Thank you, Mr. Chair. That’s a large question, but our utilities are shown on this page. We did consolidate utilities a number of years ago in this department and that was primarily driven with the intention to better manage and track our utilities and seek opportunities to reduce those costs. We have done a lot of work in that area. We have an energy management specialist in that department who analyses the building consumption on all building assets. That information is what we used to develop our work plan for the Capital Asset Retrofit Program, so we look for projects, energy investments that can provide a payback through the utility savings that you see here. So that’s been working well for us.
We do publish the results in our annual general report, so we provide a lot of detail on the utilities and where we spend our utility money and how we’ve recovered and made those savings through the various projects.
As we move forward, we continue to look to biomass as one of the biggest opportunities for us to achieve both the greenhouse gas savings and the reduction in utility costs. We had a number of biomass boilers come on line this year that are doing exactly that for us. The boiler in the new office building in Yellowknife is up and operating, and now that is heating that facility as well as the Stuart Hodgson Building and the Laing Building. So, I think there’s about $297,000 litres of fuel that will be offset through that boiler alone.
Other opportunities we’re looking for is there continues to be leaps and bounds in some of the technology that we discounted a number of years ago, so we have to go back and look at things around lighting. We can do a lighting upgrade. Five years ago it may not have been economical, but this year it is. So we go back and revisit those decisions that we’ve made in the past. LED lighting is probably one of the biggest opportunities for us going forward. We’re starting to see some technology there that we may be able to use in general purpose office space and we’re starting to do some demonstration projects around that. We will have some LED lighting in the new building, as well, to test its performance and we’re trying some in other places.
Those are some of the activities we have underway in that area.