SME Workshop | Dream's Net Zero Target and the Technology Involved

Lee Hodgkinson, Head of Sustainability & Technical Services at Dream Unlimited and, also at Dream, Nick Dumoulin, Smart Building Technology Manager dive deep into Dream's Net Zero Target and the Technology Involved.

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Recording

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Transcript

Lee Hodgkinson  00:00

We're retrofitting buildings to become moreenergy efficient, as well as actually designing, installing and commissioningbuilding automation systems. So kind of really hands on background. In mycurrent role, I oversee about 30 million in annual capital budgets to improveasset value building operations, energy performance, and generally keep thebuildings going. And then I also, as part of that sustainability piece, leadESG strategic planning and integration across the jury all dream companies. Andthat includes the leading the net zero Working Group, which we're going to diginto a fair bit today. And I'll just note that this is actually my second time,James on presenting to this community, if you will, and it was the last one, Ithink was over a year ago. And that's actually where Nick and I first met. Andso yeah, thanks to the Nexus community, for putting us in touch at the time, Iwas struggling to move along the smart building program at Dream by myself. AndI was like, I need some help. And enter Nick, I'll let you go.

Nicholas Dumoulin  01:08

Thanks. What a wonderful introduction, Lee. Soyeah, my name is Nicolas. I am the smart building technology manager at dream.So I was brought on the team from Lee, like you mentioned through ourconnection through Nexus, about a month ago, I have background in H backcontrols was a building automation, you know, contractor for a good chunk of mycareer. I'm also an engineer by trade, studied sustainable, renewable energyengineering, so decarbonizing buildings is very much passionate myself, whichwas, you know, one of the main reasons that drew me to dream in first place.And so yeah, I'm responsible for all the operational technology going into ourbuilding. So you know, H back control, lighting controls, occupancy, sensing,indoor air quality, fire alarms, access control, CCTV, pretty much any of thetechnology we're putting in our building, to help operate and manage it, I havesome part to play in. So been kind of getting up to speed and pushing thatprogram along in the last little while. So with that, I'm gonna just share ourslides and we'll jump right in.

