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Thank you very much, Chair, and thank you to the chair and the committee for inviting Natural Resources Canada to come to address you today about integrated community energy systems.
I am very happy to appear here with colleagues from the private sector who also share an interest in this topic.
I'd like to start by defining integrated energy systems, because exactly what we mean when we're talking about this subject is not something that springs to everybody's mind. When my colleagues, Mike Harcourt and the others, speak to this they will be using the same general definition.
Traditionally, when we think of how energy is used or how it is supplied, we look out across the city as we travel through it and we see individual houses. We see schools, hospitals, light industrial parks, and each one of those entities makes their own decisions about how much energy to buy, what sort of energy to buy, and what kind of equipment they use in their organizations. That's the easiest way to make decisions. You just have one entity to deal with and decisions are relatively simple, but there are a lot of inefficiencies in using energy and in supplying energy that way.
There is no use of economies of scale. There is no use of waste energy product or waste products between organizations. We find that if there are entities that are putting in leading-edge technologies or practices, it is often very limited in scale and therefore in impact. What we'd like to talk about is an integrated approach to using energy and supplying energies across a community or across a neighbourhood. By this we mean taking the energy use and energy supply decisions and fanning them out over a number of different uses across heating, cooling, lighting, and getting around or motion. We'd also like to think of it across the sectors I've been mentioning--housing, building, transportation, and industry.
When we integrate traditional energy choices, there are enormous opportunities for savings. We've been looking at energy use with respect to environmental improvement, specifically with respect to climate change, in a serious way for about 10 years, and our approach has been very sectoral. We have industrial programs, residential programs, and building programs, and we're talking about looking at it all together in an integrated fashion.
There are benefits apart from the benefits to the environment, and those include dealing with our land better, dealing with transit choices, dealing with waste and water shortages.
I'd just like to take a bit of a closer look at integrated energy use right now. If we were to look at a community that has....
I'm looking around to see if you have the presentation I'm reading from. That wasn't distributed. No? Okay.
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I'm sorry. I'll make sure it's supplied to the committee afterwards, and I'll just speak to this.
I'll give you a little more definition to how an integrated community system would work. We're talking about maximizing energy efficiency in the construction of the buildings themselves, as well as in the practice of energy use within the building and all of the technologies deployed within a building. So it's maximizing efficiency, and maximizing the use of renewable energy as well in order to minimize the energy demand, whether it's solar, hot water, or domestic ground source heat pumps or other renewables. These often have a significant cost premium, but that premium can be mitigated by bulk purchases and bulk installations, which would happen when you're dealing at the community level.
We're also looking at district heating systems, so not just supplying heat to one entity but supplying heat to a whole pool of entities from one centralized, right-sized heat provision combustion device. Finally, we're looking at the transit and the land use of a community, and maximizing the density and ensuring that it's zoned for multiple uses.
That really gives a bit of a picture of what an integrated community would look like with respect to its energy use, and the end result would be savings as far as the emissions are concerned, and savings, too, for those who are paying for energy and using it in those instances.
I'd like to give you a couple of examples of Canadian integrated communities with respect to energy. There is one near Edmonton, Alberta, called Emerald Hills, and it has 1,600 residential units--there is retail, there is a health care/medical complex, a nursing home, and some mixed-use buildings. So it's higher density and a greater mix of building types than most communities, and they are going to have a community energy system to supply the heat for the entire community.
Another development that is developer-led is Dockside Green in Victoria. It's a brownfield redevelopment right in downtown Victoria on the harbour. It's residential condominium units, as well as multi-family buildings, with heat generated through a biomass gasification system and waste water and brown water treatment to reuse the water.
A third example comes from Alberta and the town of Okotoks, and this is called the Drake Landing solar community. This is a very small project that only involves 52 single family homes, but it's really quite special in that it's first in the world in using a technology that stores sunlight collected in solar heaters on the garages of the subdivision; it stores the heat energy underground, and then that is used to take care of 90% of the heating needs of this small community throughout the year. We've been running this one for over a year now, and John Marrone, my colleague here, can tell you more about it. But it's running above expectations. It's currently supplying 100% of the heating needs from the sun. The community is integrated, in that the homes are built super energy efficient to begin with--they're R-2000 homes. So that's another example of integrated energy use in a community setting.
