I'm sorry. I'll make sure it's supplied to the committee afterwards, and I'll just speak to this.
I'll give you a little more definition to how an integrated community system would work. We're talking about maximizing energy efficiency in the construction of the buildings themselves, as well as in the practice of energy use within the building and all of the technologies deployed within a building. So it's maximizing efficiency, and maximizing the use of renewable energy as well in order to minimize the energy demand, whether it's solar, hot water, or domestic ground source heat pumps or other renewables. These often have a significant cost premium, but that premium can be mitigated by bulk purchases and bulk installations, which would happen when you're dealing at the community level.
We're also looking at district heating systems, so not just supplying heat to one entity but supplying heat to a whole pool of entities from one centralized, right-sized heat provision combustion device. Finally, we're looking at the transit and the land use of a community, and maximizing the density and ensuring that it's zoned for multiple uses.
That really gives a bit of a picture of what an integrated community would look like with respect to its energy use, and the end result would be savings as far as the emissions are concerned, and savings, too, for those who are paying for energy and using it in those instances.
I'd like to give you a couple of examples of Canadian integrated communities with respect to energy. There is one near Edmonton, Alberta, called Emerald Hills, and it has 1,600 residential units--there is retail, there is a health care/medical complex, a nursing home, and some mixed-use buildings. So it's higher density and a greater mix of building types than most communities, and they are going to have a community energy system to supply the heat for the entire community.
Another development that is developer-led is Dockside Green in Victoria. It's a brownfield redevelopment right in downtown Victoria on the harbour. It's residential condominium units, as well as multi-family buildings, with heat generated through a biomass gasification system and waste water and brown water treatment to reuse the water.
A third example comes from Alberta and the town of Okotoks, and this is called the Drake Landing solar community. This is a very small project that only involves 52 single family homes, but it's really quite special in that it's first in the world in using a technology that stores sunlight collected in solar heaters on the garages of the subdivision; it stores the heat energy underground, and then that is used to take care of 90% of the heating needs of this small community throughout the year. We've been running this one for over a year now, and John Marrone, my colleague here, can tell you more about it. But it's running above expectations. It's currently supplying 100% of the heating needs from the sun. The community is integrated, in that the homes are built super energy efficient to begin with--they're R-2000 homes. So that's another example of integrated energy use in a community setting.
The type of situation I'm describing is admirable for cost and energy and emission savings. Why don't we see more of these, and why do I have to spend five minutes here defining what I mean when I talk about an integrated community with respect to its energy use? The reason this is fairly rare--we can come up with a dozen or more examples across Canada--is this is exactly the opposite of the status quo in the way energy use is designed and the way energy is actually used in communities.
When I was referring earlier to all the individual decisions that entities make, an integrated community energy plan requires the integration of a large number of individuals, and that's very hard to put together. There's low awareness of the savings and of the potential from the energy or environmental or waste or other perspectives, and there is a quagmire of rules and policies and codes that actually prevents this kind of activity. I'll just give you a couple of examples.
Many planning regulations support low-density building, and even penalize redevelopment in the core of cities, which makes it more expensive to do an integrated community project. In some provinces and some jurisdictions, the local utility companies are forbidden from being part of an energy production facility, which limits their participation as a partner and potential financer to this kind of work.
What we at Natural Resources Canada are doing is contributing from a couple of different perspectives. We do research and development on the technologies that would support an integrated community, for instance, the biogas system I just mentioned, which had input from Natural Resources Canada, and solar storage and many other technologies.
We also support an integrated community approach through a policy framework. Kevin Lee, who is here, is leading a federal-provincial-territorial exercise to develop a road map for those jurisdictions to identify the policies and programs that would support an integrated community fashion of work. Kevin is also leading on developing across the Government of Canada, 12 departments, a standard way to measure energy use at the community level. It's not as simple as measuring the energy used in a building because you're moving across a lot of different mixed uses. In addition, we demonstrate technologies as well as practices.
The final thing I'd like to say before I run out of time here is that we look forward, at Natural Resources Canada, to continuing to support the thinking around integrated community solutions through, probably, the three planks that I've just described—through policy support, through R and D support, and also through the programs that we deliver on energy efficiency and renewable energy. We will, through our work on the road map, determine what areas are in the most need and continue our thinking about how to address the barriers of lack of awareness, lack of attention, and lack of tools, and see where we can be most useful.
I'm speaking to you today from really a pre-program development perspective, where we're thinking about the issue and trying to understand the challenges and opportunities. I welcome your questions.