Government Operations committee  Yes, those clients are gone. They'll be gone. When this plant goes in, you're going to lose 16 customers, and that's just off that line. That's 16 buildings.

Government Operations committee  We're going to lose on it because whenever you go to a smaller system, it becomes less efficient. The larger the system, the more computer control we have on combustion, on NOx emissions, the whole bit. We have more control in a big, computerized central heating plant than we do

Government Operations committee  A hot-water system in the right conditions works really well. There are different ways. The thing about saving energy is that you'd have to attack it from all sides. If you went to heat pump chillers, let's say, we have some at Les Terrasses de la Chaudière that have operated for

Government Operations committee  Zero. I guess they were all waiting for this big saviour. The ESAP has been around for a while. They were hoping for this, and they're going to go all in. I think there's a better way to go about it, and there's definitely something that should be more researched.

Government Operations committee  I would think there would always be a chance to put the brakes on. I would hope that cooler heads would prevail. Just the fact that at least 16 government buildings in the downtown core cannot convert to hot water.... They can't. There's just no way they can physically convert. T

Government Operations committee  I can only say that it's from higher powers. I'm in the union, so I get to go to LMCs all the time. It's our direct managers who have told us this, and one who is directly responsible for the ESAP program. Initially, the talk was about 100°C or 185°F, which is lower, about 90°C.

Government Operations committee  Unfortunately, I haven't been able to read the study and see what parameters they were looking at. Were they looking at the condensate return coming back to the plant, or were they considering that a total heat loss? I'm not sure. I don't know what they were looking at. When you

Government Operations committee  Absolutely false.

Government Operations committee  Yes. The National Gallery of Canada uses our steam directly to humidify their areas, to keep their artwork in a controlled environment. They would be required to put new steam boilers in, smaller steam boilers, so you'd have more natural gas lines running in these buildings—there

Government Operations committee  With a steam line, when you shut that valve, you could have it down in maybe half an hour, and it would be cool enough for welders to work on it within two to three hours. With a hot-water system that size, depending on where the valving is, it could take 24 hours to drain a smal

Government Operations committee  Exactly. We have shutdowns annually, sometimes semi-annually. We try to organize them in the off-peak period, not in February, of course. Incidents happen, like the one in 2009. We were lucky it happened in November, and the lowest temperature we saw was -7°C. If that incident i

Government Operations committee  It was floating around in a meeting that it was going to be about $1.6 billion.

Government Operations committee  Initially, when they were looking into this, they had visited Amsterdam and a plant in France, which run on low-temperature hot water. Low-temperature hot water has to be below the boiling point—so, below 212°F or 100°C. That works there, because their climate is relatively stabl

Government Operations committee  For our plant in particular, one very small issue that could save a lot of money and greenhouse gas is that we work right beside the river. Our plant doesn't have any free cooling. It's something that could be fixed so easily. Instead of running a chiller at 4160 volts during the