:
Thank you, Mr. Martin, and ladies and gentlemen. I appreciate the opportunity to address you today.
I have a real passion for energy efficiency in buildings. The fact that you're looking at this and taking it seriously is a major step forward. I think that's actually where the federal government should be. We need leadership in how we treat buildings.
As we go through this, I look back and reflect that I got involved in energy efficiency in buildings over 30 years ago. I also represent Canada on the international scene at the International Organization for Standardization. We go to countries all around the world, European countries, Asian countries, and so on. When I first got involved with ISO, when you went to meetings, because you were from Canada you were automatically considered to be an expert. The National Research Council was one of the leading research institutes in the world.
We have an excellent base we're building our buildings from, and we're working on how to make them better. Unfortunately, we're losing that in a lot of cases, and we're no longer the leader in how we build and renovate buildings. Countries like South Korea and Thailand are actually ahead of us in getting some things done. I think we still have the opportunity to show leadership and show not only the citizens of Canada but also the world what we can do.
As a side note, I was on a conference call this morning with some people in Sweden. This is a project in which we're taking some of our energy efficiency projects to Scandinavian countries. One of our partners is an American-based company. He asked how it was going to be viewed in Sweden. The short answer was that it wasn't going to be that well received. They basically had the opinion that Americans don't know how to build buildings. That wasn't necessarily unusual or anything different, but then he went on to say that if you say you come from Canada, well, it's cold in Canada and you absolutely know how to build buildings. I was very heartened by that this morning, because it tells me we haven't quite lost everything.
When we take a look at energy efficiency in Canada, we have always said that we are a big country so our energy use is high compared with other countries. When we take a look at how we can reduce energy use in Canada, and this applies right around the world, buildings become the number one spot. If we're going to transport materials and goods across Canada, there are so many kilometres they have to go and we can make our trucks more fuel efficient, and those sorts of things, but when we get down to kilowatt hours and gigajoules, or whatever it might be, the biggest opportunity we have is in buildings. If we start to look beyond that into the environment and sustainability, I propose that the greenest building there ever is, is a building we don't build.
As we're looking at new construction, obviously we want to make it the highest quality in energy use and so on, but also we want to retrofit our existing buildings. Whether they're 10, 50, 100 years old, it doesn't really make any difference. We can retrofit these buildings, and we can save energy and solve all the issues we have with destroying buildings and building new ones.
Mr. Martin, as you mentioned, our office is in Winnipeg. We're in the downtown core. The building my office is in is over 100 years old. Most of the buildings around there have now been retrofitted and brought up to date. If we can make them energy efficient, that's great.
There are other things that we don't sometimes attach to energy efficiency in buildings.
About 40% of the garbage that goes into landfill is construction waste, so we're going to have a reduction there.
I am at a conference here in Indianapolis, and one of the presenters last night brought forward the issue that when we create energy.... We have a lot of hydro power in Canada, and we're very fortunate in that, but we still do coal and gas. On the American side, of course, it's much more. They don't have quite the same percentage of hydro power. For the southern Unites States, the amount of water used to produce electricity is equal to all the water that goes over the Niagara Falls on a minute-by-minute, second-by-second basis. One of the points he brought up is that as we expand the population and so on, people like it where it's warm. They're moving to places like Florida and Georgia. Those are the areas where it's the hardest to get water. We have some environmental benefits to do energy efficiency in buildings that go beyond just reducing the energy and reducing our costs.
Back to the potential, obviously any new building we build should be absolutely the lowest energy use that is possible. The terminology typically used today is “near net zero”. What we have to keep in mind is that of the existing buildings, 74% of the buildings we have were built before 1989, and 93% of the buildings we have out there were built before 2003. The potential we have for reducing energy use in buildings, federal government buildings or whatever, is phenomenal on that side.
As you move forward and you're looking at improving the government buildings, first of all, we should be setting an example with use of technology and efficiency and setting standards for energy use to show the industry and to help the industry move in that direction. We're doing that through the codes in some of the other areas, but that's a long, slow process. We need somebody out front to lead the pack there.