Lee Hodgkinson  02:29

Yeah, so what I'll do is I'll first kind of givean overview of dream. You know, sometimes I feel like we're the best keptsecret that's, you know, not that small anymore. But, you know, I think we'vegrown a lot since my time at dream. So I have to even, you know, keep in mind,all of that. But these days, you know, we're currently up to a $22 billiongroup of real estate companies. This includes dream office REIT, dream,industrial REITs dream impact, trust, dream, unlimited, and dream residential.REITs. Nick, let's go to the next slide. Sorry. Yeah. All right. Yeah, awesome.So yeah, five publicly traded companies, you know, much bigger than most peoplethink we are. But, you know, we're why best kept secret in Canada. On the nextslide, you'll see part of our geographic reach even, which is, you know, wespend Canada, US and EU. And what I love about this is it gives us the, youknow, access to, you know, a wide range of buildings, a wide range of owners,like, you know, like building owners that we bought from and that we work with,as well as tenants as well. And this helps us also learn some of the bestpractices for decarbonisation from this kind of wide and diverse range ofstakeholders. And so of course, Today, our focus is on net zero. And so let mejust kind of take a step back into defining what our commitments are, you know,dream office three dream impact, trust and dream Unlimited, are all committedto net zero scope one and scope two and select scope three emissions by 2035.Dream industrial read is committed to net zero scope one and two by 2035. Andthen select scope three by 2050. And, you know, when we set these commitments,we had to acknowledge the very different nature of industrial buildings and whois controlling those emissions versus office buildings and apartment buildings.So so that's why there's actually that difference there in the in thecommitments. As you can also see, we've set interim targets to 20% by 2025 and50% by 2030. This of course, is 15 years ahead of the current Paris Agreement.climate scenarios. And, you know, our thinking here is we just, we can't alljust set our alarm clocks of 2050. And expect to be on time, we need to showmeaningful progress in advance of that. So we're happy to not just be talkingthe talk, but also kind of walking the walk. On the next slide, you'll see someof our netzero developments. So this one is Zippy in Ottawa, Canada's capital.This is a 34 acre, master planned waterfront community 44 buildings once it'sdone, and we've been developing this since 2015. So we've already got severalbuildings online. This is, this community has zero carbon district energy forheating and cooling. And it's really cool. The, the heating system leverageswaste heat from a nearby paper mill that they used to just dump that heat rightinto the river. And the cooling system uses actually the Ottawa River as acooling source. So this enables the 1000s of people that will call ZigBee homeand their workplace to have a low carbon footprint just by, you know, being apart of that community. Adjacent to ZigBee, we were also selected to develop leBreton flats, the first piece of LeBreton Flats, this is a 2.7 acre to towerdevelopment. And it will be one of the largest residential zero carbon buildingcertified buildings in Canada once it's built. And this one, for instance,we're looking to use a sewer heat recovery system to provide the low heating,low carbon heating and cooling. And one of our other more interesting projectswould be quayside. You guys might recall that Google and alphabet were tryingto build a smart city up in Canada, in Toronto in particular, they backed outof that for various different reasons. But we were selected to actually takeover that development. So this will also be a netzero community forest. So thiswill be 12 acres, 4000, residential units, 800, affordable housing units, andit's all going netzero. And a big chunk of it's going to be actually masstimber. So this kind of gives you an overview of the over $6 billion in netzero communities that we're developing. I'll just take a moment there to saylike, what it is Net Zero, though, everybody's going to define this thing alittle bit differently. And so I've thrown a couple examples here of how somepeople define it, and what you guys should all be cognizant of when you hearnet zero, or GHG, neutral or carbon negative and things like that. And youknow, what's most important, what I'll flag is, people need to actually defineit, and then they need to hold themselves accountable on it, it can't just be,we'll figure it out later. So I'm gonna keep rolling through this. Yeah. So,you know, what I wanted to just kind of also get a set up expectations for thegroup is, you know, when you see a commitment, you know, we believe that there'sgot to be five elements to that commitment for you to really say, Okay, this isa credible commitment. This is, you know, you know, something that isachievable, and also, you know, meaningful, like, you know, worth investing inor worth listening to, right. And so in those those five kind of componentsthat we think about, hey, there's got to be the targets and milestones. Sowe've talked about that already, you know, 2035 100%, and what are your interimtargets as well. But then the next thing is an investment boundary investmentboundary clearly defines, like, what is in scope of this commitment? Because ifit's, if you're saying we're going to be net zero, and it only covers 1% ofyour assets, like, that's not really a good commitment, right. So we've beenvery clear on what this commitment is. And, in fact, you know, when we do theaccounting on this, our net zero commitment, you know, currently covers about60 plus percent of all of our assets under management. And that's a very highpercentage in the market. But again, really want to make sure people arecognizant of this as a KPI to really think about another piece is an hourrequirement of a commitment and other key pieces and emissions boundary, whatemissions are in scope, what emissions are not in scope, people that don't tellyou that again, maybe like 90% of their emissions footprint is not in scope.And so again, is that a meaningful commitment? So we've been very clear aboutthat as well. And then you got to have a delivery strategy. So it's like, whatare you going to do to get to net zero? Is it just hope and pray, you know, assome people call it, green wishing, or is it have a real plan? And so in ourcase, we have a real plan. And some of the things I'll highlight is, you know,step one is really this identify baseline and missions piece. And so you know,what is your footprint? Where are your emissions coming from understanding thatand technology is going to play big role in that. So, you know, whether that's,you know, utility bill collection and analysis software. So, you know, grabbingenergy and water, and other things from these utility bills and converting thatinto GHG emissions. You know, we used to do that with spreadsheets, we used todo that really manually. Now, there's excellent software's available that, youknow, can do is much faster, you know, using OCR to scrape, you know, scrapedata from PDFs, but also, API's to the utility companies themselves. These are,you know, really reducing the roadblocks on this data collection and analysispiece. Not to mention, there's a tenant piece to this too, which is maybe wedon't as the landlord get access to all the bills. So what are we going to dothat that's been a real big pain point in the industry, for sure. And softwareis playing a big role with that. Another one I'll highlight is real timemetering. So, you know, maybe we don't have great, you know, utility datacoverage, like maybe we get a bill once a quarter once every other month,things like that, well, we still need to do stuff at the site. And we stillneed that data to understand our missions, and how do we troubleshoot them, ifyou will. And so real time managers play a big role for that. And the lastthing I'll just flag on this piece is, you know, energy modeling. So you know,whether that's through an energy management system, or whether that's through,you know, e quest, or IES, you know, various software's that focus just onenergy modeling, you know, we need those in order to understand where, whenwe're using energy and GHG emissions, so that we can actually build Net Zeroroadmaps to reduce them. And so, you know, Net Zero roadmaps for us are prettystraightforward, we need to develop them for all of our assets, we're, I don'tknow, probably got 10 to 20 of them done now. But we need, we've got like, 300assets, so we got to keep going on those. And, you know, we, we kind of breakthis down into first, if we're gonna build something, it's got to be asefficient as we can get it. Second, we need to conserve energy. And as much aswe can on the sites, then we need to retrofit for energy efficiency, then weneed to select a low carbon fuel, and then whatever is left, energy wise, weneed to try to generate renewable power, in order to make sure that power, thatenergy is clean, or we need to buy offsets. And so we're committed to only amaximum of 10% offsets, that's again, something that you should kind of askpeople about when you hear about their mission, their commitments as well. Andthat, you know, this is kind of an example of what that visually looks like,which is, you know, getting from that baseline, that first column, if you will,all the way down to zero, which is the last column. And on the next slide, youknow, and on that one on energy efficiency, I should say, you know, Nick willdive into that in a minute on kind of what examples of operational technologiesare kind of playing a big role for that. But the last piece of our, you know,let's say delivery strategy, and how we hold ourselves accountable, is establishingthat governance and transparency. So I think it's important for everyone toalso be aware of these, you know, very prominent organizations, whether it's unPRI, or net zero asset managers. There's many of them these days that largecompanies like ours are committing to, and those organizations are starting toprovide software tools to report progress. Other examples would be sciencebased targets, initiative, sbti, as well as grez, B, and crem. So those toolsare going to be used by asset managers. And so companies like yourselves thatare out there in this technology space, you know, think about what you want toreplace them with, or how you should be instead of replacing them connecting tothem and leveraging them and, and some of the things that we can use thesetools for us dynamically tracking, changes in these variables that affect ourdecisions, such as the grid, carbon intensity, utility costs, actual buildingconsumption, or even just the simple thing of acquisitions and dispositions andhow that affects our data. So we have to juggle all these variables andtechnology, like some of the things that Nick is going to talk about next, canreally make our lives easier on these things. Perfect,

