As I said, we focus on the upfront cost to enable decision-makers at the beginning of the project to know essentially the value and amount of carbon savings they're getting out of that project. It's based on a life-cycle cost analysis and total cost of ownership.
We recently met with the Canadian Institute of Quantity Surveyors. These surveyors are the professionals who cost, for example, real property projects. They're developing an international coalition with the U.S., U.K., and many other countries right now to develop an international costing standard on real property, which includes emissions reduction, which is very similar to the approach we've had in place now for a couple of years.
I'll give you a very quick example of what we do on real property. We essentially ask for the life-cycle cost over 40 years, which is normally the lifespan of a building before it gets retrofitted. We ask for the cost of business as usual if you build it to code. We ask for the cost of taking it all the way to zero, and we ask for the cost of being cost neutral. Cost neutral would be essentially by the utility savings we'd have over that 40 year period of time, and the cost of carbon we would be saving in terms of lower carbon fuels.
Very quickly, for fleets, we've looked at total cost of ownership. For light-duty vehicles, it's now more cost-effective for the government to buy an electric vehicle than a classic combustion vehicle, because you save 80% on fuel costs, save half on maintenance costs, and you don't pay any carbon taxes on it. It's actually more cost-effective now for the government to directly buy a low-emissions vehicle.