Thank you very much.
It's our pleasure to be here. I'm joined by Jasmine Urisk, vice-chair of Guelph Hydro Inc., and Janet Laird, our director of environmental services at the City of Guelph.
Just to give you a quick orientation with our second slide, we're a mid-sized city just 100 kilometres west of Toronto. We have 121,000 residents and we are planning to grow to 175,000 in 25 years. We've been identified as an urban growth centre in the Greater Golden Horseshoe regional growth plan.
Sustainability is one of our key principles, so we're happy to be here to talk about our community energy plans that we're working on. This started in 2004, when a consortium of private, non-profit, and public sector organizations came together to develop a community energy plan. In particular, I want to note the involvement of our utilities, Guelph Hydro and Union Gas, because that has been key to us in moving forward. Together with our consulting team, Garforth International, we developed a community energy plan that was adopted unanimously in 2007 by city council.
On the next page, just very briefly, the five goals of the plan are shown. One is to be recognized as a location of choice for investment. Second is to have a variety of reliable, competitive energy, water, and transportation services for all. Third, we set a high standard, in that we want our energy use per capita and resulting greenhouse gas emissions to be less than the current global average. Fourth, we also want to ensure that our energy and water use per capita will be less than comparable cities in Canada. The last one, which I think ties into my final slide, is that all publicly funded investments will visibly contribute to meeting the four goals of our community energy planning.
The next slide graphically shows the paradigm shift that was key in the city of Guelph and that we needed to make to get to our community energy plan. We have an energy supply system where we lose up to 90% of the energy before we even get to using it in our homes and buildings. The community energy plan is about flipping that around, getting access to that lost energy, and increasing the efficiency of the energy system.
To do that, we have a series of five priorities in our order. First is energy efficiency: if you don't need it, don't use it. Next is heat recovery. If it's already there being produced and just put out into the atmosphere, why not use it for good uses? Third is cogeneration. Why waste fuel at the power plant? Generate heat and electricity at the same time and use both of them. Fourth is renewable energy. If it makes sense, go carbon-free. Finally, we're working and teaming with our utilities to invest where it makes sense to optimize the grid and energy efficiency and use.
The next page lists our strategies. I won't go through them in detail. At the back of your package, there's even more detail on how we're achieving them. The first three speak to efficiency. Then we talk to heat recovery and district energy systems. For us, biomass and solar are the most positive in terms of renewables. Then we talk about how we organize ourselves around a multi-utility and establish some scale projects that we can link across the community. This list of strategies will look different depending on what community you are and what you have in place; it would be a mixture of these strategies and different implementation plans to achieve them.
The next two slides are here to demonstrate the cumulative contribution of these strategies to achieving our goals as a community. I put them here to show you that we looked at efficiency and renewables, but they didn't add up to get us to where we needed to go. That's where the integrated component comes in. That's where we start looking at local generation and local district energy systems in order to achieve the targets that we set for ourselves. Here, you can see the contribution both to reducing our energy consumption as a community and to reducing greenhouse gas emissions as well.
It would be wrong to think that you could pull out one of these strategies and achieve the goals. They're integrated, so each one depends on the other one in terms of being successful.
To quickly summarize this plan we're working on, after 25 years we'll use 50% less energy despite seeing a growth of 54,000 people, so there's a decoupling of energy consumption from population growth. Also, there will be 60% less greenhouse gas emissions, along with an affordable energy supply to attract new investment and reduce the city's costs.
Very briefly, in some key projects that we have, the scale projects that we're working on, there are two components that are similar in each of these projects. One is that they include an integrated energy master plan and energy zoning. The other one is that they have cogeneration and district energy as part of it, therefore speaking to the multi-utility aspect of our plan.
One is with the University of Guelph. Guelph Hydro has a partnership with the university to bring in a gas-fired turbine to provide heat to the district energy system and generate electricity at the same time. You can see that there are savings for the universities and savings in emissions. There are some other benefits here, in particular for Guelph Hydro and Hydro One, in reducing load capacity in the area.
We're also working on feasibility plans with the hospital district. That will be the anchor of a district energy system that will then move out into our downtown and will be part of our downtown redevelopment and intensification in the urban core.
Then there is the Guelph Innovation District, a 1,000-acre brownfield, which will we also work on towards an integrated energy master plan, a district energy system cogeneration. Those lands will be to leverage employment in the community.
The next slide gives you a visual illustration of what you can achieve. In the middle of the graph, you can see the cogeneration facility. That is in place. That's owned by Guelph Hydro. We are currently putting the landfill gas through this facility and generating electricity.
As for what we're working on now, we have another opportunity for an industrial anaerobic digester to add more methane gas into this facility, so we'd be increasing the productivity of this facility. At the moment we're just wasting the heat, so we're also looking at how we can capture that heat. We're in discussions with a local developer about piping that heat to a new subdivision development and using that to heat the homes. This is just a small illustration of how you can sort of plug these things together and get great benefit out of what has traditionally just been waste.
In regard to building momentum, since 2007 and approving the community energy plan, we've seen incredible momentum. We're working on 60 individual projects in the community.
Guelph Hydro has taken the lead on the feasibility studies for the scale projects. I mentioned the partnership with the University of Guelph. We've also partnered with the Ontario Centres of Excellence to take not only the plan itself but the implementation and develop a template that can be scaled to other communities and replicated in other communities. This spring, we're organizing a think tank to move our implementation forward further.
What are some of the barriers that we find?
One is that we need new processes for integrated thinking. We haven't been thinking this way. Our processes tend to be linear. We need those templates to assist other communities in terms of how to scale this.
Also, at the provincial level, some of the delays in clear rules are holding us back. The university project is being held back until we find what the clean energy standard offer price is. We need to get some clear rules in place.
At the federal level, we find that we have to de-bundle integrated projects because the funding is done in a siloed way. That's a barrier for us.
From the public and private sectors, we need new models of partnering to create and replicate this multi-utility model in our community.
For the federal roles, we see that one role is to understand that this is actually happening. There's a lot of momentum at the local level. It's real. Another is to promote a national vision of sustainable, reliable, integrated urban systems across the country.
Another one is to help contribute to that momentum through the funding that is provided, and through the policies, the program funding, the technology, and the research and development being directed towards integrated urban energy systems. Sustainable practices at the community level would certainly assist us in moving forward and maintaining that momentum at the community level.
Thank you very much.