 Good afternoon. So welcome to the webinar Clean Energy for a Green Economy. As mentioned, I'm Keri Pridmo with the Ministry of Community and Rural Development. The ministry is looking to deliver a web-based seminar on topics of interest and relevance to local government officials and other community leaders across BC. Our hope is that you'll find this webinar series provide an additional link with no information and enable discussions between experts, media, industry and government in an affordable and easily accessible manner. As Melissa already mentioned, this webinar will be recorded today and will be available on the rural BC website where you can use it as a lasting resource. And following today's webinar, we'll be seeking your feedback through a survey and also asking you about future topics of interest. So I'd like to introduce today's presenters. All of our presenters today are available online. Nobody's in here in the room here in Victoria. So first of all, Dave, sorry, Dale Littlejohn is the manager of Strategy and Outreach for the Community Energy Association. The first shot for local government leaders on climate and energy. For more than a decade, he's helped public and private sector organizations develop and implement energy strategies and efficiencies, excuse me. He collaborates with local government to identify opportunities for building a vibrant, connected future through responsible use of energy. Next we have Kanti Lachman, the business development officer for the economic development, economic development character. The previous lead to locating to the character region she was the economic development officer for students here for the Prince George. Kanti holds a bachelor's of science degree and an apartment assistant and has been chair of Lynx BC for four years. She's currently a member of EDA BC and president of the Vancouver Island Coastal Economic Developers Association. This is a rural green economic development. The couch and region is leading the way in applying traditional economic development practices to developing a new clean tech sector in the region. The conference has been muted. Next we're moving to David Johnson, who's the president of the Revelstoke Community Energy Corporation. He holds a PhD in chemistry from Simon Fraser University and has worked in post-secondary education for 33 years, including nine years as academic dean and two years as executive advisor at Vanier College in Montreal. And the nonprofit sector, David has served in various executive capacities, including president of the Canadian Railroad Historical Association. Since retiring to Revelstoke, David and his wife own and operate the Minto Manor Bed and Breakfast in one of Revelstoke's finest heritage homes. He has served on the board of the Revelstoke Community Energy Association shortly after his arrival at Revelstoke and assumed the presidency in June of 2006. I'm sorry you can't see David at this time. We're working on trying to get that video enabled, but you may just be able to hear him when the time comes. And lastly, we have Diana Brooks, one of our staff with the rural BC Secretariat. She's a regional manager for the Kootenai region. Her role involves facilitating, supporting, implementing economic and community economic development initiatives and projects in various communities, providing connections to provincial and federal government programs, services and initiatives, and building partnerships. She also works to identify and resolve local and regional issues, provide local and regional information to Victoria and liais of other ministries and agencies, and leverage development, sustainability, and diversification opportunities. So thank you to all the presenters for joining us today. We're just going to move to our agenda for the session. It includes some presentations from the three speakers, which will take approximately 40 minutes. We'll have at least 30 minutes for some questions and discussions, and then just five minutes to wrap up enclosure. I'd like to hand it over to Diana for the beginning. Thank you. Good afternoon. Can everybody hear me? Am I live now? Yes, that's great, Diana. Thank you very much. So good afternoon, everybody. It's my pleasure to begin this webinar today and to be speaking to you on behalf of the rural BC Secretariat. I would like to let you know about a soon-to-be-released rural BC Secretariat tool, the introductory e-guide book entitled Clean Energy for a Green Economy. This webinar today, it's based on this tool. It's a project that was initiated by my colleague, Chris Singh, Regional Manager for Vancouver, out in North Coast, and me. And it has been supported and funded by the BC Secretariat within the Ministry of Community and Rural Development. And it was also completed in collaboration with many of our colleagues and a lot of the other agencies and ministries that many of you have already worked with, such as Energy Minds, Petroleum Resources, Ministry of Environment, Climate Action Secretariat, Small Business, and the local government branch within our own ministry. All of these people are in the energy game, as we would say. And of course, our primary project partner on this initiative was Community Energy Association, whom you will hear speak after me today. Just to let you know that all participants who are on the webinar today will be notified when this e-guide book becomes available. As Regional Managers, we work and we live in rural BC. We work with communities, organizations, all levels of government and businesses. We are essentially a link to government. And as Carrie indicated, we provide assistance, information, support, partnership, and strategic guidance. And our work focus has a very wide range. It's from community and economic development strategies to project implementation, infrastructure funding, sourcing that out, partnership building, regional alliances, and community transitions. So over the past year, interest and activity in the renewable and clean energy arena has increased, particularly in rural BC, with rural communities. And the reasons for this increase, they are varied. We can see at the provincial or the BC level that communities are working on their greenhouse gas reduction targets. There's the implementation of the BC Energy Plan, the Climate Action Plan. There are a host of initiatives that are happening province-wide. This has set a very strong direction to achieve a low-carbon economy, and this has been an impetus. At the operational level, we're seeing communities undertaking conservancy and efficiency measures, and this may be just to assist their bottom line or for other reasons. There's also new technology that can substantially benefit local government operations. So these are some of the reasons that we're seeing for this interest in this activity. As we have been working on the ground with our clients, they told us, and we have noticed this as well, as those of us out in the field, that there is an abundance, almost an overabundance of great information and option out there, and it's coming from a variety of sources, such as agencies, ministries, organizations, businesses. And all of this is designed to assist communities and organizations and businesses with their projects and in their decision-making. There is a downside, however, I'm just going to change your slide here, becomes when you have the time to be able to sort through all the different initiatives, plans, acts, charters, tools