Thank you. My name is Gary Wong. I am the director of infrastructure at the Nunavut Housing Corporation up here in Iqaluit. I don't have a prepared presentation or specific agenda in mind. I was notified of this on very short notice, but I am quite willing to participate and answer questions to try to give you some insight into the challenges we experience up here.
My understanding is that this committee is looking specifically at the energy sector, in terms of the built environment and the whole desire to move the nation more toward a low-carbon economy. We are quite aware of energy usage, being in one of the coldest degree-day settings in the country.
I would like to start by saying that it is not new for northern builders and northern infrastructure to be dealing with energy issues. Whether they were attempting to do what was required in terms of cold compliance with standard industry practices of the day or were simply starting to build homes up in the north—which only goes back to the mid-1900s, really—because of the weather conditions and the logistics of getting materials up there, of course they tried to build the most energy efficient, warm structures they could, based on the understanding and availability at the time.
That said, my understanding up here is that once the R-2000 program was introduced by NRCan back in the 1980s, which was right after the big oil crunch, there was a lot of national interest in moving toward more energy efficient structures, coming out of the 1970s. Once again, this goes back to pre-Nunavut days, but the housing stock that we have to deal with up here now from those days tried to incorporate many of these R-2000 assemblies, including thermal bridging and increased insulation levels for warmth. That was not a code requirement. In southern jurisdictions, as a general rule, if you go back to the 1970s, just moving into the 1980s, you wouldn't have found as many assembly types in insulation values in the south as high as those in the north. That was done out of necessity, not as a code requirement.
Moving through the decades, new technologies have come out and new understandings of trying to increase energy efficiency, making tighter envelopes, a requirement for mechanical ventilation. As all these things started to move into the building code, they were maintained up here, but I think they were slightly ahead of that curve going back to the pre-2000 days. However, that said, that's the envelope. It doesn't necessarily mean that the buildings in the north were all built better than buildings in the south. I'm just saying that the concentration on energy, in the form of warmth, was a key component.
As you know, in terms of the built environment infrastructure energy usage, not every community in Nunavut is connected. There are all of these isolated communities. For a secure powered heat source, they depend on diesel-generated fuel. The Qulliq Energy Corporation is the government body that maintains and delivers electricity. It maintains power generator stations in every one of the 25 communities in Nunavut. These generators go back, once again, to pre-Nunavut days.
Many of the operations and maintenance requirements are outdated and in need of replacement. Diesel is what is generating the electricity, so when you turn on your lights in your house, that electricity is coming from diesel. In terms of the idea of reducing the carbon footprint in a jurisdiction like Nunavut, the greatest impact surely has to deal with where that diesel is mainly generated, which is at the QEC level, the pure generation level.
When it comes down to the individual units, which we deal with at the Nunavut Housing Corporation, whether we deal with specific energy upgrades, components, and efficiencies to use less energy per unit, it's very important to understand where this energy is really being generated and its source is at the diesel generation point.
That said, our current approach is to try to maintain a very high-efficiency assembly for our houses. We're the public housing agency. We deliver approximately 100 new public housing units per year, and there are roughly 5,000 public housing units in the territory overall. Our emphasis on new construction has to do with a highly energy-efficient envelope, which is air tight. We maintain the R-2000 standard, in terms of blower door testing of 1.5 maximum air changes, at the time of completion, and most of our units only have 0.5 air changes per hour when we occupy them. They're all mechanically ventilated, with two layers of insulation to prevent thermal bridging.
We had our units assessed. It was a theoretical or desktop assessment of the actual building assembly through the NRCAN HOT2000 modelling program, and the assembly types that were being built in 2013 all came in at the range of 82 to 84. A score of 80 is a new home, with a high energy-efficient rating, based on the NRCAN rating scale.
Our assemblies are the same or better than back in 2013. As each year goes by, with our O and M challenges in maintaining and changing out these buildings, we try to alter the design to suit how people up here are actually working on them to make them more usable. The whole maintenance aspect, as well as the availability of materials, also affects the design.
A key line we tend to follow here is state of industry versus state of the art. What I mean by that is the availability of materials, skill sets, and technology to be applied in a remote situation has much more sustainability to it than trying something new. If it breaks down and the stock resource of that is very limited, say a single supplier or even another country as the supplier, the time lag and expertise to understand and operate are all considerations, as we try to introduce new technology.
We have to upgrade as time goes along, but our approach has been to focus mostly on state of industry and availability of products and materials versus trying out new things that have very limited backdrop in terms of their applicability.