My company has started a project called Historic Zero, just because our buildings happen to be 100 years old. We're going to be renovating three buildings in downtown Winnipeg. Our whole purpose for doing this is to show that you can take a historic building, which would be considered the hardest to improve in energy efficiency, and bring it as close as we can to near net zero that's out there. We've been discussing this project. We have Manitoba Hydro involved. We have interest from BC Hydro. We have interest from a lot of architects and engineers in both Canada and the United States because we don't have any program out there that deals with existing buildings.
We've established 100 equivalent kilowatt hours per square metre per annum as the goal that we're trying to hit. That's another thing I would suggest be brought into the foray of dealing with government buildings: we should be setting energy targets. We should not just simply be adding some materials or changing motors or changing light bulbs, or whatever it might be, but we should actually bring it down to energy use intensity. Whether 100 equivalent kilowatt hours per square metre is the right one for government buildings or not, it will all depend on use, but if we don't have a target to go to somewhere, we're never going to get there.
An example of how that can happen is that the Army Corps of Engineers are renovating a lot of buildings in the United States. They have set, for example, for airtightness, when they renovate or build a new building, that building needs to be airtight to the point where the amount of air leakage in and out of the building is going to be about 1.25 litres per second per metre squared, at a 75-pascal pressure difference.
Now a typical building would be somewhere in the neighbourhood of 10, 15, 20 litres per second. To keep it very clear, when you build or renovate that building you do not get paid unless you meet this performance requirement, which is an extremely airtight building. When they first brought this out as a performance requirement it was deemed impossible, that nobody could do it. Now it's being done very routinely, and in fact they've moved from 1.25 litres per second per metre squared down to less than a half a litre per second per metre squared. The point of all that is just to show what happens when you start to set some targets, that not only can you achieve the target, but you can go beyond.
As an example, again, when we mentioned the 100 equivalent kilowatts hours per square metre per annum to architects in B.C., in Vancouver, where I had some meetings last week, they said that's nothing for them to achieve, they're currently achieving that today. So it shows where we need to go.
Now, obviously we do the standard energy-efficient things that we've done for the last 20 years, the light bulbs, the motors, the controls, and so on, but we need to get into some areas that we haven't got into. On a typical building we haven't worried that much about the air leakage. We're now realizing that air leakage accounts for somewhere around 30% of the energy loss due to air leaking in and out of buildings.
We haven't applied that. We've left the building envelope alone. We're starting to understand continuous insulation. It's extremely important that we get rid of the thermal bridges so the building will perform much better, rather than just throwing some vacs in the attic or vacs in the walls.
We need to also look at new and innovative products. We have a lot of new materials coming up. We have vacuum insulated panels. We have high-performance insulation. We have aerogels. We have high-performance equipment, and the list goes on. We need to start to take a look at how that can better us.
A quick example is a thermostat called Nest. It was designed by people who used to work at Apple. It's very simple, but it learns what you do. We're probably all aware and familiar with the setback thermostats, but this goes way beyond that. People who have installed it in their homes have seen their energy bills drop. We have to take that type of new technology, which is basically a smart thermostat, and apply it to some of the areas that we're dealing with.
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Good morning. My name is Dean Karakasis. I'm the executive director of the Building Owners and Managers Association for Ottawa and the national capital region, proudly at the service of the highest concentration of government buildings in all of Canada. Recently your committee showed a lot of respect for our organization by asking our national offices to address this committee and they told you that nationally our association represents about two billion square feet. To put that in context for you, for what I do, we represent about 100 million square feet in the city of Ottawa and the national capital region alone.
Our mandate is to be the voice of the industry, not the voice of our members, but the voice of the industry. In that regard we develop different programs to educate and document industry standards, but possibly most importantly to provide forums for the sharing of best practices and experiences from everything from building management to energy savings, as we're talking about today.
One such BOMA program that combines both standards and sharing is the BOMA building environmental standards or BOMA BESt program. It's a Canadian designed, Canadian operated, and Canadian maintained program. It's designed to address the impact of commercial office space on the environment by recognizing that you can't change what you don't measure. My national colleagues let you know that BOMA BESt assesses six key areas of environmental performance and management. Just as a reminder, let me tell you that the areas are energy, water, waste reduction, emissions in effluents, indoor environment, and environmental management systems.
Over 150 buildings currently hold one of our four levels of BOMA BESt designation in the BOMA Ottawa area. Many other buildings have run the program simply to assess where they stand and what they need to do to improve and reach one of our four levels. We at BOMA Ottawa are proud to say that since 2008 we have worked with Public Works and Government Services Canada as well as SNC Lavalin, who manage many of the government facilities, to put large segments of their building inventory through our program.