that are out there. And you almost need a PhD to be able to assimilate the complexity of some of these decisions that center around which technology to use, what governance model to select, how are you going to finance it, and how can we actually achieve more economic objectives and return? So I could give you time to sort of look at everything I put up on the slide here, but this just illustrates sort of local government and the community world, and if you can picture yourself being on the bottom of this, you're looking up at all of this coming at you. And this is what people are reading, this is what they're trying to follow or they're implementing, and these are where they're taking their targets and some of the targets that they're working on. And I would like to say unfortunately that this is not an exhaustive list, this is just a snapshot of what is out there. So the challenge becomes, how do you make an informed decision and how do you realize the benefits to your community to your local or regional economy? How do you realize benefits to your operation? It certainly is challenging. And we found that, and it's particularly even more challenging if you're a smaller community or you have limited staff and resources. So our goal for both the e-guide book and today's webinar is to make it easier for you to access and navigate this information that is out there and to provide those direct links to detailed sources. For you to be able to understand your options, to provide you with some how-to examples, case studies, community peer examples, and we're pleased to be able to present several of those today. Inside we're also looking at how, what is your implementation framework? How can you get ready and assess if you have the capabilities to be able to engage in this? And lastly, we'd like to begin the discussion on how you can transition and leverage, integrate your energy-related projects and actions into some long-term economic goals. So today, it is with pleasure that we'll be exploring some of the renewable and clean energy strategies, looking at some of these assessment and readiness tools and variables, and examining that green economy piece. So at this time, it's my pleasure to be able to turn over the presentation to Dale Little-John with the Community Energy Association. Dale? Well, thank you very much, Diana, for that perspective on what's happening here. Let me just take my hat off here first. These web effects are great sometimes. But as you mentioned, we are with, I am with the Community Energy Association. We're a nonprofit society that has a mission to develop collaboratively, to develop capacity in local governments and collaboratively accelerate action on climate change. We have seven staff on Vancouver Island, the Lower Mainland, the Okanagan, and the Kootenays. We do a lot of research and education that's grant-funded. However, we recognize that grants can dry up sometimes and things like that. So we are an enterprising nonprofit, so that we aren't fully dependent on grant funding. We don't just do the research, we actually help communities implement through consulting services as well. We have a number of members, which you can see on the screen, and a good number of these members are actively involved in the topic that I'm going to be talking about today, which is really around district energy systems and how you can generate some economic development from that. In the center of the screen, we have the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, one of our recent members, who have some significant funding available, not only for studies of district energy systems, but also for capital. City of North Van, of course, has had their district energy system running for quite a while now. Burns Lake, Prince George and District of North Van are all involved in the process of trying to identify district energy opportunities and implement them. Of course, Erison and Corricks can help by owning the systems, so you don't have to put up any capital up front, and BC Hydro has significant grants available to help co-fund studies. And of course, some of our supporters are along the bottom, including Provinc to BC, which also has some grant programs that can be leveraged into studies, such as the infrastructure planning grant, which the Village of Midway is using to get us to do a district energy pre-feasibility study for them. So it doesn't just have to be the large area. This is a key theme going through this. So why should we be interested in district energy and economic development and things of this nature? Well, I try to explain it with this slide. With communities, we're dealing with very long-lived capital assets. You know, street layouts generally don't change once we put them in. Buildings and infrastructure can last for 20, 30, 40, 50 years or more. These assets are all going to be there as we go through the unavoidable surprises that we're going to see. If you're pessimistic about P-Foil, it's happened a couple years ago. If you're optimistic, it's going to happen by 2030. If you're a local government, it doesn't matter whether you're optimistic or pessimistic because it's still within the lifespan of the capital assets. So we have a really significant rethinking about how we eat and cool and move around without fossil fuels. So that's going to be a significant reworking and restructuring which will also require a lot of work to do. So there's a lot of activity starting to happen out there. There's leadership starting to happen with most communities having signed on to the Climate Action Charter. And of course this past Monday was the deadline to get GHG targets into official community plans. So the question now becomes how to meet those targets and use that action to help transition to a green economy. And that's really what the guide is about that Diana was mentioning. Clean energy for a green economy. This guide started out as a fairly small guide but of course things do tend to evolve. So we are covering seven different clean energy strategies in the guide. We have some extensive links to other information and in fact eight pages of links at the back of the guide. One of the innovative things that we did with this is for each of these strategies we created a four page council ready summary that simply goes through what the technology is and what identify opportunities and how to identify economic development opportunities. And I'm going to go through that in a little bit more detail. Of course it's not just about clean energy it's also about conservation and we'll get into that a little bit later as well. So when we talk about district energy well what is it? Simply put it is heating and or cooling more than one building. So sharing the heating and cooling systems between a couple of buildings ideally through renewable energy technologies. And there's some specific technical things that you can do with district energy systems that help enable a variety of renewable energy technologies things like building it on a hot water system rather than a steam system so that you have a greater variety of technologies that you can use to generate that heat without necessarily combusting something whether that's biomass or natural gas. Now one of the interesting things that we're seeing is the very, very significant amount of interest all across BC from one end to the other in district energy systems. We see a good number of systems starting to emerge in some of the