Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
I will also introduce my colleague, the director general of the Office of Energy Efficiency, Ms. Carol Buckley. Depending on exactly where the questions go and what you are interested in, Carol will certainly be able to add to anything I can provide the committee.
I, too, am pleased to be here to hopefully help scope the study you're going to undertake and to give you a perspective on what we're trying to do within Natural Resources Canada. In our context, it is driven largely by what we're calling NRCan's low carbon agenda, but there is a direct correlation between low carbon and reducing the carbon emissions of buildings and the energy savings associated with doing so.
Our department's real property portfolio consists of some 222 owned buildings, 39 leased, and 47 that we are the occupants of, with PWGSC in the management role. I should stress that this 222 sounds large, but that counts everything that has a footprint. There are a lot of rural-based and regional-based storage facilities and whatnot. Our major occupancy is either office space or laboratory, and it numbers in the 25 to 26 range, depending on exactly how you count. Of that, there are 17 sites that represent 94% of NRCan's GHG emissions. So it's those 17 sites that we are most focused on.
A deck was distributed to the committee members. If you look at page 2, you will see the three themes of our NRCan low carbon initiative. Clearly, one is to reduce, using the same baseline of 2005-06 and driving to the 17% reduction by 2020. In truth, our math would take you to 19% because we recognize that weather variables and unknowns can sometimes take you down on a bit of a jagged curve, such as where you go back up in the occasional winter because of the costs associated with a cold winter. We had a steam pipe leak in one building and that cost us some energy. There are things like that, so we've targeted an additional 2% in our overall calculations.
Working with our colleagues at PWGSC, we believe that we can be a government leader in implementing state-of-the-art energy efficiency programs, and we also are using our laboratories primarily as living labs to understand and showcase the efficient practices and technologies.
Moving to slide 3, you can see how we intend to achieve the 5.7 kilotonnes that are associated with a 17% reduction. There are a number of components to that.
You've heard my colleague John McBain talk about building management plans. We use them as well, as you can imagine, and we figure that we will gain about 0.8 kilotonnes just by following the efficiency plans that are already in place in those building management plans.
There's another kilotonne associated with what we call “LoC”. That's low carbon. There are minor retrofit projects, things that we can afford to do within our existing budgetary responsibilities as a custodian department.
As you can see, the accelerated infrastructure program is our own acronym and was in fact part of the modernizing federal laboratories initiative of two and three years ago. We figure that we've gained about another 0.32 kilotonnes there.
The FBI is the big one, and you'll hear us talk more and more about the federal buildings initiative. You can see that there are almost 3.2 kilotonnes in our plans associated with the federal building initiative.
Finally, we've already gained almost a kilotonne in savings that were part of the operational and equipment improvements.
If you go to slide 4, you'll get a bit of a quick flavour using the pictures of the different kinds of initiatives. These are everything from the low-cost, no-cost measures of making sure lights are turned off at the end of the day to operational and equipment improvements. Going around in a circle from that top right perspective, you have 13 sites across Canada where we figure there's as much as $8 million worth of the federal building initiative's value that can be gained. We're not quite that far yet, but we're certainly starting down that track.
I explained the accelerated infrastructure. That deals with things like new boilers, new chillers, etc., that were built in during the modernization of federal labs.
There are some simple things that we were able to do. We found ourselves in a one-to-three ratio of printers to occupants of the building. The standard is one to eight. We are now at one to eight and, lo and behold, we've gained GHG reductions and lowered our costs. Also, we're hopefully going to get healthier people as they get up and walk.
As I said, we also have building management plans, including things like motor and pump replacements.
That kind of gives you a flavour of the different aspects that we're going after to achieve that reduction.
The whole plan is captured in that little house diagram on page 5. I won't read all of the bullet points. I think they're self-explanatory in large part. They deal with a number of components.
I'd like to highlight, too, under the second major bullet, the first check mark, “building optimization”. I'll explain a little more about that in a moment. Then I'll highlight the program, under the third major bullet point, “external funding—FBI”.
I'd like to unwrap those a little bit for the committee. I think they are opportunities that you might want to consider.
Turning to the FBI program first—I'm looking at slide 6—it's a program that was developed and administered by the Office of Energy Efficiency to improve energy performance in federal facilities. The intent is to use an energy performance contract with an energy services company. We get caught up in acronyms: EPC and ESCO are the two.
The EPC enables the private sector to finance and implement energy retrofit projects that are repaid then through the energy savings. The key here is that the EPC can actually provide the capital investment where major capital improvements are necessary to achieve the savings, as compared to that circle of activities, which I showed you a moment ago, that we can do within the department. Working together, we get the opportunity to achieve the overall savings. In a world of funding constraint, FBI provides an essential vehicle to fund capital investments for retrofits.
