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I'll keep it as short as possible.
Thank you very much for inviting me to address the committee. I have a handout that I'll take you through. Given the time, I'll skip over some slides and emphasize just the important ones.
The Canada Green Building Council, for those of you who are not familiar with it, is a national non-profit organization made up of mainly industry representatives. It was created in 2002. Ours is an elected board, with cross-representation from the industry, across Canada, in our committees and chapters.
We are a largely self-funded organization that delivers programs to the industry to improve the performance of buildings. We use the LEED building rating system in Canada as an avenue to accomplish this. LEED is a building rating system that came originally from the U.S. We adapted it for Canada's use in 2004. Since then the LEED adaptation has been used in Canada to certify new and existing commercial, institutional, and high-rise residential buildings, as well as for tenant improvements. These two rating systems are directly applicable to Public Works and Government Services Canada.
There are four levels of certification: certified, silver, gold, and platinum. The certification is done through third-party assessment teams. Really, it's a true third-party certification of building performance, as designed.
There's often the question of why buildings should be LEED certified. LEED provides a common framework or language that defines what a green building is. It covers five areas: energy, water, materials, indoor environmental quality, and site development. As I mentioned before, it verifies the actual performance of a building through a third party. It supports performance benchmarking with other jurisdictions. It has become, for new buildings, the de facto national green building standard in Canada over the last three years.
More importantly, the application of LEED results in the lowest life cycle cost for buildings. Quality assurance is built in to the LEED system to really ensure that buildings that go through the LEED process target high performance and ensure that things are maintained that might otherwise fall off the table through the design process. As well, the focus and discipline are maintained in the design to achieve certain performance goals for a building.
The LEED uptake in Canada has been significant. On page 6 we have listed a range of organizations that have adopted LEED. Provincial and local governments, the 2010 Winter Olympics, and a variety of private sector developers, such as Victoria's Dockside Green, have adopted LEED with a requirement to certify the buildings under the LEED system.
The levels of certification vary that the organizations have committed to. Usually it's between silver and gold. At least one organization, Dockside Green, has committed itself to a platinum level for all buildings they are developing. That's a private sector development.
The cost of LEED has often been discussed. I can show you some slides that present the current knowledge on the cost of LEED and LEED certification.
On page 7 is the LEED cost for the General Services Administration in the U.S. Basically the graph line on the left-hand side is for the courthouse, which is a new building. The office building, on the right-hand side, is a renovation where the GSA did an in-depth analysis. It basically shows that certified, silver, and some gold buildings can be delivered within the existing construction contingency budget established by this national organization. GSA is the largest building owner in the United States, and they have studied this issue in great depth. They have found that even without incentives, they could quite easily achieve LEED certification on their buildings. However, if additional money were available, they could achieve even higher levels of certification.
One page 8 we mention a study done in California. The findings correlate the average cost premium with the level of LEED certification. The findings here are consistent with what we're finding with Canadian LEED projects. On average, a LEED silver building and a LEED gold building can be delivered with an additional cost of about 2%. As the experience grows in the industry with green building, we will see those costs continue to be reduced. Basically, we're still in a learning curve in Canada, which is reflected in these costs.
The costs and benefits of LEED certification are broken down on page 9. These are California numbers, but they clearly show that the energy value really exceeds the cost premium for green buildings over a 20-year net present value.
Even though our energy costs are lower here, our experience shows that the additional costs can be paid back in a very short period of time and benefit the building owner over the life of the building.
So the question for most building owners to ask is whether they are willing to pay a little more money now and save over the life of the building or operate the building using more energy. Basically it's pay now or pay later. I think that's really the decision to be made.
Clearly the benefits are there, and the often overlooked benefits are in productivity and health benefits for buildings. As an employer, your investment is in your staff rather than the building, because they consume so much more in salaries.
The California study has found that 70% of the benefits are health and productivity benefits. The productivity benefits they identified will accrue to 70% only if they get 1% more productivity out of state employees, which is five minutes per day. So you can see the magnitude of the investment a good working environment and good buildings can provide to employees of a federal government, or any employer in the country.
The LEED costs are on page 10. These are the average costs associated with LEED registration and certification fees, and they always depend on the size of the building. They are charged per square foot.
