Evidence of meeting #122 for Natural Resources in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was businesses.
A recording is available from Parliament.
11:55 a.m.
Liberal
11:55 a.m.
Liberal
Nick Whalen Liberal St. John's East, NL
Okay, great. Thank you very much.
Ms. Murray, one of the important metrics that everyone seems to use to determine whether or not their energy efficiency program is working is cost per kilowatt hour.
Does Bentall Kennedy have a target cost per kilowatt hour? Can you provide us with some examples within your organization of different programs, the relative cost per kilowatt hour and the relative benefit they might have to other businesses if they were to adopt similar measures?
11:55 a.m.
Vice-President, Sustainability, Bentall Kennedy
One thing that's important to keep in mind in terms of Bentall Kennedy's structures as compared to some of our competitors is that we manage, on behalf of multiple clients, and we're not actually building owners. We are really at the mercy of whatever our client mandates are, so we don't paint every single management initiative with the same brush.
Specifically, we have our target-setting program, which currently has roughly 70% of all of our eligible portfolio participating in this. Part of that is that we look at the normalized energy use intensity, consumption per square foot, normalized for occupancy, weather and exceptional loads.
We also have a built-in metric to measure GHG emissions intensity. We've found this to be very cost-effective for us, in that the last three-year cycle realized over 9.5 million dollars' worth of energy costs avoided, or in other terms, a 14.2% reduction in normalized energy.
We don't give away the specific details of what the—
11:55 a.m.
Liberal
Nick Whalen Liberal St. John's East, NL
On that, what would it have cost to make those savings? What was the total input cost to generate that $9.5 million in savings?
11:55 a.m.
Vice-President, Sustainability, Bentall Kennedy
I would have to go back to find the actual numbers, because there are multiple asset classes involved in that target-setting program. I'm happy to get back with those details.
11:55 a.m.
Liberal
Nick Whalen Liberal St. John's East, NL
You mentioned that green leasing was one of the activities that you're engaged in. Can you provide some examples of how your green lease program works, and how it's done energy savings in the Canadian market, if you've used it in the Canadian market, or elsewhere in the world, if you've used it elsewhere in the world only?
11:55 a.m.
Vice-President, Sustainability, Bentall Kennedy
Yes, sure thing.
In our green lease program, the recommendations put out by corporate are for all of our assets and property managers to look at things like energy, water and waste consumption, as well as even things down to green cleaning products.
It's up to the individual landlord-tenant agreement, but we certainly put forward a lot of our recommendations as opposed to mandating it, for the reasons I specified before.
Through BOMA Canada, we will be providing our green lease recommendation document to the Chinese market in the coming weeks, in terms of our global engagement. Also, through UNEP FI, we provide those types of examples to our global competitors, if you will.
11:55 a.m.
Liberal
Nick Whalen Liberal St. John's East, NL
Are you able to provide a copy of that document for the Canadian market to this committee?
11:55 a.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal James Maloney
That's perfect timing. We're going to have to stop there.
Thank you very much, everybody, for joining us today, and for providing us with very interesting and valuable evidence for our study.
We're going to suspend for a couple of minutes while we get the next witnesses online and in the room.
12:05 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal James Maloney
Welcome back. We're ready to start with our next set of witnesses.
With us in the room from Empower Me, we have Yasmin and Karim Abraham. I'm going to assume you're related in some way.
12:05 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal James Maloney
I'm very intuitive. That's why I'm the chair.
To those on video conference, I hope you can hear us and see us.
12:05 p.m.
Len Horvath Past President, British Columbia Advanced Conservation and Efficiency Association
Yes, we can.
12:05 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal James Maloney
That's good.
From British Columbia Advanced Conservation Efficiency Association, we have David Craig and Len Horvath.
Thank you, everybody, for joining us.
Each group will be given up to 10 minutes to deliver remarks, then we will open the floor to questions.
We have a PowerPoint from our video conference group, which is in English only. It will be translated subsequently. We didn't have sufficient time in advance to do that for today. We'll proceed on that basis, unless there's any objection from anybody around the table.
Seeing none, why don't we start with Empower Me.
12:05 p.m.
Karim Abraham Chief Executive Officer, Kambo Energy Group, Empower Me
Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and committee members. Thank you for inviting us to speak before you today on a topic that we share a great passion for.
My name is Karim Abraham and I'm the CEO of the Kambo Energy Group. With me is Yasmin Abraham, my sister and our senior vice-president of business development.
Before we begin our testimony today, we'd like to acknowledge the Algonquin nation whose traditional and unceded territory we are gathered upon today.
Today we'll discuss our experiences and what we've learned from designing and implementing energy efficiency programs in indigenous communities and underserved populations. We'll provide two recommendations to maximize the efficacy and equity of programs across Canadian demographics.
The Kambo Energy Group is a family-owned social enterprise that delivers turnkey energy efficiency solutions to businesses and underserved communities. Our customer groups include commercial and industrial businesses, indigenous populations, newcomers to Canada, seniors and those who live in energy poverty. We are part of the front line for reducing energy consumption in Canada. We are not policy specialists; we're not lobbyists and we're not economists. We are building scientists, marketers, engineers, software developers, construction specialists and project managers who are innovating the implementation of energy efficiency projects every single day. We have grown from four employees in 2012 to over 60 people across B.C. and Alberta today.
In the 30-plus years our family has been working in energy efficiency, we've experienced the ups and downs of the industry. Today, approximately half of our business comes from the private sector and utilities and the other half comes from funding at all levels of government, including some first nation governments. Having worked with both public and private sector stakeholders, we're in a unique position to bridge the learnings between the innovations required to stay relevant in the commercial market and the patience required for public funding that can seem to come and go without warning or communication of rationale. This is a reality that has been detrimental to Canadian energy efficiency businesses and their ability to invest and plan for the future.
