Okay.
The second one I wanted to bring up was commissioning. Commissioning—or for existing buildings, it's called recommissioning—means going in and making sure the building is operating properly. Just to show you that I'm showing all our shame here and not just plugging all our good stuff, on the graph that's up there, the green line was perfection for our predicted energy performance for the building, and the red line was tolerable. We expected the energy performance of our building to be somewhere between the green and red lines, and the little dots are monthly performance.
We moved in in November of 2009 and then—again the squares are our monitored energy use—you can see for the first five or six months there, we were tracking the red line. Truth be told, we were bad and we didn't get our building fully commissioned before we moved into it, but being the good energy consultants we are, we eventually got around to it, and you can see that by the summer the energy numbers were matching the green, and then further on, you can see we have been nicely matching the green for the last 10 months or so.
The next slide shows the interesting thing on this, that if you take our energy use in November 2009 and compare it to November 2011—same building, same people, nothing had changed, but we commissioned the building—there was a 25% reduction in energy use, just from making sure everything in the building was working properly. The moral here is that buildings are extremely complicated, and you have to invest the time to make sure they're working properly.
The third recommendation really follows from the previous one. You manage what you measure. It's very important to be tracking energy use and, just as I showed on the last graph, track your energy use, compare it to energy predictions that were made, and see how you're doing. If you start to see some deviation, something is probably wrong. Go in and correct it.
The fourth one is about making energy performance part of all contracts. Some of the interesting projects we're working on now are what are called P3 projects, public-private partnerships, and I know the federal government is doing some of those. Some other provinces are doing them with much greater zeal, if you like, but the interesting thing on a public-private partnership is, at least in some of the versions of them, that it goes to the private sector to design, build, and operate the building. And the argument goes, well, private sector, if you're designing, building, and operating it, shouldn't you be responsible for the energy performance of the building? And if you are, shouldn't you then guarantee it?
So there are a number of contracts now where that is in fact the case. As part of your bid to build the project, you say, “Yes, we will build and operate it, and here's our price, and by the way, we're guaranteeing the energy bill will be under this number.” If it's not, basically, the person who designed, built, and operated it has to pony up. That's the pain share.
On the other hand, if the energy use comes in under, because it was operated efficiently or whatever, that's then a gain share. I can tell you from being on the proponent side of actually doing it, it sure focuses the attention of the design, the construction, and the operation team to get a really good performing building. So I think it's a model worth looking at.
Not all firms are created equal. Some firms are very good at energy efficiency, and frankly some of them aren't, so make sure when you're hiring firms, again be it for new buildings or existing buildings, that there's a proven track record of performance. I think there's a real value here in having an independent person, someone whose sole focus is looking at the energy performance of the building. It's not an additional role; it's not like they're the architect or they're the mechanical engineer. They're looking at the energy performance, and that's their sole function. I think there's even an argument to say maybe that person is hired directly by the federal government as a peer review or watchdog—if you wanted to use that—of the work to make sure it's being done properly.
Then my last recommendation is something that has been in Europe for a number of years, which is labelled the energy performance of buildings. The graph you see, the picture, is what is being produced by ASHRAE, the heating and refrigeration engineers. This is what they are proposing. We put energy labels on just about everything else: dishwashers, cars, computers, and so on. We just happen to leave off the largest single energy-using devices that we have, which are buildings. I don't understand that. I think by putting the energy performance label on the building, having it prominently displayed as it is when you buy a new car, when tenants go to rent space in that building, they can see what the energy use is. There's nothing like a game of one-upmanship—my building is a better energy performer than yours—to get people motivated to make more energy-efficient buildings.
So those are my five recommendations, and I thank you for your attention.