larger centers such as Vancouver and Kelowna and others but we also see a great number of systems either under investigation or in the process of being implemented. Now you do need a certain amount of heat load to make a district energy system viable however even in some of the smaller centers this is possible. So just because you're in a small community it's not just because you don't be worried if you're small there may still be some significant opportunities there. So if we want to pursue these opportunities how do we go about doing that from a practical perspective? Well we kind of see four phases. There's some planning figuring out whether it makes sense to whether there is an opportunity there or not designing the system building and installing it and then the ongoing operations and of course we do deal with local governments a lot so we know that one of the first questions that comes up is where do we find the funding to actually do these things? And you're looking for different types of money in the different stages. The good news is that there is a good variety of grants across all these stages to help you particularly in the up front stages and BC Hydro in particular is just launching a program to co-fund district energy studies, Federation Canadian Missalities for the larger studies there's a great variety of other ones as well and these are all detailed in our funding guide which a new version of is coming out over the next couple of weeks so stay tuned on our website for that for a detailed list of all the funding opportunities here. Now thinking a little bit more about the planning component well one of the things that we've done in this guide in those four-page summaries of energy strategies is we go through a number of questions designed to get that initial first blush as to well is this something that's worth further investigation so thinking through are there low-cost sources of heat that has some long-term availability? Long-term availability is interesting particularly when you're starting to think through the finances the longer-term finances of the program just because there is biomass available today doesn't necessarily mean that next year or five years from now you're going to have access to that same biomass unless you have some agreements in place similarly if you have some opportunities with a large industrial operation that has waste heat that's close to other buildings well that could be a great opportunity there there's also huge potential to collaborate across the public sector remembering of course that the provincial government all schools, hospitals, crowns, colleges and universities all have a commitment to being carbon neutral in their operations and all these organizations have buildings across all of BC that can be used as essentially a nice anchor for these systems as they start to grow out into the community so this is a summary of some of the questions that we've got in the district energy piece in the guide now if we want to delve a little bit deeper and get into developing a report that could be presented to council to help them make the decision around should we invest a significant amount of money to get through a detailed design or feasibility study well the process that we've gone through with a number of local governments including governments such as Langley or Kelowna or the one that we're going through now with Midway is we start by looking at the demand so where is the heat requirements across the community are there pockets where you've got some dense stable loads of heat demand and what are the specific location specific renewable heat sources and this really does get location specific then go through what are the specific technologies the financial implications and what kind of supporting policies are required do you need a development permit area, a service area or other options in there to ensure a connection and we also look through the utility options the structure of utilities and the governance does the local government own it do you get Terrison or Cortex or someone else to come in and own and operate it and then developing an integrated plan so that's going to kind of towards the next step in terms of level of detail of answering those questions around does it make sense here and that's kind of the green energy or the clean energy side looking at the green economy opportunities across this we see opportunities in each of the phases of project development in the planning and designing and even across some of the other phases working with the local colleges to help develop expertise in designing these systems or building skill sets also collaborating with scientific technology councils across BC and there's a good number of workforce development opportunities across these different phases as well as going beyond workforce opportunities into things like an as community profile and branding if the community wants to attract some of the green economy companies and again this is what this guide is designed to do it's provided a practical how to on a lot of this because we're seeing a lot of the major centers communities like City of Toronto, Chicago, Vancouver and Surrey doing really great things on green economic development strategies but this guide is intended more for the communities who may not have quite the same level of resources as the big players now one of the specific opportunities with the district energy system is the potential to re-circulate some money within the community just taking a look at a number of different communities looking at community-wide gas consumption from the community energy and emissions inventory that the province of BC has put together and recently released updated versions of we can see how much natural gas is being used across a number of communities and through taking a very high level estimate of $10 a gigajoule we can see the total amount that's being spent in these communities so even in a community of 5,000 people you could easily see $800,000 of energy spending now would re-circulating some of that in the local economy make a difference in terms of economic development? Well, possibly we think there's great opportunities to build and strengthen local economies through taking climate action now, again, I mentioned that there were opportunities at all stages both on the clean energy streams but also on the bottom of this slide more on the conservation opportunities this is the bottom of the slide here is where we're looking at building energy efficiency retrofits and things of that nature so similar about slightly different stages and similar about slightly different opportunities and again, there's huge opportunity for significant workforce development and job opportunities when you think of the number of buildings in your community that could benefit from energy efficiency retrofits now there's a number of tools that local governments can use to encourage those retrofits but there's also potentially roles for other levels of government in that in this as well so getting into beyond, again, the simple workforce development opportunities you could essentially use these projects to stimulate the green market or support the growth of existing green businesses that are potentially involved in the design or implementation of some of these technologies and getting the word out that your community is a green one and could attract other companies and businesses that want to be involved with that