That was part of our design in doing this.
Thank you. I appreciate being here today. As introduced, Geoff Munro is my name and Carol Buckley is my colleague. Carol is the director general of our Office of Energy Efficiency. I thought I'd start very quickly with a couple of context statements, because they certainly drive the way we work. I believe they will be of both interest and use to the committee.
From an NRCan perspective, we operate in three domains of energy efficiency. The first is our own home departmental responsibilities. We are a science-based and program-based department, so we utilize the knowledge that we gain on behalf of all Canadians in the energy efficiency agenda of our own buildings and run what we call a low-carbon program to implement that responsibility.
Second, we also work very closely with our colleagues in PWGSC. You've heard us speak when we were here together on the memorandum of understanding we have with PWGSC. We try to make our tools, knowledge, and programs available to all federal departments in carrying out their own responsibilities under the FSDS.
Finally, we also have a mandate to work in the commercial world. We try our best to make our tools and programs available to the commercial world, thereby improving energy efficiency in buildings across the country. So that's the broad context of how we work.
The International Energy Agency is a group that most modern western-style countries work with in improving energy efficiency. Half of the goal of being energy self-sufficient in North America is driven by the potential for energy efficiency. Clearly, energy efficiency is as important as going to renewables. We try to find energy efficient and environmentally efficient ways of dealing with fossil fuels.
What has energy efficiency brought us in the last 20 years? We have avoided some $32 billion in energy costs, which is 93 megatonnes in GHG emissions. Energy efficiency is no small item, and I certainly understand why it's of interest to the committee.
Let me try to describe NRCan's approach. We deal with things in three big categories: our own operations; the research, development, and demonstration activities we do; and the retrofit, which is mainly the federal buildings initiative. Carol will speak to this in just a moment.
A big part of our operations has to do with training. We undertake a number of training courses. We trained 430 federal employees just this year, and there's a long history of our training programs being utilized in the federal family.
We also work towards building optimization. We've developed software to monitor building performance. It is useful in analyzing proposed solutions and helps a building manager articulate where those building solutions might come from. We've had successes of anywhere from 5% to 20% of energy savings in those kinds of projects.
We have online benchmarking tools that allow comparisons with similar buildings. If you're building a lab, a hospital, or a conventional office building, not all of the parameters are going to be the same. It is important to be able to articulate how your proposed hospital or office building stacks up against the standard.
We also develop and use decision-making tools. RETScreen is probably the most well known project-analysis software we have, and it is used worldwide.
The second major area is our research, development, and demonstration agenda. This is probably the subject of another whole committee or committee review, so I'll just highlight it and be happy to answer any questions that you may have. But clearly, NRCan, in Canada certainly, is the largest R and D organization in terms of the whole question of building technologies from an energy efficiency perspective. You can see the list on the second major bullet: lighting; building design; heating and cooling; and various technologies and controls that are expected to decrease building energy consumption.
There are a number of innovations, for example, CO2 refrigeration systems that eliminate the need for synthetic refrigerants, and even just using the waste heat of pumps that pump the cooling material, and using that in other aspects of the same facility. You may know that CoolSolution was the technology that we used in the Vancouver Olympics on every ice sheet: curling, hockey, skating, the works. It was all based on this kind of technology, driving the energy efficiency up and the energy use down.
As to customized research agreements with federal departments, John talked about the collaboration with other departments. We too work closely with them. The two examples in front of you there are National Defence and Environment Canada.
With National Defence, our focus has been more on their mobile camp approach. This one translates right into saving soldiers' lives, because in that case we have a fairly large contingent for defending the movement of diesel fuel. If you can move less diesel fuel then you need less soldiers to protect it, and you literally save lives with an energy efficiency agenda.
With Environment Canada, we're helping them look at the retrofit of their own buildings, as they too head down the energy efficiency path under the auspices of the FSDS targets.
Let me at this point turn it over to the retrofit subject, and Carol will take over here. This is the subject of the federal buildings initiative, primarily. There are a couple of other aspects to it, but I'll turn it over to Carol at this point.