Nicholas Dumoulin  14:42

thankfully, that goes well into the app, whichI'm going to talk about. So as a smart building manager and deployingoperational technology. There's a lot of use cases we're targeting but reallytoday we're focusing on you know, things that reduce energy and reduce ourcarbon emissions. So So we're gonna kind of break this down into two maincategories. First one is HVAC controls a lot our assets, especially in theoffice space, where I spend a lot of my time, still have pneumatic controls,because they're they're, the assets are actually quite old. Some of them arehistoric buildings, quite architecturally beautiful. But they also have thesehairy legacy control components. So we really need to bring them up to moderncontrol standard, so that we have the flexibility to change our controlstrategies. And we get visibility on all those sensors and data in order for usto feed into our analytics and provide further optimization. So how are wedoing that? Obviously, we're just moving from pneumatics to DDC controls. Andwe're standardizing on open protocols so that we can have access to that dataand leverage it. So you know, standardizing on BACnet. And we can generally useNiagra for as an integration prac platform for our HVAC control. And so as wemove towards these systems, which are really the building blocks thecornerstones, in order to do a whole lot of the more advanced components.That's really the starting point is just getting those those cornerstones inplace. And then that will allow us to feed into some of the more advancedsoftware like advanced supervisory control, and fault detection diagnostics. Sohow we go about, you know, supervisory control can be a number of differentways, sometimes those are machine learning models, or using energy models. Andthen, you know, combining that with the sensor data to kind of see how far arewe from those baselines, and what areas or different components can beoptimized better, to get to where we want to be. So just kind of feeding intothose application layers as we go. In terms of lighting, so that's another bigcomponent, we are moving our fixtures to be all LED. I mean, this is really,everyone's doing that has great ROI. But that's not really any new news. But wewant to make sure that the pictures we're putting in place are dimmable, andcontrollable. And so we're you know, we are upgrading fixtures, but also thecontrols. So we're putting in occupancy sensors, and daylight harvestingsensors as well to pair into this so that we can run our lighting as efficientlyas possible. And then that's kind of the hardware component. But then we alsoonce again, utilizing the data. So we're taking the sensor data, and we tend tofunnel it into a lot of our software applications. So once again, supervisorycontrol, fault detection, diagnostics, or FTD, in our energy managementplatforms, so that all our teams or operation teams get visibility on thisinformation, we're able to troubleshoot issues more effectively and optimizethe system as we go along. The other component is tenant engagement. So one ofone of the key components is we don't have full control over all of the energyconsumed in a building, we have to really work with the tenants that occupy thespace to, you know, try to get them to change their behavior. And they're onlygoing to change your behavior if they understand how their behavior affectsthat energy consumption. So we're also using these systems and the data. So inthis particular case, we're sharing energy data from the lighting system towardthe tenant engagement app, or platform so that tenants also have visibility onthe energy consumption that they control. So those are kind of the twocomponents, how we operationally are able to optimize and then how we areactually sharing that data with our tenants. Kind of in the same line oftalking and lead definitely alluded to this as well. Metering also plays a veryimportant key component here. So I would put this into two buckets, utilitymeters. So these are typically your whole building or whole complex meter,where you only have a few for a property. So these ones are kind of key to helpvalidate the billing and to get a little bit more live data coming in versuswaiting for those the wave of utility bills coming in. So this once again wefeed into our software application gives our operations team alive informationOne and a work and recommendations on how to optimize the systems and know Hey,oh, we have a fluctuation here that we weren't expecting. Why is that we'regoing to troubleshoot that now and saying, instead of waiting one or two monthsfor the bill to come in and scratching our heads pay, what actually caused thisspike and consumption right there, they're gonna get information right away. Sowe, we've already put a big push on the utility meters. And then the nextbucket that we are starting to deploy, where it makes sense, it's dumb meters.So I, once again, split this out into two main buckets, key base building load.So these are, you know, equipment that are big energy hogs, your chillers,certain H back equipment, sometimes elevators, whatever, in a building that arereally the big energy hog, we want to make sure we understand what they'reactually consuming at any given time. And then feed that in once again, to our,our software, or application layer, to, to analyze, and, and optimize. And thenthe other is attending controls glows. So by submetering, independent low, youknow, once again, we're going to connect that with the tenant engagementapplication, so that they can visibly see how they're affecting the consumptionof the building. And hopefully, they can change their behavior, or that allowsus to start dialogues with them on Hey, this is something that you can do, thatwill actually, you know, save you cost, and also help decarbonize and be partof the success story here.