sector so, again, we have a detailed how-to action on reactant link development related to green energy in this guide and it starts to go beyond a project so how do you use a project to start to develop a sector or an economy overall and so that's a brief introduction to the guide and some of the thinking behind it it will be at least hopefully in the near future and I look forward to answering some questions after this and with that I will let introduce Kathy to talk about all the cool stuff that's happening in Cowichan and over to you Kathy Great, thanks Dale I'm going to give a brief example of some of the initiatives that we're doing around clean technology and I'll just give you a little bit of background we're located in the Cowichan region on Vancouver Island between the Nymo and Victoria Economic Development Cowichan is an in-house economic development arm of the Cowichan Valley Regional District we are mostly funded by the CVRD we are a fairly small office we have three people that work in economic development and we serve as a population of about 80,000 people over a very large geographic area we're made up of small communities in terms of our governance structure we have four municipalities and nine electoral areas so we have a fairly complex local government traditionally we have been a forestry and resource-based economy and we are seeing that transitioning into more of a retail and service-based economy our main sectors that are our growth sectors are agriculture and tourism and back in 2008 we identified clean technology as an emerging sector that we could use to diversify our economy so this is an overview of some of the things that I'm going to be talking about and the process that we used to roll out our clean technology strategy and I'll talk a bit about the research that we did some of the setting the stage putting in the ground work creating demand, creating supply forming the partnerships that we needed some of the challenges that we are running into I'll use a realized example of a couple of companies that we're working with as well as some of the next steps this is just for the beginning of a process for us so in terms of the research we commissioned two reports clean technology reports one and two they were 50% funded by Invest Canada Community Initiative the first report identified the clean technology sector in our region we really had no idea what businesses we had who were working on clean technology and we identified through the report 14 companies that were actively working on clean technology initiatives everything from wastewater treatment to advanced building components to renewable energy the second report focused on energy and we looked at specifically taking the existing resources that we have in our region and exploring some of the business opportunities that may be attached to that the report also identified that we have few local markets in our region for renewable energy products so we knew we had to create the demand side as well as the supply side in the work that we were going to do so ultimately we are focusing on waste to energy, solar, waste wood wind as potential energy sources and we're also looking at biogas because we do have a fairly vibrant agriculture industry we also put together a clean technology advisory committee made up of representatives from Community Futures the Environment Commission interested stakeholders in the community who had an interest in looking at clean technology so to provide some of the framework we used our existing business retention and expansion program called Talchin First to identify companies in the region to talk to about some of the challenges we're having some of the energy uses that they're currently using and how they could switch over their systems to renewable energy systems we also are working very closely with the CVRD in terms of their regional energy plan that they are creating and we're working with the political and regulatory environment to ensure that there are no barriers to having clean energy and clean technologies in our region we're encouraging local governments to look at local solutions to local problems we feel that that's a sustainable model for us and education we just can't be learning enough right now about what's going on Diana showed the slide earlier of all the little bubbles of what's going on and it's a challenge to keep up with what's happening but we're constantly trying to learn about what's the newest, the best and what programs we could encourage in our region funding for our program other than the ICCI dollars that we've received for the studies we have a very small budget for clean technology it is part of our core budget so we're making do with what resources we can bring to the table so in terms of creating demand we are working with as I mentioned our existing businesses to convert their existing energy needs to renewable energies we're also working with the political and institutional organizations to incorporate clean energy into new and existing public buildings this includes waste to energy which is a big one right now and we see it as a wonderful opportunity waste is becoming a commodity so our position is to capture that commodity rather than exporting it elsewhere new developments we have some fairly substantial new residential developments on the books to come into the college and there is talk to require alternative energy systems incorporated into those developments we haven't done that but it's certainly something that's under discussion and local organizations we've identified a number of local organizations in our region that are also working on the demand side they're creating awareness they're going out and they're talking to people they're talking about solar they're talking about all different types of things that the general public can do that will help raise demand for renewable energy products and includes the CVRD Environment Commission the Couch and Carbon Busters Couch and Energy Alternatives so we need to make sure that we're plugged into what they're doing so creating supply we are encouraging the use of solar, biomass, wind in new developments we're also identifying existing resources and developing opportunities and business cases so that we can raise the supply of renewable energies in our region and an example of that is wood waste we've identified a significant opportunity in terms of taking that wood waste and creating a renewable energy product out of that we are marketing that opportunity to new investors and we're getting out there in the marketplace and saying here's the opportunity we've created the regulatory environment for a new industry to come in and develop some new energy technologies we're also marketing our existing businesses and existing technologies to a wider audience and we're assisting those companies in attending key trade shows so that they can expand their markets now we can't do this alone and we understand that it's very important to create those partnerships and link in wherever we can and looking at all levels of government looking at the BC Bioenergy Network, Solar BC looking at areas where we can link in LynxBC which is the EBABC Economic Development Association of British Columbia's Investment Attraction Farm we're linking into their Clean Technology Initiative as well so some of the challenges that we have faced and we are in many ways still facing there certainly is a reluctance at the local level to use