There are also the LEED documentation costs. These are the packages that have to be prepared for our assessment teams. They cost an average of $25,000 to $30,000. This is pretty consistent and represents 25 buildings that have been certified in Canada under the LEED system. These are quite manageable costs to achieve LEED certification.
On the progress to date with the Government of Canada, Public Works was one of the first organizations that adopted a LEED policy in the country--a green building policy with LEED gold. To date, four buildings have been certified under the LEED Canada system, and 16 are currently registered. There are projects in every part of the country that are owned and operated by the federal government. The registered buildings are currently under design or construction.
The federal government projects make up over 5% of our registered and certified buildings in Canada. We are making some good progress. However, the application of LEED in different regions is still somewhat inconsistent. I think the government has a LEED gold policy. When we look at the four certified projects, two are certified, one is gold, and one is platinum. There's a Parks building in Saanich, British Columbia, that's the leading green building in Canada. It is a LEED platinum building, and the only one so far in Canada.
Two recent reports have shown that green buildings can make a significant contribution to reducing greenhouse gases in Canada. A study by the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy shows that if we reduce energy used in residential and commercial institutional buildings by 50%, it will take us almost halfway toward our Kyoto commitment.
The second study was done by NRCan on energy efficiency trends in Canada. It gives a lower figure, but it confirms that buildings can make a significant contribution to achieving greenhouse gas reductions and taking us closer to Kyoto. A 30% reduction in consumption load could be achieved, and a 20% reduction could be achieved by changing the operating period--how long your fan, chiller, or air conditioning is running. So there's room in readily available technology and design knowledge to achieve those goals.
On the recommendations of the Canada Green Building Council, we encourage the Government of Canada to adopt the 50% greenhouse gas reduction challenge in buildings in Canada. It is possible now. It could start with its own buildings, with the help from LEED as a tool to achieve this goal. Over time it could also develop some programs to encourage the private sector to do that as well.
The government could develop an overall real estate property policy with respect to new and existing buildings.
Sustainability goals for green buildings can apply to all kinds of projects, whether it involves designing or building new buildings, leasing, purchasing, or leasing-purchases. On leases, there are all kinds of properties the government owns and operates that could benefit from a green building policy.
The government also has a number of custodian departments that could be encouraged under the policy to develop a strategy on how to achieve the target.
LEED certification at this point is key. We're still early in green building, and LEED certification could really help establish the baseline from which you continue to measure the performance of buildings once they are designed--how they operate--and create feedback loops to ever increase and better improve the performance of buildings across Canada. This is really important. It is data-driven, performance-driven, and benchmark-driven in how we approach buildings.
The Canada Green Building Council has several programs that could help support the federal government. We help with training and education. We can also help with policy implementation. We have several courses that we offer to building owners on how they can implement policy. We also have courses that educate industry, contractors, and designers to deliver better buildings.
The next step could be for the Government of Canada, the custodian departments, and the Canada Green Building Council to work together toward performance benchmarking and verification, education and training, and green policy and standards development and implementation. We would also encourage the custodian departments to become members of the Canada Green Building Council, as all the revenue generated from the work they are doing goes directly back into accelerating green buildings in Canada.
Thank you very much.
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Absolutely, and thank you so much for inviting me to be here. I'll follow along on that great presentation.
An awful lot of the information that was provided by Thomas is very relevant to the information for our organization. In fact, if I may say so, we are in the process of working on a formal agreement to collaborate as two organizations, because of the compatibility and the synergy of the system that is delivered by the Canada Green Building Council for new construction and BOMA Canada's program, which is for existing commercial buildings.
So just by way of a bit of an introduction, BOMA Canada, the Building Owners and Managers Association of Canada, is a national, not-for-profit association representing the commercial real estate industry, primarily office buildings and some industrial and retail. It does not cover the residential area, just to be clear, but primarily the office buildings across the country.
As a national organization, we represent about 1.9 billion square feet of commercial space across the country, and our members are real property owners and managers, developers, asset managers, leasing agents, and brokers. That's the sort of realm we're dealing in.
The organization addresses issues of concern to the industry, and one of the biggest initiatives we have launched very recently, in the last couple of years, is BOMA Go Green, which is a national environmental certification and recognition program. That's the reason I'm here and that's the reason we are working with Canada Green Building Council.
