Natural Resources Committee on Dec. 6th, 2018

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Good morning, everybody. Welcome to today's meeting.

We have one set of witnesses. Two individuals are joining us today. From Ecovert Corporation in Toronto, we have Jim Lord, who is the founder and principal, and Mr. Barsoum.

Welcome, gentlemen. Thank you for joining us. No pressure, but you are our very last witnesses on this study. You have to tie up all of the loose ends for us.

The format is that you will be given up to 10 minutes to make a presentation, following which you will be asked questions from around the table.

I will remind everybody that we have to stop at 11:45. We have some committee business to take care of before the second hour. We'll try to be efficient.

The floor is yours, Mr. Lord. I assume you're going to start us off.

[Jim Lord, Founding Principal, Ecovert Corporation]

Yes.

Good morning, and thank you for inviting us to appear before you. My name is Jim Lord, and with me is Ragui Barsoum. We are from Ecovert and Ecovert CX, and are the founders of those companies.

We started in 2007. We are, I think, an environmental success story. We've grown to 22 employees in three offices—Toronto, Kitchener-Waterloo and Ottawa. Our main lines of business are green building certification, with things like the LEED certification; building commissioning; and building energy audits and building energy models.

Just to give you an idea of our clients, we have both public sector and private sector clients. We have done everything from a small bank branch to a prison to hospitals to such things as nursing homes and long-term care facilities. Probably about two-thirds of our work is with new buildings, new construction, where we're able to make a significant difference in the way they operate from an energy standpoint. The other third is in existing buildings. We've so far worked on about 150 million or so square feet, which is quite a good bit of space.

We've seen a real change since 2007 in terms of going in and talking to clients building a building. I remember there was one client who said, “We have to do this green stuff, but we're not really sure if our heart is in it.” A year or so later, when we went to see the same client, they said, “Can we do rainwater harvesting? Can we put solar on our roofs?” I asked the client what had changed in the last year that made them want to do all these things. It was interesting, because in that client's case, they'd been to a couple of functions where all their fellow developers were talking about all the great things they were doing. It would go around the table, and when it got to them they would say nothing. In order to be part of that group, they were motivated to do what the others were doing. Peer pressure can be a big motivator when it comes to getting on board with things like sustainability and green buildings. Certainly, when they see the financial savings later on with operating costs and maintenance of the building, that helps.

That being said, we got a call a few months ago from a guy in Ottawa. He was like, “What is a green building? What is energy efficiency? I have no idea where you even start.” We have the big players, with the big buildings and the big portfolios, who really understand it. They have their energy people as part of their teams. Then we have the smaller and medium guys, who make up the huge percentage of the market, who have no idea what to do and how to get started. I think that's probably one of the biggest opportunities when it comes to energy savings.

There are some things that are helping us right now. We have mandatory energy benchmarking in Ontario. That is certainly getting people to look at their existing buildings and ask what's happening and how they can be better. We have also seen changes in the building code across the country and in municipalities that have helped to spur energy-efficient design of new construction. Programs like high-performance new construction and savings by design have also helped organizations get on board with the green building call to action.

Earlier you had Thomas Mueller, president of the Canada Green Building Council, present to you. He presented on the CaGBC and their report entitled “Building Solutions to Climate Change” and their road map for retrofits. Really, in that study they looked at existing buildings in Canada and how they can help towards meeting our climate change goals. They came up with four main recommendations out of there.

The first one looked at recommissioning 60% of the very large buildings and 40% of the smaller buildings. That's 25,000 to 200,000 square feet. Recommissioning helps to optimize the use of their equipment and systems. That can create significant savings in energy.

The second thing they looked at was deep retrofits in 40% of buildings over 35 years old and buildings with electric resistance heat systems, particularly in areas where the grid is less clean. They also looked at switching to low-carbon fuel sources, particularly in buildings that are over 35 years old, and at on-site renewable energy solutions.