Lee Hodgkinson  21:50

And of course,

Nicholas Dumoulin  21:51

occupancy sensing anyone in this group probablyknow, occupancy data is quite valuable to making to optimize all these systems.And so once again, I'd put this into two main buckets, just knowing whether aspace is occupied or vacant, so on off, someone's in the room or not, a lot oftimes, we're trying to pull this data from the lighting system, because they'realready the sensors are already there. installed in the system, it's just aboutmaking sure we have waiting systems that are open, allowing us to share thatdata with other systems. So from that, we can pump that into our ourapplications once again. And you use this as another way that we can refine andoptimize. The next more advanced level, that is people count. So generally, weare wearing this on with IoT sensors, of different sorts. So there's a lot ofdifferent technologies, whether it be camera based, vision based, you know,thermal, or ultrasonic are some of the more popular version. And these are alsostarting to be used so that not only do we have an understanding of whatthere's someone in the room, but we want to understand how many people are inthe space, so that we can actually adjust our loads dynamically, especiallywhen it comes to age back control, hey, do we need more cooling in this spacewhere you have a meeting room that you can have up to 30 people in. But ifthere's only two people, you don't need to cool it down in the summer verymuch, because there's not a lot of heat coming off as people. If you have a newheating meeting room with 30 people, you're going to have to ramp up thecooling. So stuff like that. Another thing that we're using this data for is toimprove the accuracy of our energy models, you know, occupants in a space havea big impact on the consumption of spaces. And so this actually can really helpus improve our accuracy of the energy model, which then we can use as anotherway to figure out hey, how do we diagnose issues? So that's kind of the summaryof the different operational technologies that we are deploying that when itcomes to energy and decarbonisation at today? Certainly, within each of thesecategories, we're looking at several different individual technologies anddifferent ways. And a lot of different vendors have different ways to achievethe same thing. But they all kind of roll into the bigger bucket, I would say.

Lee Hodgkinson  24:33

Yeah, and so I think, you know, one of thethings that Nick touched on that I think is worth highlighting is, you know, Iwas in this meeting the other day, where we were trying to size a heat pump forbuilding so that we can, you know, switch out from natural gas boilers whichare very carbon intensive to, you know, cleaner electricity and reallyefficient heat pumps and you know, No, I had these engineers that we've engagedkind of talking about, okay, we need this many BTUs, or this many tons. And, youknow, this other engineer kind of stood up and said, like, why do you need thatmuch? And, you know, those other, you know, the the engineers that were sayingthey needed that much were, well, you know, if it's this temperature, and if weneed this many CFM. And if we need this flow rate, well, that's what it alladds up to. And that's totally valid. But, you know, the point that we weretrying to get across was, well, we have data at the building that tells us,what is the max CFM, we actually get to what is the max flow rate that we getto? What is the coldest that this building does get to? And when it gets tothat temperature, and those CFM? What is that actual load? And so, you know, Ithought it was really interesting example of how the engineering community is,you know, so hung up on the schematics from 1987. And not necessarily lookingat the data. And so in the end, you know, the strategy we're pursuing at thisasset is right sizing the system for 95% of the actual real loads, and thenfine, we can have something backup for that last 5%. But if we design somethingthat's for that 100% piece, then it's not going to operate nearly asefficiently or as effectively as it would if we right size the system better.So, you know, I think the data granularity and accuracy that Nick's talkingabout that we're trying to get from our operational technology, he's havingimplications on capital projects for, you know, things that are not necessarilyeven controlled by those types of systems. So it's a really great example ofhow the thinking needs to change on this. What we've tried to show on thisslide is some of the established and emerging decarbonisation technologies thatwe think about when we talk about how we're going to get to zero. And so, ifyou start on the left side, you know, we're gonna, we're big developer, we'redeveloping $6 billion with a net zero communities, but we're probablydeveloping $12 billion of stuff in total. And so how do we make sure that whenwe add a build into our portfolio, we're not increasing our footprint in a waythat's detrimental to our overall goals. And so, you know, some of thetechnologies I would just highlight would be LCA is lifecycle conditionassessments. And I think that this is a big area of focus for us and a lot ofother asset owners right now, as well as the engineering committee trying tofigure out what is the right way to do an LCA? Who should be doing it? Youknow, and what do we do with that information? And so, I think that that'sstill very much evolving right now. And, you know, I think that technology canplay a really big role. You know, streamlining it, are you making them reallycheap, really fast, and also make them really accurate energy modeling, you'veheard us talk about as well, that is a living breathing tool that we use tomake decisions in almost all of our assets, when we're trying to decarbonizethem. And then the other, you know, strategy we talk a lot about is IDPintegrated, or yes, it's IPD, integrated project delivery. But, and this is where,you know, we're trying to get everybody in the room more and more to solvethese problems, rather than, you know, owners, trying to keep everyoneseparated to drive down costs, and not talking. And when we find that that's,that old model needs to change because we're trying to hit other KPIs not justmeeting the construction budget, right, we're trying to meet the constructionbudget, but also achieved GHG savings also achieved a thermal energy density,you know, like, so we need them all to be talking, we can't just the speed ofiterations needs to be faster than they used to be on energy efficiency. Youknow, a lot of these things you guys know about LED lighting, whether it'ssmart, or what I call dumb lighting, still is playing a huge role, high efficiency,a track equipment, and that, you know, so that's chillers, that's, you know,you know, all cooling towers, there's all these different things need to bemore efficient than they used to be for us to use less. Right. And then thebuilding envelope, you know, whether that's windows, whether that's insulation,whether that's the roof, you know, try to figure out within reason how toactually tackle those because, you know, traditionally you'd look at them,those types of projects, like had 100 year paybacks. And so okay, what are wemissing from the equation when we're talking about doing Windows for examplethat we can use to justify why we need to do them. And for instance, again, ifwe have better windows, we might not need as much heat, we might not need asmuch cooling. So that reduces the capital costs on another project, not thewindow project necessarily, but on the cooling projects, variable frequencydrives demand control ventilation. Again, these are very important strategiesthat we're seeing. And again, are you sizing your heating system after you'veapplied VFDs or before, after you've applied demand control ventilation orbefore, these are kind of things that you holistically we need to look at. Onlow carbon fuel selection, you're going to hear all my favorite word that whereI say the most probably these days is heat pumps, heat pumps, heat pumps, sothat's air source, heat pump, ground source, heat pumps, variable refrigerantflow. And then you know, where can we grab heat working grab energy, andrecover it. So that's waste heat, such as sewers, exhaust heat, leaving yourbuilding. And then of course, on route will power we're talking about on or offsite, solar photovoltaics. But also solar thermal, I think solar thermal,especially in Canada plays a huge role, because their heating loads are so highon the ventilation especially. And so, you know, products like solar wall andproducts that, you know, heat, water, heat, air, you know, they work reallywell minus five minus 10, it doesn't matter, they they do a great job. And thenlastly, on carbon offsets, I mean, those will play a role in the net zerofuture, they can't be 90% of your efforts, they need to be the last thing thatyou do. And you know, we're going to keep monitoring that market foropportunities for us to participate in whether that's product development andcertification or just as a purchaser. Perfect, thankfully,