Again, I would like to emphasize that it's a Canadian-developed program. It was created here by BOMA, by the industry, by representatives of the industry. A portion of the program is related to benchmarking, and that's in the Canadian context. It is a voluntary program, and it's available not just to BOMA members but also to any buildings in the country. In this case particularly, we are continuing to work closely with Public Works and Government Services Canada to roll the program out across the crown-owned portfolio of buildings for the government.
I'd like to just give you a few details about the program itself.
Again, for existing buildings it's a voluntary program. It is designed to encourage environmentally conscious management and operation of buildings. So once they already exist, then it's the next steps in the life cycle of a building to make sure it's operated in an environmentally efficient manner and that they've looked for ways to reduce resource consumption. This program is designed to facilitate that, to measure that, and to recognize that in the industry.
We have over 250 properties that have been certified across Canada in pretty much all provinces right now. We have about 10 of the major commercial real estate firms that have committed their entire portfolios to going through the program in the next period of years, to be certified and to participate in this whole process.
Public Works and Government Services Canada...of course, we're in the process of rolling that out, as I indicated, to the 300 crown-owned buildings in Canada, and the Alberta Ministry of Infrastructure and Transportation has adopted the program for Alberta. I should also mention, just as an aside--and you may have seen it in the paper yesterday--that the Ontario Power Authority is collaborating with BOMA Toronto in a conservation demand program that is directly linked to the Go Green program, whereby the Go Green program is the measure by which the conservation will be determined and therefore incentives delivered. So that was a pretty exciting announcement from our standpoint.
Go Green basically has two elements. The BOMA Go Green program, which was originally developed, is a best practices program, probably designed more for smaller buildings that are not in a position to be able to undertake the full program but wish to show environmental leadership and wish to be recognized as such. Go Green Plus is a performance-based program that's based on the Green Globes online web assessment tool. BOMA Canada delivers Green Globes for existing buildings in Canada now under the banner of Go Green Plus. It's the Go Green Plus program that we're looking at for Public Works and Government Services Canada.
The specific reason for that is because it not only encourages environmental leadership, but it also provides the tools to measure and to assess changes, advancements, and improvements in resource consumption and energy usage, for example, and it also involves the building management in the whole process. It's not an outside consultant who comes in and does the process. The building management is involved in assessing their building and measuring it on an ongoing basis.
The areas that are covered are very much the same as the LEED program: resource consumption in energy and water use; waste reduction, construction, and recycling; building materials, including hazardous materials and material selection; interior environment, including indoor air quality and HVAC maintenance; and a very specific component related to a communications program and tenant awareness, because in commercial buildings and office properties in particular, the tenants are participants in the process.
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I will slow down. I am excited about the program.
Go Green Plus, as I indicated, is a more in-depth benchmarking tool that uses the web-based Green Globes system, and the data is gathered online. When an organization participates in the program, they are signing up for three-year access to this online survey. So they can participate and continue to go back and assess their improvements as they go along. The key point is that it enables the participants to participate in the process, as I said.
The other part of the online system involves portfolio management. So a group of buildings, including the Public Works portfolio, for example, can be measured against each other and measured against industry standards as well. So it is not isolated, building-specific.
The program identifies savings, and it can certainly provide the basis for strategic decisions on how to improve performance.
I included a quote on page 10 from one of the building participants, which is CREIT Management, on the measured savings they have seen from participation in the program. I am not going to go into the brief and the statistical information that Thomas did, because that is representative. But in this case, this particular building site had significant savings from a reduction in water consumption, decreased landfill waste, and increased recycling by over 30%. So those are tangible results.
On Public Works and Government Services Canada's involvement, obviously we are just delighted to have had the opportunity to work with government on that. We think that's showing a leadership role, and that's certainly our objective in delivering the program. And we think it is the right thing to do to have public and private merge for the same purpose.
I thank you for the opportunity. I am sorry for talking so fast.
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For my part, you can probably hear from my accent that I actually grew up in Germany, and I've spent quite a bit of time in both Europe and the United States.
