Requirements
The Residential Programs Group of the Office of Energy Efficiency at NRCan is responsible for the enforcement of Section 5 of the Energy Efficiency Act. The Act is Canada's response to the need to reduce the amount of Green House Gases that are produced as the result of using energy inefficient devices.
The Act requires the manufacturers and importers of certain types of energy using products to meet standards for the energy efficiency of these products. The companies are required to register their products with NRCan with information which includes the energy efficiency of the product. In conjunction with Revenue Canada, NRCan then tracks the import of products, and ensures that they meet the standards. The programs most visible component is the EnerGuide label which denotes products that have met the energy efficiency guide lines.
In 1997 there were approximately 1,000,000 imports of products covered by Section 5, and by 2018 the system has grown by orders of magnitude.
Implementation by RKIL
RKIL has progressively built a system with NRCan that allows for the cataloging of products to be tracked by Section 5, and the compliance with the import of those products. The system allowed NRCan to enter product energy efficiency reports, as well as to record information from Customs invoices that included Section 5 products.
The original system was a client/server system which uses Omnis 7 as the client on Macintosh and Wintel workstations with Oracle running on Windows NT as the server. The system has been expanded to include an Oracle web server, and an MQ connection to Revenue Canada that uses Entrust technology.
RKIL has continued to work with NRCan to improve the system which has been extended to include a product web portal that allows importers to check on allowable products before importing, and a secure system of exchanging information with Revenue Canada on imports of products.
The implementation of secure communications with Revenue Canada was awarded a gold medal at the 1998 Distinction Awards for technology in the Federal Government.