The type of situation I'm describing is admirable for cost and energy and emission savings. Why don't we see more of these, and why do I have to spend five minutes here defining what I mean when I talk about an integrated community with respect to its energy use? The reason this is fairly rare--we can come up with a dozen or more examples across Canada--is this is exactly the opposite of the status quo in the way energy use is designed and the way energy is actually used in communities.
When I was referring earlier to all the individual decisions that entities make, an integrated community energy plan requires the integration of a large number of individuals, and that's very hard to put together. There's low awareness of the savings and of the potential from the energy or environmental or waste or other perspectives, and there is a quagmire of rules and policies and codes that actually prevents this kind of activity. I'll just give you a couple of examples.
Many planning regulations support low-density building, and even penalize redevelopment in the core of cities, which makes it more expensive to do an integrated community project. In some provinces and some jurisdictions, the local utility companies are forbidden from being part of an energy production facility, which limits their participation as a partner and potential financer to this kind of work.
What we at Natural Resources Canada are doing is contributing from a couple of different perspectives. We do research and development on the technologies that would support an integrated community, for instance, the biogas system I just mentioned, which had input from Natural Resources Canada, and solar storage and many other technologies.
We also support an integrated community approach through a policy framework. Kevin Lee, who is here, is leading a federal-provincial-territorial exercise to develop a road map for those jurisdictions to identify the policies and programs that would support an integrated community fashion of work. Kevin is also leading on developing across the Government of Canada, 12 departments, a standard way to measure energy use at the community level. It's not as simple as measuring the energy used in a building because you're moving across a lot of different mixed uses. In addition, we demonstrate technologies as well as practices.
The final thing I'd like to say before I run out of time here is that we look forward, at Natural Resources Canada, to continuing to support the thinking around integrated community solutions through, probably, the three planks that I've just described—through policy support, through R and D support, and also through the programs that we deliver on energy efficiency and renewable energy. We will, through our work on the road map, determine what areas are in the most need and continue our thinking about how to address the barriers of lack of awareness, lack of attention, and lack of tools, and see where we can be most useful.
I'm speaking to you today from really a pre-program development perspective, where we're thinking about the issue and trying to understand the challenges and opportunities. I welcome your questions.
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Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I'm delighted to be here as a recovering politician, somebody who was in the trenches for 24 years and escaped before the posse caught up with me, and I'm delighted to be the honorary chair of QUEST, which is quite a remarkable initiative that was started by the two people beside me here, Mike Cleland from the Canadian Gas Association and Ken Ogilvie from Pollution Probe, a very successful NGO that deals with these issues and has for a very long time--both of these two have. It has become quite an exciting activity over the last two years, and it has grown organically, with a quite impressive variety of people who are participating, from government, from business, from the community.
I thought I'd give you a quick update of where QUEST--Quality Urban and Community Energy Systems of Tomorrow--is at and why we think it's important that you know about us as you launch on this study that you're going to prepare over the next few months and that then will be available, we hope, to be acted on. We have talked to the minister, Lisa Raitt, about our activities and she is quite interested.
I thought we should say, why QUEST? Why are we here before you? I think it's because the communities of Canada represent 50% of Canada's energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. So there's a huge opportunity to deal with some of the issues that we're facing now in terms of climate change and greenhouse gas emissions, and other effects of that.
I would argue, as a former mayor in Vancouver before I was demoted to being premier in British Columbia, that cities are where 100% of the consumption of natural capital, of forest products, agricultural energy, and mineral activities eventually takes place, 75% directly and 25% from the factories and mines and farms and oil and gas, and other activities like that in rural areas that supply our cities with the consumption that takes place there.
So Canada's cities and communities, and we're not just talking of Toronto, we're talking about all of the communities that make up Canada, big, medium, and small.... I was involved in a report I prepared for Prime Minister Martin and handed in to Prime Minister Harper on the national role in Canada's cities and communities. If you want to have a look at that, it describes those kinds of issues. So we think it's important that QUEST exist to start to grapple with solutions to that huge consumption of Canada's energy and creation of greenhouse gas emissions, and we think existing approaches to greenhouse gas mitigation mainly focus on the energy supply issue, and they fall far short, as you can see from grappling with this issue, of the policy targets that we need to make or probably will need to address very actively and aggressively in the next few years.