Nicholas Dumoulin  31:54

and kind of the last aspect is, you know, Italked about the technology itself, what we're putting in, but I wanted to talka little bit about some of the management strategies in terms of, of energymanagement, how are we actually optimizing systems once they're in place. Sothe first step, I would say, is moving to Dynamics, that point, there's a lotof different ways you can do this. But basically, instead of using what wouldbe traditionally static data, that point maybe that at the time of commissioning,so maybe schedule start and stop time will moving to an optimum Start Stop,where it's dynamically starting the start for the stop time of equipment, basedon, you know, what we're observing in the space, how many people are in thespace, if there's no one in it, or people are leaving? For lunchtime? Do weneed to be running the equipment as as aggressively during that time period,and then ramp it back up once people are back in the building pressure andtemperature setpoint. So there's, you know, if you know, ASHRAE, you'd befamiliar with like trim and respond. Strategies. Here are some times we'reusing machine learning models, depending on the technology vendor, there's alot of different ways of going about this, but instead of just, you know, doinga balancing exercise, and that's your static pressure setpoint. And that's it,we're actually dynamically changing that based on the environmental conditions,right? What is the what is the outside air conditions, and what is the insidethermal conditions, right. And same thing with lighting level. So that's whyI'm talking about dimmable lights is really important, we don't need to havethem on at 100% all the time, it really depends on what people are doing in thespace. And in the wedding level, a lot of times, you want to actually calibratethat lighting, to be that optimal lighting level. overweighting is actually anissue in office spaces a lot of times. So it has, you know, a net good impactenergy, but also tenant comfort. So there's some win wins in those categories.The next category I would say is identifying and fixing faulty equipment. Sousing fault detection diagnostic software allows us to find faulty equipment,that would be wasting energy until we fix the issue. And so that can look like valvesthat are our, you know, the valve bodies that are leaking hot water into aheating coil, an air handler unit when you're expecting it to be closed. So andthen your cooling coil is now you know, compensating for that. And same thingwith, you know, dampers that are not fully closed or not fully closing,especially fresh air dampers. Now you have to condition additional air youweren't expecting. Identifying sensors that are no longer reading accurately. Alot of times people forget about it. But if we're using all this data thatcomes from sensors to optimize their system, we need to make sure they'reaccurate. otherwise, you know, they're going to be telling the control logicand strategies to do the wrong thing. And so that we need to make sure those arereading accurately. And then equipment that isn't identifying equipment that'sactually not being controlled to the setpoint, or responding to command. Ifthey're not doing what we're asking the equipment to do, we need to identifywhy that is because, you know, maybe equipment is staying on when we'reexpecting it to be off. All these are areas where we're wasting energy that wedon't need to be. So just fixing being proactive. In this approach, reallyimportant. We've alluded to this already, but occupancy based control. So if noone is present, why use energy to condition the space. So this might be usingoccupancy data to adjust that point. And, you know, setting unoccupiedsetpoint, so when people aren't around, we don't need to have the same temperaturesetpoint as we normally would, and turning equipment off when space is vacant.Traditionally, a lot of H HVAC equipment is just running for the wholescheduled occupied period during the day. But if there's, if you can prove thatno one is in a particular space, then you don't necessarily need to run thatequipment. So a couple other ones on this ongoing data driven commissioning, soleveraging that the data analytics tools, whether that be the energy managementsoftware, the fault detection, and so on, really helped us identify poorcontrol sequences and reprogram them to be more energy efficient, right. Sothis might be simultaneous heating and cooling of equipment, that they shouldonly be doing one or the other. So they end up fighting each other identifyingthose situations, scheduling misalignment between equipment, so is, you know,an air handle unit still running when your Levy's are not calling for anydemand, stuff like that. And then identifying equipment that's over heating orcooling or ventilating all these things that might not be evident. Just lookingat a graphics page on a BF system. The software can help us identify themquicker and address them proactively. And then the last strategy, I would sayis demand response management. So enabling our buildings to be activeparticipants with the electrical grid to manage demand. So if we, as a whole onthe electrical grid have really high demand, you know, what can we do to helpthat on on the consumption side? So can we shed our load? Can we shift our loadto lower demand periods, so pre cooling or heating? And can we identify sourceswithin our buildings that are electrical or thermal storage, so you can justinstall battery. But sometimes you can utilize some of the thermal systems, Hvac systems in a building and use them as a thermal battery to use. So thereare a lot of different strategies we're looking at within those spaces tocontinue to optimize or the systems we have in place. So that kind of wraps upthe presentation we had for you guys just mapping this journey out for dream. Isee a lot of questions in the chat. So I'm sure we'll have. We'll run out oftime I imagined before we can get to all of them. Anyways, look forward

