Coming back to that, if you take that model going forward, you understand the natural environment. You can do different things in Montreal or Toronto. You obviously couldn't do deep lake cooling in Edmonton, but its unique geography, the unique resource space, the population growth rates, the nature of what the industry is in a community, and the configuration of the built form--how you co-locate where people live compared to where they work--are the things that really allow you to reduce demand and to derive more efficient supply.
If you look at what Calgary has now that most other major municipalities in Canada don't have, Calgary has the most cost-effective and appropriate technology fit for suburban low-density communities. They have the right kind of technology solutions, solutions that they know are going to work for their downtown, and for their airport they've configured a whole other range of existing, already commercially viable, deployed technologies. It allows you to accelerate that.
They're also not just looking at the cost side. Because they're using it and embedding it in their official plan and working with the Government of Alberta to do that, they're actually understanding that you allow more intense, higher-quality development and that you can actually identify greater opportunities for introducing technology in a way that maximizes jobs and investment and drives economic value, so that you're actually building the tax base of the municipality rather than doing it by building the tax burden. I think it was about a $17 billion cost, but the savings annually are $1.5 billion, so the payback is about eight years.
That is not counting any benefit. There's no return on investment counted in that. That's just simply on one side of the ledger, the actual cost savings operationally from capital.
We're now looking at doing this smartly and doing it in a way that clusters commercial activity in the way they did in Markham, Ontario, where IBM doubled its presence because of energy resiliency. You can start to use this as an incentive to cluster and to strengthen economic investment in business clusters and new business clusters in communities if you integrate it into your economic development policy.
We think the federal government, if it spent smart, would be able to support smart growth, and that if it respected provincial and municipal jurisdictions and played the role that it should play nationally, it could be a very effective player in this transformation economically, environmentally, and socially.
Thank you.