Thank you.
I'm going to cover five areas when it comes to energy efficiency and economic benefits: voluntary standards, zero-carbon innovation, building retrofit, capacity building of the workforce, and then a few recommendations at the end.
At the Canada Green Building Council, we believe that green buildings can help achieve Canada's greenhouse gas emission reduction commitments, and significantly improve the energy efficiency of the building sector in the Canadian economy.
Over the last up to 15 years, voluntary standards have driven energy efficiency in the building sector. You can see that voluntary systems such as the LEED rating system had significant penetration rates in the building sector; up to 30% in the institutional sector, and 22% in the commercial sector. Overall, there are currently 1.2 billion square feet of LEED projects in Canada, but 3,700 projects have been certified.
Those 3,700 projects save 12,900,000 megawatt hours of energy through energy efficiency measures. That's enough to power 435,000 homes in Canada for a year. So you can see that voluntary programs have already had a significant impact on the building sector, on energy efficiency in the building sector.
You can also see how voluntary programs also have an impact on how buildings perform at a per-square-foot level. The example here is that the average Canadian office building uses about 350 kilowatt hours per square metre per year. The average LEED building uses about 162, and there are some other buildings, which you see here, that have significantly lower and better energy performance than conventional buildings, which have been brought about through voluntary programs, like LEED and others, in the Canadian marketplace.
Not only do they improve the energy efficiency; they also create jobs and contribute to economic growth. You can see that in 2014 Canada's green building industry contributed $23 billion to the GDP, and almost 300,000 direct jobs, for people employed in constructing these buildings in Canada in 2014.
One very interesting fact is not only that the green building industry employed 297,000—or 300,000—full-time workers but also that this represents more than forestry, oil and gas, and the mining industry combined. Green building construction and renovation is a significant energy efficiency opportunity as well as an economic opportunity.
On slide 5, you can see how these jobs are distributed in Canada by sector, with construction and trades making up the largest proportion, followed by materials and manufacturing, and then professional services.
But energy efficiency measures also result in net savings. The life cycle savings from LEED-certified green buildings in Canada are significant. This is based on a number.... At the time the report was prepared, we had 2,275 certified projects in Canada, representing 24,000,000 square metres. These buildings, on an annual basis, save about half a billion dollars in energy costs. If you aggregate that over the life cycle, estimated at 33 years, it goes up to $6.8 billion dollars in energy savings that have been achieved through readily available energy efficiencies, technologies, equipment and practices.
The next innovation is what we call the zero-carbon building. Zero carbon is the new performance benchmark. In order to get a zero-carbon building, high levels of energy efficiency are required. As you saw in the previous slide, we can drive energy efficiency to very high levels, and then supply the rest of the energy in those buildings through renewable clean energy sources, such as hydro in certain areas of Canada, but also through onsite and offsite renewable energy resources. Canada is actually a global leader in this space.
It builds on the learning curve the industry has gone through with regard to LEED, and we can actually do this right now with the technology, the know-how and equipment available. This is the next phase of innovation, and it will yield significant benefits not only with carbon but also in terms of energy benefits if this is rolled out across the building sector in Canada.
I would like now to go to the second half of my presentation, just finishing off and focusing your attention on building retrofits. Fifty per cent of the building stock that exists today will still be in use by 2050, and there are significant energy savings available from this building stock, between 20% and 40%. These savings can be realized through a number of very accepted industry practices like building commissioning and recommissioning, along with the retrofits of about 60% of larger buildings in Canada.
The council has done a lot of work in this space with various federal and provincial government departments, and the focus here is really the idea of the retrofit economy; to establish a retrofit economy in Canada that would support large-scale retrofitting of larger buildings. If we retrofit about 100,000 buildings in Canada over the next 10 to 20 years, at the end of that process, we'll not only save 21 million tonnes of carbon in associated energy use, but we would save $6.2 billion in energy costs every year by the end of the process.
The federal government, including the Canadian Infrastructure Bank, plays a very important role in leveraging investment for retrofits for commercial, institutional and multi-residential buildings and can leverage funds from the private sector. The federal government also needs to play a role in building confidence in deep retrofit by providing and supporting standardized frameworks that support retrofit performance outcomes. What I mean is that, after the retrofit, we want the buildings to perform in a way that realizes the energy efficiency benefits.
There are of course, as always, a number of barriers in order to realize these benefits. You can see that there are barriers to a strong retrofit economy, but there are also solutions as shown with the investor confidence project, which represents a standardized process to assess retrofit projects and performance outcomes across the country.
The other barrier we have is really capacity. We have enough capacity already in Canada to get this started, with both LEED and zero-carbon buildings with retrofit, but we need to train our workforce to deliver at this scale. There are also new technologies and services that are not well understood, which require new skill development. We also need to scale up: we need a larger trained workforce to deliver the results. We are currently doing some work around the skills gap in Canada, and particularly in Ontario. The skills gap is a real risk for scaling up energy efficiency. For Canada to succeed in this space, the federal government must invest in a changing workforce that designs, constructs and maintains buildings, or in this case, also retrofits buildings across the country.
Our recommendations for this committee are as follows.
Continue to support existing voluntary industry standards. This could be in government-owned and -leased buildings. After all, the federal government is the largest building owner in Canada.
Support and de-risk new voluntary standards like zero carbon through incentives and through research and development, but also in the procurement of government buildings. Again, it's another opportunity for the government to lead in this space.
Create a retrofit economy by either investing in or incentivizing large building retrofits, and at the same time support the training of the construction workforce. This is a really critical link in not only realizing the energy efficiency benefits but also realizing the economic benefits. We would also encourage the government to develop a multi-year retrofit strategy for government-owned buildings. In some cases it might also be possible to encourage the private sector to retrofit buildings to meet government standards.
Thank you for your time. I'll stop here. I'm looking forward to your questions.