Lee Hodgkinson  38:45

to it. Yeah,

James Dice  38:48

excellent presentation. You guys. We do have alot of questions in the chat. If we don't get to given question. I will put itinto this chat on the recording. When I post the recording, I'll look at allthe questions. If we didn't get to that question. I'll tag either Lee orNicolas and who should answer it. And then we should be able to cover the onesover time. Maybe they're not immediately after this. But over time, we'll we'llanswer a few more. So first questions for Lee from Scott and feel free if anyonehasn't put their question in the chat. Feel free to raise your hand. I alwayslike to let people talk rather than me just reading the questions from thechat. First questions for Li Li Can you talk about Europe versus the US interms of how owners are thinking about and sort of the main differences betweenhow they're thinking about decarbonizing in Europe versus the US?

Lee Hodgkinson  39:43

Ya know, it's a great question. And again,because we have this, you know, wide spanning portfolio, we get to put on thesedifferent hats and talk to our peers in each of these markets and, you know, ingeneral Well, from a commitments perspective, Europe is just way ahead ofeverybody else, you know, it's just de facto there, that they need to get tonet zero, they need to reduce energy, that their grid is not abundant withenergy. And, and so they're, you know, generally European companies will have muchmore aggressive targets and clearly defined targets, Canada, somewhere in themiddle. And in the US, I would say, there's still a lot of landlords that don'thave commitments and, and are even, you know, trying to navigate the ESGbacklash over the last eight months or so. And so that's taking steps backwardsfor a lot of owners in the US to be honest. And then as far as technology goes,the other thing I would just highlight is, you know, in in Europe, it is muchmore common for people to already have heat pumps in their buildings, and toalready have deployed a lot of the technologies that I talked about solar andother things. And I think that Canada and the US are quite far behind. And oneexample of that is just refrigeration technicians. There's a lot morerefrigeration technicians in Europe that are trained on working on thesesystems than there are in Canada in the US, and that needs to change. Yeah,great answer.

James Dice  41:25

I'm gonna keep us rolling here pretty quickly.Next question is around sub metering, would like to understand more about theavailability of low cost metering technologies? Which I think is a greatquestion. That's sort of a space that's evolving all the time. I just had ameeting with a startup yesterday, that was developing a really cool way to readnatural gas meters. So I think that space is evolving all the time. Can youguys talk about how you're kind of looking at that space in terms of trying toramp up your submetering? Niche?

Nicholas Dumoulin  41:59

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I don't think we'redoing anything too special. In terms of the metering, I would say we're usingpretty traditional vendors and techniques, I would love to hear about companiesthat are definitely trying to reduce that cost, that would definitely help usin that endeavor. So if you got any leaves, I'm more than happy to hear aboutthem for sure.

Lee Hodgkinson  42:25

And I just want to add on to that. And I think,James, it's kind of an interesting takeaway I want for this group, which is,you know, it's early on in my career, we would install sensors, we installmeters. And we would trust that data, we would use that data and makeoperational decisions based on that data. And we would show, hey, we saved 20%.And we're really happy. And that's still true, but we're moving into thiscompliance space with regards to this data, which is, you know, can I reportout the data from this sub meter to, you know, a big four accounting firm, andhave them assure it, so that they can submit it to the SEC, or just submit itto the Canadian Securities, regulators, and things like that. And so that's arapidly evolving space. I just want to flag for everyone, which is, you know,are we using the data just for operational decisions? Or are we using the datafor operational decisions and compliance reporting? And I think, you know, whatwe're doing, for example, is we've kind of had to separate those, you know, wehave one set of data that's really informing operational technologies. And thenwe have another set of data that's doing our compliance things. And is that thebest setup? I don't know. But that's kind of where a lot of people have landedright now. And I'll be very curious to see how do we improve upon that? Really?Yeah. Love that two part answer.

James Dice  44:05

Next question is from the same person around theutility bill, data scraping. I've done this before a lot, right? We get it fromone of these providers. And it's pretty difficult to wrangle that data still,even though they provide this automated feed. Right? How do you get thatstructured across different providers? Can you guys talk a little bit moredetail about how you're doing that? Maybe who you're using to help you withthat?