local technologies and resources a lot of these technologies are new and local governments do tend to be risk averse and so getting some of our local technologies into local government systems has been challenging electricity costs are sometimes prohibitive to renewables with the current prices that BC Hydro will pay for renewable energies retrofits of existing businesses to retrofit them into a renewable energy source can be very costly and as I said many of the technologies are new and improved it takes a lot of time to wade through a lot of these technologies and figure out what's going to be the best one for your community. So an example as I mentioned before we have to kind of grow the demand side and the supply side at the same time so we are working with some greenhouse operators in our region who are currently burning natural gas or propane to heat their greenhouses and we've approached them to say hey is there a way we can look at using renewables as a heat source for your operations? At the same time we have an existing wood operation who has a fair amount of waste fiber who's saying I'd really like to develop this waste fiber and do something useful so we're matching the greenhouse operator to the waste fiber folks and saying okay let's develop a pellet or a putt or some other energy products from that wood waste that then could be fed into the greenhouse operations. So next steps as I mentioned we're just at the beginning of figuring out what we're doing but we do know that we will be developing a green economic development strategy incorporating here's the new buzzword triple bottom line into the activities that economic development college will be doing the economic social and environment and so we will be looking at existing strategies transforming into new strategies industry attraction looking at local quality of life industry expansion looking at industry efficiency how can we make our existing companies more efficient building infrastructure looking at that and saying how can we reduce waste recycle workforce attraction into workforce development we need to ensure that our existing workforce is employed and is providing the skills into the new clean energy marketplace resource extraction we would like to as a new strategy go into eco restoration and renewable energy and the last one land inventory transitioning into urban form and some green building operations so that is the end of my presentation and I would like to turn it over to David Johnson this time. Good afternoon everybody I'm David Johnson president of the Rebels Oak Community Energy Corporation Dale has given us an excellent overview of the step-by-step process which you can go through to actually look at feasibility and then develop some good opportunities I think Kathy has taken us through the step-by-step process that College in Valley has actually been through and what they're looking to do in the near future and I get the privilege of taking you through an actual operation the Rebels Oak I'm just trying to get my slide to advance here what's this doing here? Hi I can change it for you as you like Next slide The Rebels Oak Community Energy Project is a heat only project it consists of a 1.5 megawatt biomass boiler and a backup of 1.75 megawatt propane it uses the wood waste from the downy mill interestingly enough the waste is in quotes there for a very important reason at the time RCEC was established the waste was truly a waste product there was no market for it so we were an opportunity for them to dispose of some of their waste product they now of course can sell cedar bark down into the states for commercial ground cover and various other things so in fact the waste is no longer waste but it's just one of the supply one of the products they produce and one of the supply side items that we have to worry about what our biomass boiler does is it actually heats hot oil the hot oil passes through a steam generator which produces steam for sale to the downy dry killings and then it also produces hot water through heat exchangers and through a 2.3 kilometer piping system we heat the major buildings in the core of the city of Revelstoke and next slide the plant building is on quarter acre land donated by downy mills and the fuel bin is at the back of it and it's very convenient being located literally on the mill site because the mill actually delivers the fuel to us by front end loader and dumps it in the fuel bin which is equipped with a walking floor to use it forward into the screws that feed the combustor next slide please inside the plant you'll see on the left hand picture on the left hand side of the picture is a KMW biomass boiler it's nice and clean and that picture is fairly early on in its existence next to it behind the second black column is the steam generator tube bundle and so the hot oil comes down one of the silver pipes passes into it and passes out through the other and then passes on to the hot water heat exchanger to generate the hot water and behind all of that the red and the blue is the propane backup boiler the pipeline then is shown on the right hand side the pipes are insulated and they contain a leak detection system an electrical system that will pinpoint fairly accurately if there is ever a leak in the system as to exactly where that leak is next slide please why we undertook this project in Revelstoke back they actually started looking at it as early as 1999 and the plant finally came online in 2005 is the Downey mill was using a silo burner to burn its waste product it was polluting the air and Revelstoke is in a very narrow valley so the air quality was suffering from that so we helped both Downey mills and the silo burner and we improved the air quality at the same time and we also have eliminated about 3400 tons per year of greenhouse gas that has been either from the silo burners or from the propane that we've displaced it provides an alternate energy source for city and private buildings and it actually provides a non-taxable non-tax source of city revenue incremental plant expansion actually is an opportunity and we've been in existence five years now and we're at the point of looking at how we should go about the expansion or the next phase of the energy cooperation project so we're taking this waste wood product we're adding value to it we're gathering revenue from both the heat and from the steam produced and it is keeping in Ravelstock as opposed to shipping it out and so next slide please we provide a number of advantages as to most district energy systems one is the long-term stable energy pricing to our customers we entered into energy supply agreements with our customers where we guarantee that their price of energy will increase by only the rate of increase in the cost of living index in BC for the next 20 years and in addition to that our customers no longer have need for a boiler a boiler room or maintenance of the boiler room and boiler and it saves space and actually saves some cost and it provides a win-win solution of course to the waste wood product probably in Ravelstock next slide please as I said earlier this is a heat only project we initially looked at doing a combined heat and power system but it was simply too expensive for a community the size of Ravelstock to undertake from scratch so the heat only project cost $7 million in total we spent $3 million on the plant and equipment associated with that simple plant we spent $2 million on the community