So we think it's of huge importance to Canada's citizens.
We also believe that an integrated approach is going to bring all kinds of benefits. If you're taking an integrated approach to energy systems in Canada's communities, we believe it will deal with the potential insecurity about energy and some of the other impacts of energy use. It will build a more sustainable energy future, deliver greenhouse gas emissions, let us go to a no or low carbon environment, reduce many other environmental impacts, and provide more affordable energy and more reliable and resilient energy services.
I'll tell you about a remarkable document that the Canadian Gas Association sponsored in 2002-03 for an International Gas Union competition to see what city could come up with a 100-year plan that would address the future shortages of energy. Canada--Vancouver, in particular--won this international competition and put together this project called citiesPLUS--PLUS standing for planning for long-term urban sustainability.
We found that when you backcasted to pick the future community you want for Montreal or for Swift Current or for Prince Rupert, for yourselves and your kids, and you then put a 20-year to 30-year transition strategy in place and then 10-year capital and operational plans, one of the byproducts of that integration of approaches was to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, 70% to 80%, just by doing what we're talking about.
We think this approach is hugely important for Canada to undertake. We can get you copies of this, Mr. Chair, for your committee members to have a look at. Seven of the world's leading urbanists looked at this very real community called greater Vancouver, with 2.2 million people, being one of the nine finalists to address this series of issues successfully, and they won the grand prize in Tokyo in 2003. So there is a lot of good work that has been done in Canada, and we think QUEST is part of that.
The QUEST vision, as you can see from the material I think you have, is that by 2050--and being the optimist that I am, I hope sooner--every community in Canada will be operating as an integrated energy system, and accordingly, all community development and redevelopment incorporates an integrated energy system. That's our vision.
Our mission is to foster a community-based integrated approach to land use, energy, transportation, waste, and water, and to reduce related greenhouse gas, air pollutant emissions, and waste.
This is the vision and mission that then guided us to becoming much more specific and concrete and community based.
Who is involved in QUEST? If you look at page 8 of the submission, we summarize that we have many federal government departments and organizations involved, a number of provincial governments and municipal governments across Canada, certainly the energy industry, environmental groups, the building sector, and academics. So we have quite an impressive number of people who are involved in this initiative.
I'll just quickly summarize our guiding principles. They're to improve efficiency; to optimize “exergy”, which in simple language means you don't use electricity for space heating, you use more appropriate geothermal, solar, and natural gas, and you use electricity for other power-related activities; reduce waste, and we think there are all kinds of ways, and we've got examples, to reduce waste; use renewable resources more and more; use grids strategically to be able to technically handle renewables and fixed grids and those sorts of very important technical issues.
We think the building blocks are starting to form up across Canada in the following ways: the integration of land use and transportation so that transportation, rapid transit and buses, shape more dense and liveable city centres and transit corridors. So integrate land use, transportation, energy, water, and waste systems. Do not do them separately; combine them.
We think there's an enabling platform for that in higher-density, mixed-use developments of energy efficient buildings. You've heard some examples here today of how that is starting to happen in Canada.
The backbone of it is smart district energy and utility grids that allow better management of available energy.
We think moving to distributed, smaller-scale, local energy systems, which we describe in the citiesPLUS project, is the way we're going to evolve in our communities.
Use local renewables, solar, geothermal, wind, and biomass--and we've certainly got lots of biomass in B.C. with the pine beetle that we're going to have to find a use for.
We're suggesting those are the kinds of directions we need to go in and those are the building blocks.
We have been building momentum, particularly in the last six months or so, from the initial discussion to the point where we've moving to implement. We are looking at a number of demonstration projects in various provinces and municipalities.
In conclusion, we think what the federal government needs to do, and we'll talk about this in questions, is support the move to the QUEST vision from the fringe to the mainstream.
Secondly, there has to be ongoing support for building further momentum. Ensure that technology funding, program funding, infrastructure funding helps create through green infrastructure more sustainable cities and communities, and that integrated energy systems are a central part to that future vision of Canada's cities and communities.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
The savings vary according to the different projects and according to the different locations. But, as we were saying earlier, with respect to the project with Drake Landing, we are seeing savings pushing up to 100% on the space heating side of things. We're seeing similar potential savings in other environments, and it really depends on the approach that's taken and the target that is set by the individual community.