Their challenge, as they looked at that, was building owners having the confidence that when they implemented these items they actually would get those savings. In their report, which you would have received I think a month or so ago, they put a whole bunch of recommendations as to how that could happen. With this they're talking about, in their view, about $30 billion in economic opportunity through this retrofit economy on existing buildings.

I'm going to pass it over to my colleague, Reg. He'll tell you a little bit about himself and some of the work that they're doing on commissioning.

[Ragui Barsoum, Principal, Ecovert Cx Corporation, Ecovert Corporation]

Hello. I'm Ragui Barsoum, Reg for short. I have some 30-plus years' experience in the building automation industry. I worked on computerized control systems first introduced to Canada in the 1980s. Back then computers were mainframe computer systems with punch cards.

I wanted to give you a short rundown on my opinion of things that, from my experience, are key to effective building retrofits on existing buildings. Number one, I think we need a holistic approach to equipment replacement versus the present-day habit of replacing equipment one to one, even if it's more efficient equipment. I've seen a lot of 50-year-old boilers. They're built to last, obviously, but one should not replace a 50-year-old boiler with a newer, higher efficiency one, without having a wider look at how the other components in this 50-year-old building would behave.

Particularly for buildings with 50,000 square feet plus, it's my opinion that the extra cost to have this more in-depth look would result in significant gains and I think that it's part of what the CaGBC report was talking about when it's talking about deeper retrofits.

Number two, I think we need to focus on utilizing the people who work on site. I think many people already do that. They obviously have day-to-day knowledge and can ID the weak points. They may not know the solutions, but that's an excellent starting point.

Number three, there are all sorts of products that can save energy, but many are quite complex to operate and don't lend themselves well to a harmonized building. Lack of harmonization, in my opinion, is the most common problem. That's the one I see the most.

The fourth item that I have is more of a complaint rather than a recommendation. It's that the current standard for energy benchmarking is to compare building performance based on type of occupancy, size, location and a couple of other things, but there is not a way to compare types of building systems or operating strategies. I think that's a weakness in the benchmarking system and I think it's an opportunity for future improvement.

Thank you.

[Jim Lord]

That's our presentation. We look forward to answering your questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Perfect. Thank you very much, gentlemen.

Mr. Serré, you're going to start us off.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses for your testimony today for our study. My first question would be relating to—you talked about it and we've had other witnesses here on this—the energy audits and some of the challenges. As you indicated, large businesses like Loblaws have a manager of energy efficiency and they've done quite a bit of work. They've presented here at the committee.

The CFIB was here indicating their members were struggling with getting more information. I wanted to get some specific recommendations from you on what the federal government can do to support this? Do we support a small business with incentives or do we look at more education? What are your ideas around that for the audits?

[Jim Lord]

I would say it's twofold. I think it's both of those things. It's the education piece and giving them the confidence. It might be working with organizations like the CFIB to let them know that these programs actually work. There was a municipal program where they would do a thousand dollars' worth of lighting retrofits for small users of energy and there was very low uptake in that program. People just didn't believe that the utility would come and give them a thousand dollars of free stuff. They were like “What's the hook?”, which is sort of funny. You make it free and people won't do it. Maybe if there was a bit of a cost to it, maybe they would have done it.

It's finding that balance. I think that's more at the municipal level than at a utility level, but I think supporting the utilities and coming up with these programs is probably the best way.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

You said earlier that some of the municipalities have spurred a lot of the energy efficiency. Can you give us some examples of best practices that municipalities have done? You just indicated the thousand dollars here, but are there other examples of what municipalities have done to support small businesses and the sector in general?

[Jim Lord]

I think if municipalities through their energy providers have been able to.... They've had a number of incentives. Whether lighting retrofits, chiller retrofits, pump retrofits, there is a whole bunch of different retrofits that help the small, medium and even large companies to reduce the payback on the retrofits that they're doing within their facilities. I think that has certainly helped. It has spurred suppliers to go out and sell the program on behalf of the municipalities, rather than the municipality having to put a whole bunch of money into marketing it.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

We've had Efficiency Canada present to us. One of their recommendations was building codes. In your presentation you talked about building codes and new buildings. You stated that two-thirds of your business is new buildings. I just wanted to see...because we've heard from the construction association, for example. They're very concerned that any changes to the building codes will add costs to businesses. We understand the concern.

