The Living with Lakes Centre will be the first initiative of its kind to incorporate the climate scenarios into the development and design of the building. It's also the first time we've seen the teaming of both architects and scientists. A scientific team has been appointed to oversee the development of the facility.
This year, at our local community college, Cambrian College, we're starting a new training program for young people called the energy systems technology program. We see great value in working with the educational institutions in our community to train young people in this new and emerging field. Along with this three-year energy systems technology program, they're building a new research facility called the Sustainable Energy Centre of Excellence. This will be a prototype facility, to study energy systems and showcase examples of sustainable development conservation initiatives and building products and materials, which will hopefully facilitate the generation of new business.
The next slide is about an initiative we're doing with both the elementary schools and the high schools in our community called Dearness Conservation. It's a national program that targets educating young people on the opportunities for conservation of energy, water, and waste. It is being delivered in all 94 schools in greater Sudbury. Along with the educational program with young people, we also have a training program for teachers, principals, and maintenance and custodial staff. We are educating all the people involved in that sector.
Through behavioural change, the savings a school will realize range from $2,000 to $5,000 a year for an elementary school. High schools are achieving between $10,000 and $20,000 a year in annual savings. This is through behavioural changes alone, without doing any retrofits whatsoever. And the schools are moving ahead with retrofits.
The Rainbow District School Board in greater Sudbury is building the city's first new school in 40 years, and it is the province's first green school. That school will be open in September 2007.
Another initiative we have launched within the school sector is something called the interactive home audit, which is an online web-based tool. As a homework assignment, all 27,000 students in greater Sudbury were asked to complete the interactive home audit with their parents. Through the schools, we hope to reach at least 50% of the population. As well, we're asking individuals in the community to take the interactive home audit, either online or on a paper copy, so they can look at energy conservation opportunities and initiatives that will help save them money in the home.
We were one of 41 communities to roll out the federal government's one-tonne challenge program. Our focus with that initiative was threefold: we engaged individuals, we had a youth initiative, and then we had a corporate challenge. That work was a very nice lead-in for our community to our most current campaign, which is called Efficient Sudbury. You'll see samples of some of the materials of the campaign there.
Our Efficient Sudbury initiative is a retail-consumer community conservation program. It's the only one of its kind being delivered in Canada. Our goal is to educate both retailers and the public about the benefits of premium energy efficiency products and services in the community, such as Energy Star. Our goal is to transform the marketplace to better support these products and services and to educate the public about the cost savings and benefits to choosing Energy Star. We want to remove any barriers that might exist from lack of knowledge of Energy Star. We want to educate the public on conservation opportunities, both through procurement and purchasing habits, and within the home as well.
As part of this campaign, on the retail side of things, we started with a comprehensive series of train-the-trainer workshops for both store owners and managers and front-line retail staff. We've also developed a comprehensive in-store marketing campaign. I have some copies of these materials here today, if any of you are interested.
The other aspect of the campaign, in terms of reaching consumers, involves a comprehensive public education outreach initiative. We started the initiative with presentations to our neighbourhood groups and community action networks in greater Sudbury, and we launched a library loan program for energy monitoring devices for home owners—a power cost monitor and a watt meter reader. We've also started a door-to-door campaign, where we are going to residences in the community, targeting both single family dwellings and low-income housing, where tenants pay their own utilities; and we're working with some first nation communities as well. We're also talking to people about the interactive home audit, our Efficient Sudbury campaign, and what to look for in the marketplace.
What's unique about this initiative is that we've successfully engaged nearly all retailers in greater Sudbury. So we have over 50 involved in the program, ranging from hardware and building stores to home electronics and appliance stores, grocery stores, and general retail stores. So the public will start to see this information and these messages throughout the community. So we've created a brand identity around this. We're trying to remove the barriers relating to the lack of knowledge, the inconsistency in information, throughout the community. There are many large companies, such as Home Depot and Home Hardware, with their own campaigns—equal options, EcoLogo, and what have you. We're really trying to create one uniform message and to engage the public and consumers in making wiser choices when they're in the market for new appliances, new electronics, or even something as simple as a compact fluorescent light bulb.
The last thing I wanted to mention is something called a regional centre of expertise. The years 2005 to 2014 are the United Nations decade of education for sustainable development. Sudbury was invited by Charles Hopkins, a United Nations University chair who operates out of the York University Centre for Applied Sustainability, to apply for this designation. We were actually approved early this year, in 2007. So Sudbury will be one of 35 regional centres of expertise worldwide. There are only four in North America, the other ones being Regina, Saskatchewan; Toronto; Grand Rapids, Michigan; and of course greater Sudbury now.
The regional centres of expertise are essentially a network of organizations whose objective is to use education as a means to promote sustainable development—and this is in all forums and at all levels of education, from formal to informal and non-formal, using transformative education. We're doing this by establishing a network within our community to really mobilize the groups who are already doing positive work in our community. We have essentially developed some guidelines on how we can move forward and plan for creating a more formal process to ensure that anything we do with respect to education and any other initiative in our community incorporates the principles of sustainable development. We are actually moving ahead with this initiative, with an official launch in May 2007.
What I'd like to say about the lessons learned in our community is that our local action plan, or our sustainable community plan, took an incredible investment of time to develop, as did securing partnerships in our community. But that has been a very valuable exercise for us, because now that we're at the implementation stage, we have a constituency of very informed and very engaged partners and supporters in the community. And that network of partners continues to grow; we now have over 100 organizations involved in this initiative in greater Sudbury.
We engage these groups of individuals one at a time. We met with them individually and developed rapport and respect with them, and now we continue to move forward and are implementing programs in our community because of that. We're doing this one step at a time.
That wraps up my presentation. I'd like to thank you for your time and this opportunity.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.