One of the things we're looking at in integrated community energy systems is allowing each community to set its own targets and to decide the important pieces, whether they want to focus on renewable energy, whether they want to focus on lowering carbon targets, whether electricity is the base case in a particular jurisdiction, or gas. All of these things have different implications.
As we talk about a road map for how we implement these things, the road map is not for individual communities, but more a means for them to decide how best to approach integrated community solutions for their specific circumstances.
Overall, though, as we heard earlier, communities are responsible for 50%-plus of the energy consumption in Canada. And we certainly see savings of 50% within the realm of reach in very short order, and significantly more become possible when you start thinking about renewable energy technologies and getting the synergies across the different systems, where you start using waste heat from different industrial facilities and that kind of thing—or we can get some real synergies and economic benefits at the local level. So there's lots of opportunity.
I think one of the big keys is understanding that each community will have different solutions, depending on their energy mix, building type, industry type, etc.
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I would think, Mr. Chair, through you to the member, that my colleagues here, who have been dealing with this for quite a long time, would be able to answer that. I think we're still working through whether you need to start from scratch or whether you can retrofit. Frankly, we're going to have to retrofit because only 3% of the building stock changes every year, so we still have 97% to deal with.
And there are lots of good examples of communities where that retrofitting is taking place, and others that we have documented across the country, where new lands, old brownfield sites, are being redeveloped. There's one in Montreal, the Technopôle Angus Montréal, which is a very large--one million square feet--space that's being built. It's going to LEED buildings. It's close to the transit system, and it is using a lot of what we're talking about. So I think it's a combination of doing both.
I'll give you another example. In British Columbia, I'm working with four high-growth communities, four high-growth municipalities—Surrey, Langley, Abbotsford, and Coquitlam—which are going to receive two-thirds of the next million people moving to Vancouver. They have dramatically changed their land use to much more compact, higher-density, green buildings, and they want transit to be built into these old city centres of Whalley and other places to shape that development. We are now starting the dialogue with them about integrating energy into that.
Calgary has, in its east downtown lands, the old rail yards. It had to go through some very difficult bureaucratic and regulatory regimes to get in sync with the new mixed-use, very high-density development--it's an attractive development--of this old rail yard site, that finally has a district energy system integrated into it.
So I think this is still an emerging approach. As to whether you need to have a new development or retrofit existing land use and buildings, I think this is something we need to act on, as we do on these demonstration projects throughout the country.
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I apologize that this slide was not made available to you. I will make it available to you afterwards. We put a great deal of effort into some graphics that would help demonstrate--for those of us who are visual--what was different about these communities. I'll now run through them a little more slowly.
The one in Emerald Hills near Edmonton, Alberta, did the integrated design process for the neighbourhood from the start. As Kevin Lee was describing, they invited the developers and the design team in at the beginning. They planned it this way from the start, that they would integrate every opportunity for saving energy use. They started with a higher mix of uses and a higher density than otherwise might have been the case. They put building performance targets in place for all of the buildings, which is not usually part of a building design project.
We, from the Canmet Energy lab--my colleague is in charge of the one that's run out of Bells Corners--provided some of the design input, I guess, in terms of the actual design processes for the different structures and technologies to be used. The first townhouses are under construction. They're not fully built yet. They have a community energy system planned. I believe they had originally planned to have a waste-to-energy facility. They're now replacing it with another idea. Those are just some of the things in place in that community.
With regard to the third community, I talked about the chief integrated and high-efficiency aspects of that. All of the homes were built to R-2000 specification. That's 30% better than the conventional home. Then the solar collectors on all the garages, storing that energy in the ground over the winter, make an absolutely unique and very exciting technology given the potential to save the summer's heat and use it all winter long. And this is in Alberta, which, as some of you know, has quite a heating season. Hearkening back to one of the questions about the role of utilities, ATCO, the utility in the area, will own and service the community energy system for that subdivision.
Kevin, did you want to add anything to the specific energy saving aspects of that, or have I covered it? Okay.