energy system and about $1.1 million for the actual energy transfer stations in the various buildings that came online that brings us to another advantage to our system in that we actually cover the capital costs for buildings to actually come online with district energy that means there is no upfront capital cost is then calculated into their energy rates down over the next 20 years and finally there was development costs and construction, etc before we actually started producing steam where did it all come from we're extremely fortunate in Ravelstock for a number of reasons one we have a community forest corporation they're managed by a holding company and they advance the loan of $1.25 million to the energy corporation no interest the city invested $1.2 million of capital preferred shares in the purchase in which they're getting 7% interest on the green funds a loan that's 1.35 million 3.5% roughly and the credit union loan that's 1 million that's the only money we had to borrow on the open market and the green funds also extended their grant of $1.81 million to the project finally from VC we were able to add $5 million terms for tomorrow grant to it to give us the necessary funds for the project next slide please we as it stands now the simple payback for the investment is about 13 years originally it was estimated that it would take 10 years to payback the investment our return on investment has dropped from what was originally forecast to 5.3% and the return on equity is now at 8.8% down from 13.8% there are a number of reasons and we'll get into some of those later on why we didn't achieve our target there next slide please our experience in actually doing this project is that we came in about 2% over budget and this is quite good considering that we're building at the height of construction boom period so we were quite good at keeping costs under control up to the time of commissioning we then ran into a number of operating problems which of course weren't budgeted for they never are and this is part of the problem of new startups anyway we ended up with water in the thermal oil which does the oil and water doesn't mix so that led to problems we had heat exchanger failures they simply weren't robust enough and we actually had to change out several of the heat exchangers before we could proceed we had a fairly steep integration the fuel feed had to be modified for the kind of stock we were getting we can burn either chips sawdust or hog fuel if it's properly chopped up but each require a different adjustment on the boiler in the oxygen flow and the rate of feed we did not meet the first 2 years revenue projections and this was largely because we didn't build out our system in the first 2 years the funding and the customers just weren't ready to undertake it at that time we are now fully built out for the first phase of the expansion and all of the above problems basically cost us money to fit so we came in not producing the revenue that we expected in the first 3 or 4 years of the project next slide please other problems we encountered the generator and combustion pipe in the burner itself corroded this pipe having proper water treatment and we had to replace the pipe in the combustor and that was partially because of a leak caused by interior refractory and that happened in year 4 it shouldn't have happened until about year 10 there was a small fire in the hydraulics room in December of last year offline but with the propane backup we were able to continue to supply continuously the district energy heating system part of our problem with building out the entire system was that there is a distinct lack of awareness of district energy in certain key federal and provincial government departments give you an example just one example of this it took probably 7 years from the initial contact and 3 years from the time that federal government said they were going green to actually get the federal government to sign on to district energy it just is a very lengthy tedious process even though the politicians were saying we're going to be green we had to go with the salt oil loop system because if we'd gone to a straight steam generation system at the size that we were looking at we would have had to have 24-7 staffing in a plant and the salt plant just simply can't afford that so we used the oil loop to get around that particular problem next slide please I won't go through all of these some things when you're talking to people they have difficulty understanding what is the seasonal boiler efficiency you put a boiler on run it at constant load it works very very well manufacturers will tell you they work at 92-95% efficient when they actually get in use and you're cycling them on and off up and down in terms of temperature you're actually using heat to actually heat up the system each time so the actual heat output from the system drops so your boiler efficiency drops most customers won't admit that actually happens and so we have to be careful on how you approach customers make sure they understand that sort of thing so that you can get them to actually sign into and buy into district energy system I won't do anything else on that next slide please what about the future well we're extremely fortunate with RCEC we have a very good corporate citizen in Downey they entered into a 20-year fuel supply agreement with the energy corporation and that will run out in 15 years time we have to be able to cover the cost of actually buying feedstock at that point in time or what happens if in fact the mill closes and they continued operating throughout the recent downturn but there's no guarantee there forever if we move on to expand the plant or the system and or the system it's going to cost money we're going probably borrowing that in commercial markets or pursuing other grants for a plant that already exists and that may be more difficult than doing borrowing for start-up and as things warm up in Rebel Stokes the new schools coming online for instance in the next couple of years are looking for cooling should RCEC be looking at adding cooling capacity to its district energy system that's something that some places might be very interested in looking at when they get actually at the design phase and then of course there is the question of what is the minimum size of project to get good economies of scale I won't speculate on that at the present time I would say ours is at the minimum effective size other challenges is expensive to hook up individual residences of heat exchanger in each building you have the piping into it you have the heat exchanger you get a heat exchanger in a plenum of a forced air furnace or a heat exchanger in a hot water heating system they're both problems again I won't go through everything in Rebel Stokes the major competition for green energy has been ground source heat pumps engineers know and understand them to a certain extent they recognize that they were within the lead standard system district energy was added to the lead standards as an addendum and a number of difficulties making the transition to understanding how district energy can in fact improve the lead standards for new buildings so that's the current concern for us next and why were we successful well as the saying goes necessity is the mother of invention we were extremely fortunate to have a council who has been extremely committed to improving the community here in Rebel Stoke they have gone through the