Our four level program helps property managers to understand where they stand in absolute numbers and where they stand against comparable metrics allowing them to consider initiatives that may reduce their buildings' impact on the environment.
A BOMA BESt level two certified building performs 6% better than the national average. Level three buildings perform 18% better and a level four building, our highest standard, perform 46% better than the national average. We are partners with government to ensure that the Public Works portfolio goes through BOMA BESt assessment. In March alone we with independent auditors reviewed 49 buildings, buildings that house government employees, a new record.
The reality is that many of the options available to larger, well-managed buildings are already being implemented. But there are three areas that we can address if our collective goal is to reduce the environmental impact of commercial office space in both government and the private sector, in particular in energy usage.
First is the need to invest in professional property managers and facility managers who manage the government portfolio or who interface with their alternate delivery providers. They need access to continuing education to allow them to learn about and implement best practices as they continue to evolve. It will make them contributors to the overall discussion. It will make them better managers and more valuable assets as federal employees.
Often I find myself managing a BOMA BESt file where the data is collected and entered into the system by a project officer or an environmental specialist while the property managers or the building operators are left to answer questions and conduct on-site verification tours unique to our program. These property managers or building operators are the front line for ideas for progress and for maintenance and they need to be participants in the measurement initiatives.
Second is the expansion of the federal mandate to those buildings that are not part of the Public Works and Government Services portfolio. I don't want to suggest that this isn't happening. There are many enlightened property management groups in Transport, DND, and other government departments that have sought us out and because of the affordability of our program are able to access it and implement it and receive the value of the evaluation. The ability to further realize savings by further reaching into building inventories is clear. You simply can't reduce what you don't measure.
Finally, let me suggest something that I'm not sure has been considered a lot. It might seem strange coming from someone who is supposed to represent buildings and building owners, but too often we concentrate on the building envelope and equipment that keeps the building running because it's easy and it's within our sphere of influence to change a system, to change a light bulb, to change a window. The fact is in today's world the replacement of windows or HVAC systems will always trend towards environmentally friendly options that are available in our industry.
A very well-respected property manager with a very large portfolio in this city said to me that you would have to try hard not to build a retrofitted building that is more harmful to the environment than what is currently being used.
In fact, the investments some of our industry are making in being environmentally responsible are not usually reflected in a positive way on the balance sheet, but environmental responsibility in the operation of the building is part of our culture now, and we're not going back.
What we struggle with is the constant evolution and improvement of those that reside in our buildings, our tenants. We place signs directing behaviour: glass here, plastics here, organics there. We put in place an infrastructure for them to participate in paper recycling, computer recycling, and battery recycling. These are all things we do constantly. But we don't have an obvious means of education, or recognition, or the capture of the input from the tenants in things that will make them a bigger part of the process. I don't mean suggestion boxes, whether they be virtual or real, but rather the idea that tenants can provide meaningful approaches to the problems.
The best sealed window in the world is of no use if it's left open all day. The most energy-efficient piece of equipment in an office is ineffective if it's left on when it's not needed. Users of office space are more environmentally conscious in their homes than they are in their office space, and the reason is simple: it's not their space. That culture is something we all need to work on in order to get tenants to understand.
We need to get them to feel they are a partner in this and we require more than just a memo for tenant contact. It means using traditional media, social media, and more to get the message out, and maybe branding the culture of environmental education, something all of us can do, both government and private sector, to all of our tenants.
Sometimes we feel we're trying to make buildings efficient in spite of our tenants. It's time to design programs to make them efficient with our tenants. Tenant engagement is the next horizon to energy and waste reduction.
I want to thank the committee for inviting me here today and listening to my message. As an industry we stand ready to partner in the development of even more innovative approaches to our collective future.
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Thank you for the opportunity. I've been here for three weeks now, waiting for this. I'm only joking.
Thank you very much.
I run Global Resource Efficiency Services. We're a strategic energy management group. We operate across Canada. We're integrators and planners and we help clients implement energy efficiency measures.