There is the U.S. Green Building Council organization. We do quite a bit of work with them around LEED development and policy development and so on involving green buildings. Things in the United States with regard to green buildings are really accelerating at a rapid pace, both federally now, with the change in the Congress, in the Senate, but also—and this refers back to what you said about cities—there are I don't know how many cities that have signed on now to a climate change agenda in the States, and they are supported by the Clinton Foundation global initiative around climate change. There are 42 cities worldwide now that have signed on to it.
There is a lot of cooperation going on among cities. I haven't seen a similar collaboration in Canada. I know that FCM has Partners for Climate Protection, but it hasn't been as visible. We actually have it in our business plan this year that we want to get the 13 largest cities in Canada together around the issues of green buildings and climate change and around what you are referring to: information sharing and green buildings.
It extends not just to the kind of building but to where we also think about buildings in the community context. Really, what we need is to build cities that are more compact, of higher density, and that also have buildings that perform at a much higher level than they perform right now.
This is really in a nutshell our agenda. We want to start with the 13 largest cities—Toronto and Montreal and so on. Many of them already either have policies in place or are in the process of putting policies in place with regard to green buildings. Often they also commit to LEED.
So in terms of the States, I think we're lagging a little bit behind in this area, but then we are ahead in other areas. There's a lot of capacity, a lot of knowledge and innovation here in Canada when it comes to green buildings and sustainable community development, which we can really draw on. There's a real, I would say, economic cluster forming in Canada with that expertise.
As for the performance of buildings—and I haven't spent as much time in Europe as some other members of our council—we are part of the World Green Building Council as well. It is an international body that brings together councils from across the world. There are currently nine—actually ten members as of this week, including, just this week, the U.K. Green Building Council, which has joined. We have India, the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, the United Emirates, Japan—these are some of the countries that have green building councils and green building rating systems, not necessarily LEED, but their own homemade green building rating systems—and we have Europe as well.
I can tell you that in the European context, what I saw the last time I was over there, last year, is that in terms of energy they are considerably ahead of North America. I have seen different houses. One house is called the passive house, of which they have now built about 6,000 in Austria and Germany. They use only 25% of the energy of our top-rated energy house in Canada. This is a commercialized technology. It is low technology that uses wood frame construction. These kinds of technologies are out there, and it is quite fascinating to see.
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If it's about policy for all of government, I think the report of the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, which I mentioned in my presentation, lays out a pretty convincing agenda on how buildings not only contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions but what strategies can be used in buildings right now--commercial institutions as well as residential buildings--to get there, to actually get to a 50% reduction in energy use in new and existing buildings across the country. It's very convincing.
That's why I mentioned the technologies and that the know-how exists to do it. I think it really hinges around the willingness both on the part of industry and government to move forward in terms of policy. I think that's the important point to make.
On new buildings on the LEED system, I think what you're talking about would actually be beyond the platinum. LEED platinum would get you a 65% improvement in energy over the baseline. You have a building in your portfolio already--a Public Works building in British Columbia--that is 75% above the current energy standard. That is the kind of model that can show this can be done right now.
I know they didn't spend a fortune on this building to do this. It is as much the technology as it is the process of how you design buildings. We talk about the integrated design process and making it happen. Well, all the players--the owner, the designer, the builder--actually envisioned what the building was supposed to be. It's the integration; that's when you really get the efficiency. The building codes are very linear, and it's this integration where you get buildings that are really performing at a very high level.
In terms of what you're talking about, I would have a policy that would extend to all government departments that own and operate buildings. Given the urgency around climate change, I would talk at a very high level of energy performance that is perhaps 50% by 2010 or 2015, and then you have to ramp it up every year.
These are the kinds of policy approaches you see out there. It's not that we're doing this now and it stays for 10 or 20 years; it's a process for continuous improvement that uses data-driven performance measurements. It feeds it back so you learn to achieve ever higher levels of performance. That is then benchmarked with other jurisdictions such as Europe, Japan, the United States. You can see that you actually are making progress, and it also encourages other jurisdictions to make progress as well. So this is really a data-driven approach to increasing performance in buildings.
I think the goal can be set right now at 50%, and it can be made higher. For example, CMHC has the net-zero housing initiative. I've seen some of the proposals. Again, this is technology that is doable. It actually comes to net zero. So carbon-neutral buildings in the residential sector are possible, and that's certainly also possible in the commercial sector as well, if we take the right approach. A cycle of continuous improvement ramping up over time will get us there.