establishment of Rebel Stoke Community Forest Corporation saw that that was a great job generator they knew the mills were in trouble and they needed a way to get rid of their waste wood so the energy corporation was part of that solution the interest of council continues in fact we're just engaged the consultants and about to launch the community energy and emissions plan here for Rebel Stoke and under that plan the energy corporation is playing a major role and we hope to be able to base it on for the next five years on what comes up under the CEEP we were extremely fortunate that the green funds were coming online with their grants and financing programs and other programs were coming online as we were looking for money to actually do this the community was behind the project they wanted the air improvement they wanted the climate improvement to actually occur and they were willing to do it however none of this would have happened if we didn't have Dr. Jeff Battersby who was the project and is still very much the project champion he was the fellow who jumped in there and actually worked with council to get them to understand the advantages of community energy worked with the individual companies and buildings that joined up to the district energy system and worked very closely with the Downey Mills project we were lucky to have good consultants and FBB and good staff and we were just lucky that this all came together at the same time and as I mentioned before we're extremely fortunate to have a good corporate citizen in Downey Timber they gave the plant site to the energy corporation they provided a 20 year fuel supply agreement delivered to the fuel bin for free for getting rid of waste product from the beginning and they have struck to that commitment and are seeing it through they also signed a 20 year contract to purchase steam energy from the plant so we have a client who is willing to take about 50% of our heat project right there across the street in the kilns at the Downey Mills and they were willing to work with us and provide a long operator on a 50-50 share to actually operate the plant and so we got an excellent plant operator out of them as well so everything fell into place very very nicely would we do it again yes we've had our headaches we've had our challenges it's always a challenge to keep a plant running in a small community but I think we would do it again and be very pleased to do that next I shall preview of Revelstoke Community Energy and I'd be happy to answer specific questions either now or later so thank you very much turn it back over to Melissa great thank you to all of the presenters those were very informative presentations we have a couple discussion questions to perhaps get you started of course you may have developed some questions on your own so just to remind some of the late comers to this webinar that for this discussion if you look to the right-hand corner and see a green square if you turn that purple we'll see that you have a question and we'll address you by name and then you can pose your question I'm going to try unmuting all of the lines right now so you don't have to each be hassled with unmuting your lines but if we experience some feedback I'll have to re-mute the conference has been unmuted one so go ahead Jim I don't know if maybe I missed it but could you tell me how many buildings and what kind of square footage your plant is heating David Johnson here answering that question we currently have about ten buildings on the system and they range everything from the aquatic center as being the largest heat load through to manor bed and breakfast which is the smallest heat load which is only 4500 square feet the economics really isn't there to put anything smaller than that on the system so we heat the current high school we just signed entering into the agreement with the school district to heat the new elementary high school that is going to be replacing that high school we heat the arena the outer space federal building one of the bigger motels in the downtown area so those are the kinds of things that we currently have on our system great David Pat, did you have a question I did thanks David thanks for the presentation and congratulations to Rebel Stoke once again for your leadership there have you calculated what the economics of the system would be if you had to pay for your fuel yeah we have we would probably have gone with higher energy rates from the beginning and that creates a problem we did guarantee the rates would all be 5% less than the pipe in which we were displacing and so it would have cut down that margin the way it works now is that we have this first period of time where we are actually paying off the loans and then we will be in a position to have fuel so it's sort of phasing in the financial offensive foundational side of things that way so it works quite well for us to do it this way any other questions from any of the other attendees any other questions that's actually Ted Sheldon in the room he's going to close the question to David thank you hi Melissa yeah Ted Sheldon climate action secretary here thanks very much Diana Kathy Dale David awesome presentations very much appreciate it question to Kathy if I can Kathy you mentioned the clean tech advisory committee just to what extent do you envision them playing influencing and providing advice do you see that as a very high priority for the committee we see them playing a very easy and political role within our community as well as raising awareness of the importance of the work that we're doing so yes they're going to play a very important role so they're an advisory committee amongst other things to the regional energy by themselves they haven't been yet the regional energy plan is in a very early stage but there will be opportunity for consultation and the group will be part of that consultation process thanks very much while we're waiting for other questions to be generated I just wanted to highlight that we do have the resources that Dale alluded to here with of course the wine guide pending and the contact information for the presenters on the last slide so feel free to change your feedback to purple if you had any questions or wanted to respond to the discussion questions posed here do you have another question Pat? I do thanks Melissa and this one's to Kathy and Kathy congratulations to Cowichan on your leadership in this clean energy sector can you talk a bit more about local government the challenge with the local government being risk averse and how you have been overcoming that is it is it simply a matter of education and if so how are you doing that how are you approaching that or are there other aspects to thanks Pat for your question and I don't know that it is an issue that we have yet overcome I think it is typical of local government that they are risk averse and that they they want to explore every option before moving ahead with the strategy and I think the comment relates very much to the waste energy initiative in terms of the technologies that are out there and what's going to be the best solution for the Cowichan region in terms of dealing with their waste and so it's I don't know that I have a really good answer for that I think it's a challenge to get local governments to step outside in terms of embracing some of these technologies we are encouraging the politicians to look at especially local solutions and local technology what tends