Moving to slide 7, I won't read it but I'll provide it as information. There's a series of FBI success stories. You can see it wanders across a number of departments and agencies within the government: RCMP, the Royal Canadian Mint, the Communications Research Centre of Industry Canada, the Canada Centre for Inland Waters down in Burlington, the National Research Council, and others.
I believe the speaking points that are associated with that slide will be made available to the committee members. You'll get more specifics of the actual numbers that are accrued in the way of savings, both in GHG reductions and dollars, in those examples.
The other area I'd like to unwrap for a moment or two is the NRCan expertise that we have in building optimization. The simplest analogy here would be the gains that you get when you take your car in and get it tuned up. Building optimization is tuning up the building.
There are a number of small, often quite small...I won't call them errors, but operational problems—the different components of the HVAC system aren't talking to each other, the lights are on, something's being heated or cooled when it turns out it's a storage room and doesn't need the same level—linking the activities of the building to the various components of the energy efficiency infrastructure.
What we've done is we've developed a diagnostic tool. You can see it named under the third bullet point, “DABO”, the diagnostic agent for building operation. That software diagnoses all of the preset conditions of all of the components of any building with a central control system on a 24-7 cycle. It works ahead of time—i.e., saying that something is going out of the zone, and you can adjust now. If you actually get yourself into a problem, it can give you advice on how to fix the problem. Then, after the fact, it can also say, in a retroactive sense, here's what happened, and here's how you can prevent it from happening again. Part of our plan as we move forward with the NRCan buildings is to install DABO in all of the buildings that have that central control system.
I should stress right at the beginning of this whole discussion around DABO that just by itself it's not sufficient. It's a great tool, but as in all cases, using a tool properly is the key. There's a training component associated with the building management itself that links with DABO, and the combination of the two can be very effective.
We figure as much as 10% to 20%, depending on the building age, the building condition, etc., can be gained. It costs about a dollar a square foot, with somewhere in the neighbourhood of a three- to five-year payback.
Our low carbon accomplishments to date have been focused largely on the creation of eight site energy teams. Energy management plans have begun for each of the 17 facilities.
Governance, we find, is an interesting challenge. If you're working in a scientific laboratory, the person running the lab, the director general or the director on site, tends to be a science-oriented person and is driving programs. Then you have a support mechanism in engineers and people who are running the building.
Getting those two to work together in terms of the overall operation of the building, so that the use of the building and the correlation to how the building's heating and cooling systems are managed, etc., is a key objective, and it has proved very successful. We've implemented a number of minor energy retrofits that we figure will give us an equivalent of about 325 tonnes of CO2 per year in our custodial buildings. That's without the FBI program.
We're also benchmarking all our buildings. You heard my colleague from PWGSC talking about the BOMA BESt system. There are four levels to BOMA BESt. We are working to upgrade all of the buildings through that system. As you can see on the slide, we've completed 9 out of 21 certifications.
John also talked about our collaboration with PWGSC to accelerate carbon reductions. That memorandum of understanding is highlighted on page 10, which indicates that we're collaborating in three primary areas.
They include the actual increased awareness of energy efficiency, engaging senior leadership, and increasing the knowledge of carbon reduction opportunities through an education and training program, etc. Benchmarking is also included in that first area because that's critical: if you can't measure it, you don't know whether you're winning or not. Also included is reducing financial and policy barriers: trying to figure out exactly what barriers are impeding the suggested actions and how we can go about solving that dilemma, and working with key federal departments on the next round of the FSDS targets. Then, finally, we have implementing specific initiatives: the building operation I was talking about, and optimization, the Workplace 2.0 that John was talking about, etc.
Our final role in Natural Resources Canada is also to move outside the federal family, so I bring to your attention on slide 11 the point that we are working to make the overall stock of buildings in the country more efficient as well. We work on the development of codes. We've led the development of a model building code, which is 25% more stringent than the previous code. Eleven provinces and territories are now adopting this code—part of a robust intergovernmental relationship—and ministers of 14 jurisdictions jointly released an energy efficiency progress report in Charlottetown in early September.
We're also very active in standards and labels. We have over 40 standards in place. We've set a minimum level of performance for motors, lights, computers, and audio equipment. It's part of the reason why you can't buy a fridge with poor energy efficiency when you go to the furniture store—because the standards are in place to prevent that.
Training is the third component: trying to make operations more efficient. Some 25,000 Canadians have taken our energy management training since 1997, with estimated savings of over $175 million across the country. Two thousand of those participants were public servants, including 400 from National Defence—the air force bases, which are putting special emphasis on training their employees.
Let me echo my colleague's statement in thanking you for the opportunity to talk about building energy efficiency. We look forward to the committee's questions.
Thank you very much.
