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What we've found at the City of Guelph is that
energy integrates everything.
It integrates so much of what we do around city planning
and city building, whether it's land use planning
or transportation, water, waste-water.
It flows over into other aspects around economic development
and making sure that we're an affordable community as well.
It's not a special interest or something that lays on top.
It has to be integrated from underneath.
The collaboration between the City of Guelph,
Guelph Hydro and the Province shows up in many
aspects of what we're doing.
The city was there.
School boards were there. Private sector. Public sector.
Community benefit sector, utilities.
So we brought all of them together to be part
of developing the plan, because they needed to have
an investment in it.
And supported by FCM through the Green Municipal Funds.
We are mapping what we are doing on an annual basis.
We have bench-marked our work largely
against European standards.
By 2031 we're expecting to add approximately 50% more
in population and a per capita reduction of 60%
in greenhouse gas emissions.
We've got a very ambitious corporate
energy management plan.
It looks to have 25% reduction across all of our buildings.
It's our holding company that owns Guelph Hydro.
This has given us the platform to build other business units
to be able to implement the community energy initiative.
Things like combined heat and power projects is something that
we're working on with the city.
We've seen a big uptake in solar because of the
FIT (Feed In Tariff) program.
Biomass is another opportunity for us in terms of hooking
into our district energy system.
Trying to reduce the energy consumption or the energy
footprint of both residential, commercial
and industrial customers.
And we use energy as a fundamental differentiator -
an advantage for us in attracting investment.
So we've built it around a very strong economic model
and at the same time we saw the greenhouse
gas reductions follow.