to happen is we have some very innovative companies in our region who end up exporting their technology to other regions in the world who are embracing the technology but we're not embracing it here so I think it's an ongoing education I think you're right, we need to educate our politicians and point out that to be truly sustainable we need to look at local solutions for some of our local solutions I'm just going to mute all the lines again there's just some distracting background noise the conference has been muted so just to remind you to respond both to the presenter than the attendees you need to press star 7 to unmute your individual line so Kathy if you weren't quite finished Laurie just press star 7 yes I think I was did Pat did that answer your question? yes thanks Kathy so we have these excellent presenters online for another 20 minutes if you have questions David Mills has one I'll remember you press star 7 David to pose your question I'm muted now I actually had a quick question for Dale Dale you mentioned briefly that you've been working with the Village of Midway to develop some sort of energy plan and I was just wondering what type of if you run into any problems with scale in that community and how you'd be dealing with those yes we've been working with the Village of Midway looking at district energy opportunities and heat sharing opportunities and one of the really interesting things about that is that even in a small center Midway is not a large community along highway 3 there does look like there's some really small opportunities to share heat in at least two or three buildings there and quite possibly a few others they have a fairly small downtown kind of area there's an arena a community center and a few other buildings there's a senior's facility there I think a couple of other public sector buildings all located within a block or two of each other so it looks like we could find some opportunities there we're looking right now the strongest opportunities are looking like waste heat opportunities the ice rink that they've got there's also a strong potential for geo exchange we're looking at the soil conditions right now in the drilling records to see if that might be valuable there beyond that we're also going to take a quick look at the building scale opportunities even if there's not an opportunity for large scale district energy systems it's probably not going to be quite as big as a rebel system there's always opportunities at least in all the communities that we've looked at so far for building scale opportunities so think of things like solar hot water solar BC this program is currently going on where local governments can get up to 50% funding from the various solar BC grants for solar hot water systems on their own buildings but that's an opportunity for individual residences we see in the Okanagan entire new single detached subdivisions going in with individual geo exchange systems that's being done at a cost that really isn't significantly more to the purchasers so there's a number of opportunities there and there's opportunities that we've seen in communities at all scale does that answer your question? I'm just unmuted for such a thanks Dale that's great Hi Rachelle did you have a question? Star 7 to unmute your line Hello Hi thank you I do have a question for Dale and it's about what he just mentioned about some of the single family subdivisions that are being created I think it was in the interior I can't remember now where exactly it was but have you seen any of those types of subdivisions on individual geo exchange and the heat pumps that are operated by local governments or is it all with a different utility company for that question there's a number of subdivisions going in in the Okanagan in a couple different communities Sun Rivers is one that did that there's also some subdivisions going in in Kelowna and I believe a couple other communities out there you've seen most of them being owned by an apple asset company like Geotility or others like that I know Corix has been involved in a few of those there's nothing to prevent a local government from becoming involved in that and setting up a distributed energy utility we're seeing a lot of local governments owning their own district energy utilities there's some advantages and disadvantages there there's the ability to rate at what the local government wants to in order to create the rate signals whether that's getting more people onto the system or encouraging conservation when the local government is running an energy utility we'll have to go through the BC Utilities Commission whereas when a private sector company is running it we have to go through there now having said that it also provides some exposure for the local government when they're setting energy prices as well local governments are more comfortable with that than others but I haven't seen it specifically owned by local governments but there's no reason why one couldn't thank you I'm just going to jump back in what might be the problem with setting energy prices I didn't quite understand what you meant there well one of the concerns that I've seen from a number or from at least one or two local governments is if you own the energy utility and council is approving prices for energy for a portion of their population and prices are going up for instance to meet the capital requirements and operational requirements of the utility that could provide for a little bit of political exposure for council but I think there's often ways to manage that but it is a concern that comes up is that something that's being highlighted in your community or hi we're doing our regional energy plan right now we have a couple of people in our area on the political side and within the local government who are very keen to move forward on something like this or the distributed energy and we're just waiting our way through it right now and figuring out what might be a good project more closely at one potential advantage the local government municipality or district wants to get into that game is that they could potentially establish a distributed energy utility that could generally look at owning the physical assets for a variety of technologies so not necessarily just geoxchange but also potentially solar hot water or other types of systems urging the users back for the energy that they get from that so it would be a way to create change across a couple of different areas thank you thank you we'll just give you a few more minutes to see if there are any other questions out there I think we're hearing that probably there are no more questions at this time so I'd just like to jump in and thank the presenters for joining us today and all the participants that have been on the line very much appreciate your participation just want to remind you that we will be following up for the survey after the webinar and we look forward to the feedback that you'll provide and any suggestions and a reminder that in the top right hand corner where there's the three notes sheets there is a copy of the presentation for you to download if you're interested and it'll only be available during this session while we're live of course you could get it afterwards but this is kind of the easiest way to get it while we're here you might want to take an opportunity to have a look there so with that we're going to say thank you and we're going to plan off so thanks to everybody for joining us