On page 7 are examples of some of the municipalities that have taken on a leadership role and have either developed sustainable and community energy plans or engaged in district energy mapping or looked at including municipal building standards into their legislation and into their communities.
Slide 8 is basically an illustration of how B.C. Hydro views a sustainable community and what the benefits are to B.C. Hydro. Across this picture you'll see some terminology.
Technology innovation in a sustainable community can help B.C. Hydro create what we call a smart grid, which is basically a grid by means of which we can send communications along the wires to say “We need you to shut down your appliance” or “We're having a crisis on the grid because of a load or a circuit failure and we're going to take power from your plug-in hybrid vehicle”. Those are all in the future—the smart grid is potentially 10 to 20 years out—but these are things we need to start to think about now when we're planning these communities.
From a green buildings perspective, we get the demand-side savings. If it's a green building, it uses less energy.
From a district energy perspective, it can help offload from both heating and cooling standpoints and again use less energy; it's more efficient.
From a distributed generation point of view, it helps customers come up with solutions that are best fit for them and in some cases can add additional revenue streams to either their municipality or their industrial base or their industry.
Sustainable transportation is talking about the plug-in electric vehicles that basically can plug into the house. Hydro, in a future state, could call on that energy if it needed it because of some system crisis or constraint; it's fairly futuristic.