Thank you.
Good afternoon. My name is Mark Schembri. I head up technical services and store maintenance for Loblaw Companies.
ln my role, I oversee electricity, waste and refrigeration operations within our stores. I'm a member of our company's carbon steering committee and my team focuses a great deal of its efforts on reducing electricity consumption and reducing our carbon footprint.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today. I hope you'll find what we've been doing of interest.
First off, I'll tell you a bit about Loblaw. Loblaw is Canada's largest food and pharmacy retailer. We employ over 200,000 Canadians in our corporate and independently operated stores across the country.
We are a multi-banner format. We trade under such names as Real Canadian Superstore, No Frills, Provigo, Maxi and Shoppers Drug Mart.
Loblaw occupies over 90 million square feet of retail space across the country, with over 2,500 retail stores. Due to our size, the scale of our footprint and emissions is significant and my group focuses on improving that.
In terms of our energy profile, as a business that sells and stores perishable products as its core function, we rely heavily on refrigeration equipment. The operation of our refrigeration equipment constitutes about 50% of our total electricity consumption. Loblaw's national electricity consumption is about three terawatt hours. This represents half of one-tenth of all the electricity generated in Canada. Our annual electricity bill is greater than $300 million a year.
In 2011, we established our baseline carbon footprint. Then in 2016, we worked to establish targets on reducing that footprint. We have set public targets of a 20% reduction by 2020 and a 30% reduction by 2030. In 2011, 50% of our carbon footprint was attributed to the electricity that we consume in our stores.
In terms of big data, we have been installing digital interval meters in our stores in various regions across the country. These meters allow us to track and benchmark electricity consumption on an hourly basis in real time. We've implemented key performance indicators that enunciate utility consumption variances to our business. When these issues are identified, we dispatch our control technicians to investigate and repair the issues in our stores.
We have been investing in energy efficiency. In the area of lighting, the retail lighting business is going through a transformation. We are moving from filament arc and gas lamp platforms to digital ones. lt's a very exciting time to be in the lighting business and we've been very actively converting our stores. We started with our refrigerated case lighting, followed by our exterior parking lot lighting, store ambient lighting and task lighting.
Another area we are focusing on is converting our open refrigerated cases to closed-door cases. We support a retail business with an extensive focus on perishable food. Our merchants' first instinct in putting a barrier between our customers and the product is that it would be an impediment to sales. This, thankfully, is an emotional debate that we are finally starting to win. The reality of it is that putting doors on our refrigerated cases has a substantial environmental and energy benefit. We've been very active in this space. We've converted our open frozen cases to doors. We are in the final stages of converting our dairy cases to doors and we remain active in this area.
On building energy management, we've been installing energy management systems in our stores for decades. We have over 50,000 active sensors pushing real-time temperature readings to a Loblaw control call centre. We can remotely monitor and change set points associated with our store lighting, HVAC and refrigeration through our national maintenance help desk. As these control strategies and systems became more complex, we recognized as a business the need to make supermarket energy management a core competency of our business. We developed refrigeration technicians who were already employed by Loblaws and developed their expertise in the area of controls throughout the country. These individuals ensure our control systems are optimized and operating consistently to drive the most efficient operation in our stores.
Our in-house controls experts and remote monitoring capabilities allowed us to launch in 2017 a nationwide recommissioning program in our stores' building energy management systems. We leveraged our own people and third party contractors to survey every store in the network and recalibrate the control system set points within the stores and make modifications and identify issues where we need to upgrade.
In the area of demand response, we are actively working with a number of electricity utilities across the country. We have installed systems that allow us to instantaneously reduce lighting and HVAC loads in multiple facilities. We work with utilities to reduce our electricity demand during system peak periods, and many of the utilities are advancing in this area.
In the area of renewable energy, we have installed over 70,000 photovoltaic panels on the roofs of our stores and warehouses. We continue to work in various regions throughout the country to investigate opportunities to advance renewable energy initiatives.
In the area of electrical vehicles, we believe that electrification of the transportation sector is coming. We recently hosted the installation of 10 level 3 EV charging stations in British Columbia. These chargers will have a place in the future. They are fast chargers and they are surprisingly electricity intensive. As these expansions and rollouts begin, we think it's very important that the system operators understand the electrical intensity of these charging stations, and that they look towards controlling them to ensure they do not become an impediment on the entire electricity system.
We are seeing the benefits. Since 2011, which was our baseline year, we have recognized 26 quarters of year-over-year electricity intensity reductions. We have reduced our absolute electricity consumption for our network of corporate stores by 21%, which translates to about 400 gigawatt hours.
What's next? We continue to work with our merchants on the adoption of refrigerated doors on cases. We're very hopeful that all of our refrigerated product will ultimately be stored at retail stores behind doors.
In the area of machine learning and the Internet of things, the next steps in the evolution of building energy management control systems, in our opinion, are to leverage variables from the external environment to recognize patterns with respect to energy consumption to control energy-consuming devices. Variables such as power demand, electricity pricing and temperature could be applied and improved upon on an ongoing basis. These tools can then modify and adjust equipment operation to balance energy consumption over the entire day. The machine learning can also take advantage of opportunities in the external environment variables, such as low electricity prices, system demand and low ambient temperatures.
These systems would trigger equipment to consume energy during more opportune times and remain idle when the electricity demand is high. This could be done in the area of cooling and heating.
We are actively testing energy storage initiatives. We have a store that has installed the lithium ion battery system, and we are working with an organization that is developing a thermal storage application, which we're very excited about putting into our stores.
In conclusion, seldom can we identify initiatives where we believe everyone benefits. Investment in energy efficiency generates high-skilled jobs, has a positive impact on the environment and reduces utility costs. If the utilities manage these resources properly, they will improve the effectiveness of the utility systems throughout the country.
Thank you for your time. I would be happy to take any questions, if and when it's appropriate.