We're now in Alberta where we have the highest electricity rates in Canada, thanks to deregulation. Lots of people don't like 22¢ a kilowatt hour. We like it because it's creating a lot of opportunities. We work on welding shops, high-rises, schools, Indian reserves, and on and on, because there's a lot of angst in the system right now about the high cost of electricity. Gas is still really cheap. Water is at times very expensive; it depends where you go. Waste is an issue as well.
For you, in getting right to the point of dealing with this topic, I see the federal government and the way it operates with its buildings operating in two different worlds, one where you lease a lot of space and the other where you own your space. I think more and more you are starting to lease more and more floor space. So how do you deal with owners who really don't care what your operating costs are and are passing on those operational costs to you? You pay them. You pay the electricity, the gas, the water and so forth. Really, I have only two thoughts on how you deal with that.
We deal with a lot of owners and tenants and leasing issues and so forth. The key to what the federal government should do on a policy level is to set standards of performance that you expect the owners of the buildings you are leasing space from to deliver to you. Do you want to move into a space that's got really high gas and electricity costs, or do you want standards of performance that set basic requirements for what you want to be able to pay for?
Do you want energy-efficient lighting in the buildings you lease? Do you want water efficiency and so forth? I think you have a lot of power there to demand that you deal with owners of buildings who will give you really reasonable operating costs.
The other thing you can do with leased buildings in general is make big improvements in terms of the building code. Provincial and federal governments continually run away from improving building code standards when they should be dealing with that, because you can solve a lot of problems.
When you phased out the T12 fluorescent tube in Canada everyone moved to the T8 and the T5 lamp, so a legislative tool like that has created a lot of changes in our system.
When you own buildings we really believe in utilizing something called AIM, audit, implement and monitor, where we deal with your buildings in a strategic way versus a tactical way. Tactical solutions to attacking buildings would be “I want to fix my lights.” That's a tactical decision and away you go and make the changes to the lighting, but you're really not thinking about what other impacts that change would have in your building.
When you remove old lighting you are really removing a lot of heating that's being generated from that lighting, so how are you going to deal with the heating and cooling issues because of that change in lighting? We therefore really believe in doing strategic planning in terms of how you're going to attack your building.
In the AIM process the first thing you do is get a strategic plan done. When you do a strategic plan you're looking at the capital renewal costs over a 25-year horizon, such as when you need to replace your roofs, windows, doors, the lighting and so forth. You have an analysis done on that and you see you have a lot of money to spend on building renewal. Well, energy efficiency measures can attack some of that problem. So if you have a plan that lays out and provides you with an analysis, you can then start to implement sound, really efficient decisions on how to move forward on retrofits for your facilities.
You tie capital asset planning together with energy efficiency measures. That is something that I think the bureaucracy within the federal government should be doing. That's a policy decision.
When you deal with the AIM process, you do the audits and all the planning, and then you move into implementation, that's where you attack the hard measures that confront you, i.e., the need to improve lighting, the need to do all of these different measures, and renewables and so forth. How do you that? As the previous speakers have talked about, if you don't have very good building managers and facility people in your system, you're going to have a hard time doing that. Training those people and resourcing them with tools and the money to do those changes is critical.
By the way, the money to make those changes is in the system. We really believe there's over 50% waste in our system, in our buildings. Give me a building and I'll find 50% savings. That's our philosophy and approach. One of the things I've been hearing about in terms of this committee is how you make these changes with internal staff if you don't have them.
Some people have been talking about energy performance contracts and utilizing ESCOs, energy service companies. That's an option, but when you choose that option, you have to know that you're going to be paying 20% to 40% more for those retrofit costs if you go that way. Those companies are going to be insuring the risk they're putting into the project. They're guaranteeing savings, and guess what? You're going to pay a premium for that kind of work.
Our belief is that you get the people in your system, have them available, and let them do the work. You bring in resources, consultants or whatever, to help them make those changes, but the best way is to have your own people make those changes, because they run them long term.
On the soft side of measures, and I like what I've heard already from the BOMA folks, is training of your building operators and providing them with the tools and resources on how to operate your facilities effectively. It can easily generate 10% savings.
ASHRAE has done peer review work on this type of work, and for sure, easily 10% savings can be generated in terms of how you manage your facilities. Involving the occupants, creating awareness programs for your occupants, and creating incentives and shared savings programs with them will also help.