I just wanted to get a sense from you. Should we be changing or are there recommendations to change building codes? Would that help? What are you thoughts around building codes?

[Jim Lord]

I think building codes need to continue to be the drivers of change for the people who don't want to follow the move that everybody's doing. People complain about them. When we were doing green buildings in 2007, contractors were like, “No way we can do this. No way we can divert our waste. There's no way we can have low-VOC paints. There's no way we can hit these efficiencies.” You have the same people today and they're meeting all those things, no problem. They don't need any pushing. That's just how they do business.

In a 10-year period, we've seen dramatic change as it's been adopted. There is a lot of whining at the beginning, but it's a matter of figuring out how to change and how to actually meet what the code requires. I think some training and education.... I think that money in that area might be money well spent.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

On the training and education piece, we've heard from other witnesses that there's a shortage and a need for more skilled labour in energy efficiency. Has that been your experience? Do you have any recommendations along those lines?

[Jim Lord]

Yes, it's very true. There is a shortage of skilled labour in the energy efficiency technical pieces. There's a change in the people required to run buildings and facilities. Where anybody could sort of run a building before, now they have all these different technologies there. You don't necessarily need to be a computer programmer, but you need to be very computer literate to operate these buildings.

At the same time, there's a challenge because you have new people. The young people who are coming out, they're very computer literate, but they don't understand the systems that well. For example, in a presentation we attended a couple of days ago, they were saying the cooling tower was consuming tons of water. The building operator goes, “See? On the computer screen everything's fine. We don't know what's happening”. He didn't actually go up and look at the valve or look at the cooling tower and see that the valve was actually stuck open and the computer sensor was broken.

We need a bit of the old and the new together in a training program. Maybe that's the construction association. There are groups out there who would be attuned to doing that. There may be colleges, as well.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

We've heard from.... Go ahead.

[Ragui Barsoum]

I was just going to add that from an engineering standpoint, we've seen a change required there as well, from energy modelling to being aware of new technologies. That's been a challenge as well.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

We've heard from another witness, Pierre Langlois, for example, about the clean energy side and the huge potential for us in Canada and here in Ontario for export. Do you have any experience on the export side with other countries related to clean tech?

[Jim Lord]

No, that's not really an area that we focus on.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Obviously, today, for example, this week, the first ministers are meeting. Do you have experience with some of the barriers between provinces? Is there any recommendation that you have here in Ontario, such as some barriers to expand or to grow the industry with Quebec or other provinces? Do you have any recommendations?

[Jim Lord]

We only really have an income from the construction side and construction techniques and products. We haven't really come across any barriers ourselves in what we do.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

All right. Thanks, Mr. Serré.

Mr. Falk, I understand you're going to pick it up from there.

[Ted Falk, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to our witnesses for your presentation. It was very interesting.

I want to start off by just talking a little bit about what some of the challenges or obstacles are that you face from your clients or customers when presenting them with energy-efficient solutions.

[Jim Lord]

I think for the challenges, we sort of brought this up earlier. We've been building buildings the same way for the last 150 years and now we're asking people to change the way they think, to look at it differently and to look at not oversizing equipment. We are letting them have the confidence that it will actually work and the building will function as it is.

Reg, do you have something more on the technical...?

[Ragui Barsoum]

It's also getting specialists working together to a common goal and understanding each other's points of view. When you're talking about re-cladding a building versus changing the boilers—Jim touched on it—if you're going to re-clad it or you're going to re-insulate it, you don't need to have the same size boiler. You need to go to a bit more trouble to figure out exactly what you do need and how it would work.

[Jim Lord]

It's having that confidence to put in the smaller boiler so you won't be cold in the winter.

[Ted Falk, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

Right.

Ragui, you talked about more of a holistic approach, instead of just one-off replacements of different components. Can you expand on that a little more? How important do you think that is?