy modelling capability to help them meet the energy prerequisites in LEED and gather additional credits, perhaps under that same program.
We also become involved in doing modelling of 3P projects, public-private partnerships, that might be of interest especially in Ontario, B.C., and Quebec, in which there is a requirement for an energy target or energy guarantee on a new project. That's where the rubber meets the road, when it comes to providing accurate energy modelling.
In addition to that, in Ontario there is now a requirement to model to show code compliance. There are only a couple of provinces in which this is currently a requirement. I'll get into that a little later.
Our background, prior to 10 years ago when this Caneta Energy activity started under the old banner of Caneta Research Inc....
We have been in business for 24 years. We have advised and consulted with the provinces, the federal government, and agencies such as the National Research Council when they do their code development. We've advised these departments on new building energy requirements and also have worked with some government programs that a number of you may remember: the commercial building incentive program, which was offered by Natural Resources Canada for large buildings, and recently the ecoENERGY efficiency initiative, which is very similar. We provide support to those programs and also help clients get incentives or take advantage of what is being offered. We have worked for the Ontario Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing. It is the group responsible for the Ontario code. We've done this on two occasions, once in 2006 and again in 2011.
I'm only providing this background as I think it will be useful for the kind of questions you may want to put to me.
We have just completed a major study with the same agency, the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing, for large buildings, developing code proposals for encouraging energy efficiency upgrades during renovation. At this time, there is no requirement to upgrade. For example, if you do a repair on a wall, there is no requirement to replace or upgrade the insulation in the wall. If you replace a piece of equipment, you do not necessarily have to meet the current energy requirements.
The province wants to change that. They want to be able to take advantage of anything that comes under a permit to call for more stringent requirements. They are currently looking at drafts for this requirement. It may take a few years to put in place, but at least it's encouraging to see that it's not all focused on new buildings.
I briefly mentioned the work with the National Research Council in development of the National Energy Code of Canada for Buildings 2011. I'm sure many of you are aware of it. It's one of the most stringent codes, I would think, in North America if not the world. We haven't had a chance to benchmark it against the European standards, but I'm sure it's up there.
My attendance today was prompted in part, from what I understood from Marc-Olivier, by a report we did for Public Works in 2001, a study in which we were challenged to identify how we could improve office-type buildings, from meeting a model national energy code for 1997, which was a benchmark at that time.... A couple of the provinces adopted this as an energy requirement. Public Works wanted to go 60% to 70% beyond that, which is very stringent.
It was relatively easy to get to 25%, and we demonstrated that. Programs have evolved since. The commercial building incentive program, for example, required that buildings show 25% energy savings compared with that MNECB, the model national energy code for buildings.
The current national energy code for buildings, which I just mentioned, which NRC came out with in 2011, shows savings in buildings typically 25% greater than it does with the old MNECB 1997. Considerable progress has been made so I didn't want to spend a lot of time talking about a 12-year-old report, but rather where we've come since then.
That work did show it was relatively easy to show you could get a 25% saving compared to the old code, MNECB, without any incremental capital cost, and that was promising. Anything beyond that is a different matter. It can get more expensive.
As I said, that whole approach of achieving 25% greater savings was later used in incentive programs across the country.
Today that same premise is the basis for the Ontario building code energy requirements. One of the paths to compliance is showing that your building is 25% better than the MNECB. I wanted to point that out. I think it is probably one of the more stringent jurisdictional codes that I'm aware of. We've benchmarked it against ASHRAE 2010 in the United States, 189 ASHRAE, which is a high performance standard, and as I say, the only thing left is how it compares to Europe.
I probably have spent enough time talking about that sort of thing.
I mentioned in my background, which I understand everyone has, that I did a presentation to the Toronto chapter of the CaGBC on all this, how we've come over the years, where we're going with buildings, including net zero. There's a little about net zero in that presentation, and how we could achieve that in buildings.
By the way, ASHRAE in the United States, the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers, is targeting 2030 to be at net zero. I don't know whether they'll achieve that or not. That's a long way off.
One of the biggest challenges today in many areas—and I'll be concluding more or less with this point—is energy prices have changed dramatically since that 2001 study. The price of natural gas is 50% lower today than it was at that time. The price of electricity is double what it was at that time. I'm talking primarily certainly of the markets we looked at in that document. This has the effect of significantly increasing the payback periods associated with gas measures, if you want to save gas, while lowering payback periods for electricity measures.
Often when you do something in a building you're going to impact both electricity and gas use and you're depending on both to give you the savings you need to justify your capital investment.
I think you've already heard from the CaGBC, probably back in March when I couldn't make it, but it's making it very difficult to show a 25% cost reduction and beyond to get energy credits beyond the prerequisite in LEED because you can't depend the same on the gas savings because you're coming up with a percentage dollar saving.
I wanted to place that. That is something everyone is up against today, and any time we've looked at.... Recently, for example, the renovation study I mentioned we're doing for the code ministry in Ontario was one of the big issues we had. We had difficulty showing savings at a reasonable payback with the gas prices we had. Electricity is a different matter.
I think a lot of what we did in that old report that dated from 2001 would apply, for example, to existing Public Works buildings. A lot of the energy measures we've looked at there could of course be applied. There is an opportunity, especially if the buildings are undergoing equipment replacements, major renewals, or renovation.
That concludes my opening remarks. I hope I can address some questions you might have.