I'm going to stop there. I prefer dialogue and discussion.
On a high level, do strategic planning; try not to do it tactically; do it yourself and you'll save a fortune; change the building code. Deregulate so that we have really high electricity rates all over Canada—I'm joking.
Voices: Oh, oh!
Mr. Brian Staszenski: Thank you.
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Caneta Research Inc. is a small energy consulting company in the greater Toronto area. We have 10 engineers on staff. Our core business is done under a company called Caneta Energy, which does energy modelling and energy consulting in connection with a number of building owners who are trying to improve their buildings and trying to qualify for LEED.
We do not do full LEED facilitation per se, but we often become involved with facilitators who don't have an energy modelling capability to help them meet the energy prerequisites in LEED and gather additional credits, perhaps under that same program.
We also become involved in doing modelling of 3P projects, public-private partnerships, that might be of interest especially in Ontario, B.C., and Quebec, in which there is a requirement for an energy target or energy guarantee on a new project. That's where the rubber meets the road, when it comes to providing accurate energy modelling.
In addition to that, in Ontario there is now a requirement to model to show code compliance. There are only a couple of provinces in which this is currently a requirement. I'll get into that a little later.
Our background, prior to 10 years ago when this Caneta Energy activity started under the old banner of Caneta Research Inc....
We have been in business for 24 years. We have advised and consulted with the provinces, the federal government, and agencies such as the National Research Council when they do their code development. We've advised these departments on new building energy requirements and also have worked with some government programs that a number of you may remember: the commercial building incentive program, which was offered by Natural Resources Canada for large buildings, and recently the ecoENERGY efficiency initiative, which is very similar. We provide support to those programs and also help clients get incentives or take advantage of what is being offered. We have worked for the Ontario Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing. It is the group responsible for the Ontario code. We've done this on two occasions, once in 2006 and again in 2011.
I'm only providing this background as I think it will be useful for the kind of questions you may want to put to me.
We have just completed a major study with the same agency, the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing, for large buildings, developing code proposals for encouraging energy efficiency upgrades during renovation. At this time, there is no requirement to upgrade. For example, if you do a repair on a wall, there is no requirement to replace or upgrade the insulation in the wall. If you replace a piece of equipment, you do not necessarily have to meet the current energy requirements.
The province wants to change that. They want to be able to take advantage of anything that comes under a permit to call for more stringent requirements. They are currently looking at drafts for this requirement. It may take a few years to put in place, but at least it's encouraging to see that it's not all focused on new buildings.
I briefly mentioned the work with the National Research Council in development of the National Energy Code of Canada for Buildings 2011. I'm sure many of you are aware of it. It's one of the most stringent codes, I would think, in North America if not the world. We haven't had a chance to benchmark it against the European standards, but I'm sure it's up there.
My attendance today was prompted in part, from what I understood from Marc-Olivier, by a report we did for Public Works in 2001, a study in which we were challenged to identify how we could improve office-type buildings, from meeting a model national energy code for 1997, which was a benchmark at that time.... A couple of the provinces adopted this as an energy requirement. Public Works wanted to go 60% to 70% beyond that, which is very stringent.
It was relatively easy to get to 25%, and we demonstrated that. Programs have evolved since. The commercial building incentive program, for example, required that buildings show 25% energy savings compared with that MNECB, the model national energy code for buildings.
The current national energy code for buildings, which I just mentioned, which NRC came out with in 2011, shows savings in buildings typically 25% greater than it does with the old MNECB 1997. Considerable progress has been made so I didn't want to spend a lot of time talking about a 12-year-old report, but rather where we've come since then.
That work did show it was relatively easy to show you could get a 25% saving compared to the old code, MNECB, without any incremental capital cost, and that was promising. Anything beyond that is a different matter. It can get more expensive.
As I said, that whole approach of achieving 25% greater savings was later used in incentive programs across the country.
Today that same premise is the basis for the Ontario building code energy requirements. One of the paths to compliance is showing that your building is 25% better than the MNECB. I wanted to point that out. I think it is probably one of the more stringent jurisdictional codes that I'm aware of. We've benchmarked it against ASHRAE 2010 in the United States, 189 ASHRAE, which is a high performance standard, and as I say, the only thing left is how it compares to Europe.
I probably have spent enough time talking about that sort of thing.
