That's a great question, thank you.
We have been pushing for insulation energy audits in federal buildings. It takes a very short time for a qualified person to go in and take a look around the mechanical room in a building like this and very quickly identify insulation deficiencies that are costing money. It's a simple matter, really. It could be a checklist that's provided to building managers to go and take a quick look at their insulation. If they see some of the red flags, they can have an expert appraiser come in and do an audit.
I have a couple of examples of audits that we've done. We did one at the London courthouse. The Ontario government gave us a building and let us go in, and we did a quick audit. It was a fairly new building but, all the same, we found mechanical insulation upgrades that would save $10,000 to $14,000 a year in that building. The cost of installing the insulation would be estimated between $6,000 and $9,000, depending on the contractor and the cost of the materials. It works out to a payback of nine months. At the same time, we reduce greenhouse gases by about 61 tonnes a year from that one building. We save a lot of money and energy.
That's one of the things the federal government could do. The tax credit is also a great idea for building owners who want to put in the small initial investment of doing an audit on their mechanical insulation and then doing some repairs and replacing of missing or damaged insulation. If there is some kind of a tax credit incentive for that, we think that would be another big step.