Natural Resources committee  Can I add one last comment to that? When you study how these systems grow, you get these opportunities like windmills in Victoria or Southeast False Creek in Vancouver. But if you study how they grow, you see that most of the growth occurs at the edges of an established utility

Natural Resources committee  There is a very fine nuance, in our opinion, to the difference between risk and cost-benefit. We have a very professional financial manager in the city, and he said that we had to make a utility-grade return on investment. We made these investments. The system is going to cost th

Natural Resources committee  For us, there is a small incremental cost to the actual green building approach. Within the utility itself there's an incremental cost up front, but it doesn't get borne out in the unit price, right? We recover the cost of the utility through the rates we charge, but that is a

Natural Resources committee  I want to address the comments on both the longevity and the risk. The biggest investment in most of a district energy system is the pipe in the ground. Again, I wanted to stress in my presentation that it's the backbone. It's the biggest capital cost, and it is really the thin

Natural Resources committee  On codification, whether you're doing it in local government or provincial government, or if there are federal tools, it is really important but it's not the first step. The first step is really fostering the leadership. We can invest extra in our own facilities because we recove

Natural Resources committee  Exactly.

Natural Resources committee  No. The fact that we didn't choose to go with what we call the Vancouver model, which when you look at the north shore of False Creek is the podium development with a point tower, was a decision made by the council at the time to actually create a more distinct neighbourhood with

Natural Resources committee  Thank you very much. I'd like to introduce Penny Ballem, our city manager. She'll do some introductory remarks before I move into the body of the presentation.

Natural Resources committee  I'm going to move fairly quickly. We're going to focus mostly on the Southeast False Creek development, which is the home of the Olympic Village, to illustrate how we're doing integrated energy planning and deploying those systems. I'll talk a little bit about what we see as the