I mentioned in my background, which I understand everyone has, that I did a presentation to the Toronto chapter of the CaGBC on all this, how we've come over the years, where we're going with buildings, including net zero. There's a little about net zero in that presentation, and how we could achieve that in buildings.
By the way, ASHRAE in the United States, the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers, is targeting 2030 to be at net zero. I don't know whether they'll achieve that or not. That's a long way off.
One of the biggest challenges today in many areas—and I'll be concluding more or less with this point—is energy prices have changed dramatically since that 2001 study. The price of natural gas is 50% lower today than it was at that time. The price of electricity is double what it was at that time. I'm talking primarily certainly of the markets we looked at in that document. This has the effect of significantly increasing the payback periods associated with gas measures, if you want to save gas, while lowering payback periods for electricity measures.
Often when you do something in a building you're going to impact both electricity and gas use and you're depending on both to give you the savings you need to justify your capital investment.
I think you've already heard from the CaGBC, probably back in March when I couldn't make it, but it's making it very difficult to show a 25% cost reduction and beyond to get energy credits beyond the prerequisite in LEED because you can't depend the same on the gas savings because you're coming up with a percentage dollar saving.
I wanted to place that. That is something everyone is up against today, and any time we've looked at.... Recently, for example, the renovation study I mentioned we're doing for the code ministry in Ontario was one of the big issues we had. We had difficulty showing savings at a reasonable payback with the gas prices we had. Electricity is a different matter.
I think a lot of what we did in that old report that dated from 2001 would apply, for example, to existing Public Works buildings. A lot of the energy measures we've looked at there could of course be applied. There is an opportunity, especially if the buildings are undergoing equipment replacements, major renewals, or renovation.
That concludes my opening remarks. I hope I can address some questions you might have.
I want to thank all of our witnesses for coming here today.
Mr. Chair, sometimes I think we need to keep in mind certain things. First of all, when we hear the word “leadership”, it's a fair word to use, and I appreciate Mr. McCallum's mentioning leadership and asking what we would say should be done, but I have noticed that it is sometimes human nature, Mr. Chair, to forget what has gone on.
We've discussed the federal building initiative, which provides on average 15% to 20% in savings for every building that has been done. My colleague Mr. Trottier has pointed out that there seem to be fewer returns over time, because some of the low-hanging fruit, if you will, Mr. Chair, has gone away.
I've taken the time to visit NRCan's research development for building products. While it may not be as flashy as spending large amounts of money, which some opposition members might want to see in this area, what it does is it allows individual companies to bring forward new and innovative products, which they test here in Ottawa. They have two houses side by side. They will put an energy-efficient water heater in one side and then put a standard one in the other; then they'll test the two under very similar circumstances.
Rather than say that the federal government has not been taking leadership, I would argue that it's probably because we have such great and innovative building products that we get such great energy efficiency. Whereas Mr. Karakasis says that most new buildings are as energy efficient as can be, it's almost as though you would have to try in order not to be energy efficient, mainly because of the buildings.
There has also been some discussion regarding the waste disposal for particular items. Mr. Chair, I want to point out, as a former city councillor, that in the City of Penticton we work with our regional partners on landfills. One of the major challenges is that if you put greater regulation in place for getting waste to the landfill, construction materials, etc., you will actually create illegal dumping: you are adding to the costs of a retrofit. The whole point is that every time you retrofit, you get a better and more energy-efficient project in its stead.
Second, Mr. Chair, one of the issues when the materials go to landfills, whether they be private or publicly owned, is that the landfill owners feel rather pressed to allow individual groups, whether volunteer civic society groups or actual for-profit businesses, to collect and recycle those materials. Again there's not a want to see those things; it's legal protection and jurisdiction.
I am actually going to get to some questions today, Mr. Chair. I know that you and I can get into these discussions, and they get pretty heavy, but I'd like to speak to the gentleman from Alberta, Mr. Staszenski.
Mr. Staszenski, you mentioned that when a lease.... By the way, I appreciate your pointing out that leases are typically closed contracts: you can't just open them up. But there is a capacity for you to say to your landlord, if you want to improve their facilities, that you will pay for the extra costs and they will get a better building out of it when you're done with it.
You mentioned a 40% premium on some of these energy efficiency guarantees. Is that correct, sir?