Lee Hodgkinson  44:30

That kind of thing? Yeah, I can take this one onthe utility bills. You know, the technology is changing. But you know, reallyinterestingly, you know, we own buildings in Spain, in Slovakia, in Netherlandsand Germany, as well as Canada in the US, and I hate to tell you, but the billsin Slovakia are not in English. Not to mention, they might not even use thesame units. Not to mention they don't look anything like the Toronto Hi hydrobills that we get here. And so I think that when we were deciding, and I don'treally want to talk about specific vendors too much, but when we were decidingwhich vendors to go with, that was a big decision, because are we going to havea two tier system where, hey, this vendor does this country and this vendordoes this country? Or are we going to have a vendor that can do all of theselanguages and all of these things, and, and all that kind of stuff? And so, Iwould say that that was really important for how we've gone about doing that.And, and, and again, does that vendor, have the ability to a take a PDF andscrape that data be take a spreadsheet and scrape that data or see evencommunicate directly with the utility with the utility to get the data fromthem directly. And so we are using all three of those mechanisms to collectdata. And that was, you know, really important for us to be able to get ourdata coverage up.

James Dice  45:55

Thank you think the key is it sounds like youhave one vendor that's sort of abstracting away that complexity for you. And

Lee Hodgkinson  46:04

that's what you're trying to do. Yeah,

James Dice  46:05

yeah, totally. Okay, group of questions herewe're about to begin are all around controls. So just to frame where we'reheaded with this. So can you guys talk about with pneumatics? What are thetriggers that you guys see that actually cause you to upgrade a pneumaticsystem? Like, what's the decision trigger there?

Nicholas Dumoulin  46:27

I mean, I would say at this point is we wantaccess to the data. And we want to be able to actually optimize the systems,right? Like you can't control, there's no programming for pneumatics, unlessyou're rewiring how the the piping is going between devices. And that's stillpretty limited. So really, you know, there is already lots of research aroundjust moving to DDC controls can get you energy saving, just by doing that. Sothere is an ROI on that financial ROI. And, you know, just helped us our goal wouldalone all the other ditional benefits, right and visibility into how thesystems are running, being able to transfer that data to other systems thatallow us to leverage even more functionality, more use cases out of that.

James Dice  47:21

As soon you don't have like, however much itwould take and capital budget to replace every pneumatic system across thewhole portfolio. So how are you deciding when to do individual systems.

Nicholas Dumoulin  47:32

So it's just a phased approach, we we kind ofsection out between the system and we take it in chunks. So you know, we have acertain amount of budget that we can allocate per year, and we're just rollingwith it that way. So over time, we're taking, I would also, you know, ingeneral, a lot of these capital upgrade projects, we try to leverage theperiods when there's tenant turnover, right? And take advantage of thosesituations when there's new tenants coming in, where spaces are empty, to makesure we do that work. And part of my role is really setting in those standards.So all our team, all our construction team, doing tentative bid outs, and doingthis type of work, understand all these fundamental hardware that we need toput in, to allow us to do everything else, so that we are incorporating that inevery single project, regardless of which team is taking care of it. Becausesometimes it's my team, sometimes it's their construction team. Sometimes it'san external construction team hired by the tenant, but they still need tounderstand what our standards are in order for us to achieve all theobjectives.

Lee Hodgkinson  48:52

And I think just I'll build on that for asecond. On two ways. One is, the other trigger that's very common is a massiveH HVAC project, right? So like, if you're changing your heating system in a bigway, or your cooling system in a big way. And that's going to be like 100control points that have to change. All right, well, you're gonna go pay yourpneumatic guy to reprogram and rewire and whatever, those 100 points atwhatever dollar point it is, or you just gonna get a new system. And honestly,because of the lack of trades, there's not a lot of people that really knowpneumatics anymore. Like, I mean, I have literally some of those fittings in mycar, from pneumatic systems that you can't really even find anymore, but Idon't know how you retube it without these fittings, you know what I mean? Andso, I think that because there's such a shortage of labor there, it's like, thecost of just install a new GDC system is often cheaper than trying to rejigyour pneumatic system when you're doing a big H back project. And so that'sdefinitely one thing, you know, wanted to flag as kind of a trigger and theother thing is, and Nick can talk about this as well, which is, you know,Separate from that pneumatic piece. He's the networking piece. Right. So, youknow, Nick has been fantastic at putting in what we call base building networksVPNs across our portfolio and identifying what project will need that BBN andwhat does that date look like? Do you want just touch on that for a second?

Nicholas Dumoulin  50:26

Yeah, sure, I, I focused mostly on thetechnology that had direct relation to energy decarbonisation. But of course,to leverage that we need the infrastructure, right. And that's what thoseconverged networks base building networks. So I'm sure a lot of people in thiscommunity would understand this is this is an IP Ethernet network that allowsus to connect all these different base building systems onto one network sothat the data can flow between systems as we require it. So that that is whatallows us to connect the occupancy sensor data from our waiting system, tomaybe our H fax system, and sending all this data out to possibly a cloudprovider where we're doing the fault detection or where we're doing the energymanagement, all those types of things. That is a backbone, it's just similar tolike the plumbing in your in your building, you know, the this is your yourpipes, and the data is the water that's flowing through, no one is going tohave a building without plumbing. And this is what we start, we need to havenow. In order to leverage hold us. Yeah.

Lee Hodgkinson  51:34

And again, because we put that in, when we go todo that pneumatic project, if you will, we can effectively reduce the cost ofit when we go to DDC as well. Right? So there's a real direct cost savingsthere. Absolutely, absolutely. Love that.

