Natural Resources committee  Thank you. The private sector represents about 10% of the work we do. One of the more high-profile buildings recently was the Empire State Building, done by Johnson Controls and using a performance contract. It was heavily monitored, so there is a great deal of data available on

Natural Resources committee  Yes. Thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity to come and speak to you. My name is Peter Love and I'm the president of the Energy Services Association of Canada. J.P. Finet is the vice-president responsible for our Quebec office. I will make some comments in English.

Government Operations committee  On the greenhouse gas emissions, we have better connections to the U.S. So to the extent that B.C. can save electricity, they can ship more into the U.S., where it's displacing coal. Especially in Manitoba, it's a huge economic driver for Manitoba Hydro. They have among the best

Government Operations committee  It's good that a target is out there. I don't think it has percolated down to the rank and file. It's there and it's commendable, but the phone at the federal buildings initiative is not ringing off the hook on how to sign up. 2020 is far enough away. They have all sorts of issue

Government Operations committee  I've looked at that too.

Government Operations committee  Yes. I've looked at it to try to correlate it to economic trends. I've looked at it in terms of political leadership. I can't discern a very good correlation. The best I can come up with is that it's an idea that caught on very early. It was new and exciting, and it was success

Government Operations committee  I think you want some analysis before arbitrarily saying those numbers. It wouldn't be very hard to look at that existing building stock and say, “Here are the ones that really should be done, and it is feasible to do it over the next five years.” I'd be reluctant to set a arbitr

Government Operations committee  I agree with that. I think it's probably best if you do the targets and goals by department. Again, no one is responsible for an overall government goal, or those who are responsible are so high up. I would encourage you to be...and maybe even get down to a particular building.

Government Operations committee  It's a bit of a complicated question, but natural gas right now is very inexpensive at $3.50 per million BTU. It was $10. In Europe it's $12, and in Japan it's $16. So we have huge price variations, and right now it is at a low price. So for someone building a new natural gas pla

Government Operations committee  I'll start. The major barrier I see to that is what's called an agency problem, where you have somebody, or one institution, responsible for capital expenditures and another, maybe in the same department but a different part of the ministry, who is responsible for operating cost

Government Operations committee  Yes. I'm quite involved here in Toronto, as are the other people on the panel, with an initiative called the race to reduce. It's a voluntary program to reduce energy consumption in office buildings in downtown Toronto by 10% by 2014. We've decided to adopt a metric that's been b

Government Operations committee  Good question. Yes we do, and it's provincially-based. When we do a project in B.C., we're looking at the cost of electricity and natural gas, so when they do a payback calculation for B.C., it's based on B.C. numbers. Typically though, these reports have focused on the financia

Government Operations committee  That was documented by the Clinton Foundation, and there's quite a lot of research and reports on that. As I said, NRCan is just in the process of taking this on in more detail. I would expect a study to be available later this year, so I will share with the committee a presenta

Government Operations committee  There are both direct and indirect effects. There's direct employment and then, because those people have jobs, their kids go to school, and they buy groceries, so there's indirect employment. There's also an issue with net employment. What happens is that, if you save energy,

Government Operations committee  That's a good question. I don't have the answer, but I think it would be a very useful piece of work. NRCan may have begun to do this—albeit I haven't seen it—to rank the buildings in Canada, as you say. Presumably, they started with the low-hanging fruit, probably mostly in Otta