We'd like to share with you our experience with public funding of energy efficiency, and highlight Empower Me, a landmark equity-based program that combats energy poverty in western Canada. Over the years we have honed our programs and services to focus on two core principles, which also serve as our recommendations to the committee. Number one, programs should be focused on implementation and performance. Number two, programs should be inclusive of all Canadians.
With respect to the focus on implementation and performance, if the goal of energy efficiency programs is to reduce energy consumption, the reduced energy consumption should be the verified deliverable. Far too often we see funding that has stringent eligibility criteria limited to activities with no requirement to report actual savings. In addition, funding programs rarely fund both assessments and implementation of measures required to achieve those savings. Assessments on their own do not reduce energy use. This fragmented approach, which separates the processes between energy assessors, engineers and contractors, leads to poor results with little accountability for the savings. We need a cohesive approach focused on accountability.
The success of our clients and the savings they achieve are a direct result of the innovation that has been created precisely between the existing siloed funding steps. Our technology spans the traditionally fragmented value chain to move seamlessly from diagnosing energy-saving opportunities to scoping solutions, providing installation quotes and business cases, managing the implementation and verifying resulting energy savings. By focusing on the goal of delivering meaningful savings for the client from the onset, innovation and accountability maximizes efficacy and drives down costs.
In B.C. first nations communities, we have seen this approach achieve energy savings of between 30% and 40% on upgraded homes. We have also seen 10% community-wide reductions year over year, with simple paybacks of four to seven years. Sadly, we have no specific funding stream from any federal organization to be able to repeat this proven approach with other communities.
12:10 p.m.
Director, Kambo Energy Group, Empower Me
Our second principle is to ensure programs are inclusive to all Canadians. In the next 18 years, Stats Canada is projecting 25% to 31% of Canada's total population will be immigrants. In 2016, 1.7 million Canadians identified themselves as indigenous. Canadian seniors now outnumber children for the first time, and by 2031, about 23% of our population will be seniors.
Today, 1.8 million Canadian families struggle with energy poverty, which I will address in detail later.
These are not small numbers. Members of each group have specific needs in how and where they access energy efficiency information and programs. Empower Me is Canada's only energy conservation and behaviour change program designed specifically for and delivered by members of underserved communities in over nine languages.
The program focuses on four often-overlooked groups: newcomers to Canada, indigenous people, seniors and families struggling in energy poverty.
Our experience shows us that members of these communities fail to access the readily available energy efficiency education and programs available to all Canadians. To ensure these Canadians are not left behind, energy efficiency programs need to be designed to address the language, trust and accessibility barriers that these communities face.
Our teams have worked with newcomer families living in uncomfortably warm homes, with astonishingly high bills, who believed they were not allowed to touch that dial on the wall. Many families we work with do not trust authority figures like utilities or governments to help in lowering their bill. Others in this group are often the target of scams and are wary of offers promising savings and other free services.
Empower Me breaks through these barriers by finding and hiring key connectors in the community, known as mentors, to deliver information back to their own networks in a trusted and accessible way. Because mentors are well known in their communities, they're invited into sacred community spaces where traditional government and utility messaging just doesn't reach.
Six years since our inception, this approach has led to hiring and training 55 individual mentors across B.C. and Alberta from under-represented and underemployed groups, many of whom have gone on to other meaningful work in our industry. Mentors have worked with over 320,000 community members and reduced greenhouse gas emissions by over 13,000 tonnes.
To ensure continuity for the communities, Empower Me has made the strategic decision to launch as a stand-alone program and seek support from a coalition of funders: local and provincial governments, utilities and private businesses. At present, Empower Me does not receive any federal funding.
I'd now like to spend a bit of time talking about energy poverty, its link to Empower Me, and the impact to Canadians.
Households are considered to be energy poor when a disproportionate amount of their income is spent on energy bills. Today, 21%, or more than 1.8 million Canadian families, struggle to pay their bills. This means falling behind on bill payments, utility cut-offs, and tough decisions about whether to keep their families warm or purchase other basic needs.
Energy poverty is distinct from poverty. More than two-thirds of families struggling to pay their utility bills would not be considered low income by Stats Canada's LICO measure. One of the easiest ways to reduce energy poverty is to improve the energy efficiency of homes. Higher consumption in energy-poor households is driven by inefficient buildings, older appliances and individual energy use behaviour. Residential rebate programs are typically not an option for struggling families, as they require a significant portion of the upgrade costs to be funded up front. Without providing effective and fully subsidized home upgrades for these families, the cycle of energy poverty and its effects will continue.
In the early 1990s, when governments began funding solutions to energy poverty, the Empower Me leadership team helped develop one of the first programs in the U.K. Since that time, in Canada, all provinces and territories, except for Saskatchewan, have implemented energy poverty programs. However, there is currently no federal approach to addressing this issue.
In 2018, Energy Efficiency Alberta supported Empower Me to design, deliver and build the province's first program to support the 300,000 Albertan families struggling to pay their utility bills. The goal was to maximize energy savings in energy-poor households and build one of the most economical, inclusive and effective solutions to addressing energy poverty, a great example of innovation required across the value chain to maximize impact.
12:15 p.m.
Director, Kambo Energy Group, Empower Me
Our family is proud to have built a business developing innovative solutions to make a real difference to our most vulnerable populations.
I hope that our testimony today has illustrated the need for energy efficiency funding to be inclusive for all Canadians and to focus on implementation and performance while providing businesses the space to innovate solutions that align with overarching goals.
12:15 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal James Maloney
Thank you.
You would have been right on time if I hadn't interrupted you. That's my fault.