James Dice  51:51

Let's go to people counting, can you guys sharemore use specifics with people count data in regards to control strategy? Sohow are you using that? And I think there if I remember correctly, Nicholas,there was a good post on the chat room about this, that maybe while you'retalking, I can dig that up. But if my memory serves me correctly, you're you'retrying to use those in your ventilation set points in the on the h max side, isthat correct?

Lee Hodgkinson  52:17

Yeah, I would say

Nicholas Dumoulin  52:18

it's, it's still fairly early days, and howwe're trying to utilize occupancy data. You know, we're just trying to get thesensors in place and validate the accuracy. And thinking about how we utilizeit, but we are utilizing a couple properties where it helps determine the whenequipment should turn on and all equipment in, in a property. So that's theoptimized Start Stop, where we can see people coming into the building. And youknow, early morning, it's ramping very, very quickly, okay, we need to make surethat the equipment is responding accordingly. during lunchtime, it ramps down alittle bit as a bunch of people go out for lunch, ramps back up after lunch,and afternoon. And what's really, I would say a lot of people do optimize darkalready today with more elegant, like hysteria, you know, rule basedprogramming, but the, it's really difficult to know how to turn off equipmentearly, based on people leaving, so a Friday afternoon, you know, especially inthe summertime, in Canada, we don't get a lot of nice summer weather, a lot ofpeople are gone much earlier. So, you know, maybe by two, three o'clock, youmight have like 25% occupancy in the building, you know, but most of theequipment will not turn off until that five o'clock stock time. And so now wecan actually start ramping down that equipment, and in some cases, turning itoff if we see their floors that don't have any tenants on it, stuff like that.So we're starting to use it that way. We're about to start some pilots withactually adjusting temperature set points based on how densely populated anarea is. Stuff like that. So we're trying different strategies, but I would saypretty early

Lee Hodgkinson  54:10

days. Cool.

James Dice  54:13

I think we have time for one more question.Ruben, can you make it quick?

Lee Hodgkinson  54:18

Make it quick,

Ruben  54:19

when it comes to those people counting andimplementing those strategies? how granular is your people counting like howhow specific in areas of the building Do you Do you have these

Nicholas Dumoulin  54:33

right now in terms of people count that normallyhold building or floor by floor level? will will will be part of my to do listitems for this year is actually kind of do a deeper dive into occupancytechnology. It's something that you know, we did a good job starting thisbefore I was around and I'm just getting I'm just on my to do list to kind ofrevisit because there's a lot that has changed in the marketplace in the lastfew years with this technology so and so we're, we might get down to the room level,but I would say today, we're mostly relying on whether a room is just occupiedor vacant, through the, you know, on off occupancy sensor from lighting. Andthat gives us a good enough information to say, Hey, should we have theequipment on or off? Or what should they? What mode should equipment be in toknow how many people are in a specific room that gets really granular, and youknow, our cost starts going up quite a bit to implement a solution like that,on that granular level, is not necessarily required. But we're going to bedigging into it a little bit more over the next year.

Lee Hodgkinson  55:52

Thank you. And, James, if I could just one lastthing kind of building on that would be, you know, I think for this group,especially, one thing I would flag is, you know, we can't try everything,there's gonna there's a lot of ways to tackle this occupancy sensing piece, forexample, you know, under the desk under the chair, like there's so manydifferent ways to do this. And, you know, what, we'll have what we have to do,and the reason real estate is so slow moving on, this is, you know, we have tounderstand what are all the own risks by choosing a vendor, you know, like,what happens to that vendor goes under what happens to that vendor getsacquired? Would we get left with? Is that black box going to keep working? Isit valuable? Is it not? Is that sensor gonna work? It was good warranty, blah,blah, blah. So I think for this community, I think when you're talking tolandlords, you know, keep that in mind for sure. All right, great point.

James Dice  56:42

I just want to say thank you to the both of you.I think it's clear how much you have on your plates and how busy you both are,every time I talked to you, there's like 1000 things going on. So thank you fortaking your time to teach us all of this stuff. I feel like this is like amasterclass and combining decarbonisation with the technology required to doso. So thank you so much. I'll post we have like 10 unanswered questions. I'llpost those in the chat and tagging you guys. So you get a notification thatwe're wanting more from you on those questions, and thanks, everyone, for thegreat engagement and great questions. And I'll see you all at the end of themonth for our next member gathering.

Lee Hodgkinson  57:22

Thank you. Yeah, thanks, guys for having me.

Nicholas Dumoulin  57:25

I know. You know, being part of the nextcommunity is really helped me a lot professionally and, you know, been awonderful support network. So I'm very happy to be able to contribute back inthe

Lee Hodgkinson  57:39

thanks for giving back. All right, yeah. Seeeveryone. Thanks, Nick. Thanks for finally. Bye, everyone. Best seminar. Wow,Greg. Thank you.

James Dice  57:52

Oh, seminars.

Lee Hodgkinson  57:55

Wow, that's a big honor. That's really sweet.There you go, Nick. There. You got it back. So

James Dice  58:02

long back to the neck. You're done. Yeah.

Lee Hodgkinson  58:07

Sounds good. All right. See y'all later