Thanks.
I applaud the committee for taking on any right approach energy systems, because it isn't easy, and it's worthy of note. It's not just about one solution, or one technology. It's about integrating many technologies and many solutions from the point of a single home, to a large condominium community, to a new development, to a new community, to all our existing buildings. How do we integrate that all together? It's a pretty big challenge. I think we're pretty fortunate today to be here with you, because we can share some of our examples. We've integrated all of that together. We've looked at it together. We see a lot of barriers out there in the system, but we see a lot of opportunity.
One of the big things we've seen as an organization is that we lead by example. We live what we preach, what we build and what we deliver to our consumers. That's a pretty big example, and that's a big message I'd like to leave for this committee, that you need to lead by example.
We don't find that there's any one idea that's no good. Little ideas can magnify into huge ideas. Take a simple thing like two-sided photocopying, which is a pretty straightforward and simple thing. You have a two-sided newspaper, so why can't you have it on paper? Just by doing that, we saved $50 per employee. By looking at the conservation of natural resources, we can see that there's a bigger play at energy savings, cost savings, overall productivity and efficiency. There are a lot of little things we can do to make big ideas work. Integrating all of that together is a huge challenge, but we can do it.
Look at what we've done historically. We have projects that have moved on from a condominium size that started at 22% energy savings, and we've climbed up to 40% energy savings. We can do this as a developer because it makes sense. We have the financial economics to do it. Forty percent isn't enough; we need to go beyond that. We've looked at innovations from eight years ago, where we had an all-off switch that turned lights off simply at the front door. How much easier is it than just pushing a button and having all the lights go off in your apartment unit? These are very simple things. We do that right across the board in every home that we sell, every condo that we sell, empowering our residents to actually themselves conserve.
This all came from an integrated approach, putting everyone who's involved in the design of a building in a room together, and asking how we can do better. The brilliance that can come out of people is amazing. When you put your heads together, you'll come up with ideas, and some of those have really good economic return.
Some don't have really good economic return, like a distributed energy system. We experimented with one in 1998, 1999. It was very expensive to implement, very expensive to put together. The results were brilliant. We could get really good output from it, but it's a matter of getting that cost down and getting it out there in the public so we can use it more often. So it's really a challenge for us.
We can innovate as far as we can. We've looked at doing better fresh-air systems for condominiums; we've looked at using rainwater, stuff that falls free out of the sky, as water for irrigation, water for toilets—really simple things. There are massive regulatory barriers around doing that. Nonetheless, we can still put it together and make it work. We found great success in that.
We've taken that same approach to our existing portfolio. What can we learn, what can we integrate into our existing buildings to make them more effective? Frankly, that's where our challenge is. It's not the new stuff that's coming out; it's already regulated quite well. We really have to look at our existing building stock and ask how we can make our existing building stock more energy efficient, more natural resource conservation-oriented.
We created a number of years ago something called a comprehensive natural resource management plan—a focused effort on all of our buildings to see how we could reduce our environmental footprint, how we could reduce our carbon footprint. It gave us some return, and we're getting there, to that 40% mark again, but we seem to be cut off at 40%. We need to get beyond that. We need to innovate beyond that. I think Glen hit it beautifully when he said had we thought 20 years ago about a development in a community we were building, we would have had the opportunity at that point in time to put in the right systems and infrastructure to make sure we could have an almost net-zero community.
We started in our single-family home side last year by building a net-zero home out in Manotick, just south of here, which I invite any of you to come out and see at any time. It's open all weekend long. It generates as much energy as it consumes. It's all renewable energy, very simple to use, very simple to see. You can touch it, you can feel it. It's darned expensive, but it works really well, and it's really the future of single-family home construction, as far as we can tell.
It's working really well for us. We started integrating our single-family homes, our community design, our existing buildings. Overall, we've seen 20,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases reduced, and we see that as being just the start, the tip of the iceberg.
We need to work harder at changing what our culture is like, changing where we're going, and reducing the barriers.
I'll let Greg close out from there.