Eronen’s first instinct: a massive water tank linked to solar thermal panels that could store heat, to be used in a district energy system. “Would that be economically and technically viable?” they wondered. The answer, as it turned out, was no. What they needed, instead, was a medium in which to store the high level of heat – as much as 650°C – generated by the electrical current flowing out of photovoltaic panels. That substance would have to be inert, non-combustible, not prone to melting or boiling, and cheap.

The answer, Eronen says, was essentially hiding in plain view: sand. It is abundant, as he says, “everywhere.”

That light bulb moment provided the spark for what would become Polar Night Energy, now a 25-person firm that develops sand batteries to serve industries and communities with renewable energy and district heating systems. Polar has developed two commercial sand batteries in Finland, and the company is developing a third near the village of Vääksy, as well as its first international project in Latvia. Eronen, who is the CEO, says Polar also plans to expand into northern European markets like Germany and Switzerland.

Soaring growth for storage

This particular innovation is the latest chapter in the evolution of the renewable-energy storage sector, which has become an indispensable element of the energy transition, particularly now that solar PV has become the least expensive form of electricity generation. Many utilities are deploying large-scale lithium battery installations as they incorporate more renewable sources, but other forms of storage – from traditional pumped hydro to more emergent technologies such as flywheels and aluminum batteries – are part of the mix.

According to a 2024 International Energy Agency report on the role of batteries in the energy transition process, “strong growth occurred [in 2023] for utility-scale battery projects, behind-the-meter batteries, mini-grids and solar home systems for electricity access, adding a total of 42 GW of battery storage capacity globally.” The IEA estimated that global energy storage capacity will have to increase by 1,500 gigawatts by 2030 to facilitate the amount of growth in new solar PV and wind required to achieve the Paris Agreement target of net-zero emissions by 2050.

With rapid projected increases in both electricity consumption and utility-scale solar farms, the role of large-scale storage will only grow in importance, Eronen says. “It means that we have to have very good batteries to take this excess energy at times when we have too much, and then obviously deliver it when we have too little.”

Sand stands out

If you want to understand Eronen and Ylönen’s insights about the role of sand, think about the experience of walking on a beach on a very hot day: the surface of the sand can be uncomfortably warm, but if you dig your feet in only a few centimetres, the temperature drops – evidence, Eronen says, of sand’s capacity to both absorb heat energy and provide natural insulation that prevents that energy from dissipating.

After graduating, the two inventors set up a small-scale sand battery in the backyard of Eronen’s grandparents’ cottage. The proof of concept worked and Polar Night was formed. They built their first pilot plant in Tampere, Finland, and then went on to deliver the world’s first commercial sand battery for the renewable energy supplier Vatajankoski, followed by the first industrial‑scale installation for Loviisan Lämpö, which provides district heating in Pornainen. Last year, they launched a €4.2-million pilot plant in the city of Valkeakoski, about 150 kilometres north of Helsinki, in partnership with Valkeakosken Energia, a district energy firm, to test a new version of the sand battery.

Polar describes its sand battery as both a power-to-heat (P2H) and a power-to-heat-to-power (P2H2P) technology: the former is what they’ve deployed so far, and the latter is still in pilot phase. For P2H, excess renewable electricity passes through a series of resistors, which throttle the current and become extremely hot. The hot air flows into the cylindrical sand battery. That thermal energy, in turn, can be drawn out as needed through a network of pipes and used for industrial process or district heating. Though still under development and not yet rolled out, Polar Night’s P2H2P technology uses the super-heated air to power a boiler that produces steam to generate electricity.

“We have patented a heat-transfer system that is taking the heat into the sand and away from it when we want to use it,” Eronen says. “We have lots of steel pipes going through the sand. The air and the sand don’t mix, ever.” He adds that large-scale cylinders – imagine something the size of an industrial oil storage tank – are the optimal shape for Polar’s technology and application (i.e., district heating), and the amount of storage they can provide increases in direct proportion to their size.

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The company’s technology, and its expansion strategy, received its first big boost a few years ago when a segment on the BBC’s website attracted half a billion views. Eronen says that as they’ve moved to commercial-scale projects, the company has begun bidding for contracts offered in “grid-balancing markets,” typically by transmission operators who need to add storage capacity as more renewable sources come on line.

The major advantage over other technologies is that Polar’s sand batteries can retain heat for up to 100 hours, whereas most other systems, like utility-grade lithium, provide only a few hours of storage between charges. The upshot: “They can charge with the lowest prices possible on the spot market,” Eronen says, “and also be very flexible when they offer that capacity to the grid-balancing markets.”

Perhaps the most appealing aspect of Polar’s invention has to do with its own environmental footprint. Unlike large-scale lithium batteries, for instance, Polar’s product consists of nothing more than sand, steel pipes and a steel silo. As Eronen says, “The life-cycle assessment will say that the emissions from sand batteries are one of the lowest, or even the lowest, of all battery technologies.”

A low-emission storage medium for the renewable-energy revolution seems like the right pairing to deliver the missing link in the energy transition.

Correction: The order of events in Polar Night’s company history was corrected from an earlier version. 

John Lorinc is a journalist and author specializing in urban issues, business and culture.

The post Finland’s giant sand batteries are starting to roll out across Europe appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Scarcely a week passes without another handout to add to the pile.

Most of this work has involved undermining anything that promotes renewables and electric vehicles or puts regulatory constraints on large emitters. But the Trump regime has also surreptitiously opened up a somewhat unexpected front in its denialist war: the International Energy Agency’s annual modelling exercise, widely seen as the definitive prognosis for long-term power demand and its impact on the earth’s climate.

Recognizing that forward-looking scenarios help shape the futures they describe, fossil fuel lobbyists and their allies in government mounted a back-channel pressure campaign. They threatened to withhold the United States’ 14% contribution to the IEA’s budget unless the multi-lateral agency stopped talking about third-rail topics like peak oil and instead put out forecasts that muddied the energy transition waters. Their primary target: restoring the IEA’s reliance on an innocuously named energy model, known simply as the “current policies scenario” (CPS), which the Paris-based organization dropped back in 2021, at a radically different political moment.

Guerrilla warfare

When the IEA released its World Energy Outlook (WEO) in October 2021, the agency sketched out two versions of the future: the “stated policies scenario” (STEPS) and the more ambitious “announced pledges scenario.” Together, they provide a view of what 2050 would look like, either with modest progress or bolder ambition, respectively.

Yet in a move that channelled the spirit of that fleeting moment, the IEA added something new and exciting: the “net-zero emissions by 2050 scenario.” This model, it stated, “charts a narrow but achievable roadmap to a 1.5 °C stabilisation in rising global temperatures and the achievement of other energy-related sustainable development goals.” Climate advocates were thrilled by both the IEA’s big goal and its instructions for how to get there. Meanwhile, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and U.S. oil and gas interests fumed about all these models forecasting their demise.

It took five years for the backlash to reach IEA’s analysts. For the 2025 edition of the WEO, released in November, the agency’s most ambitious scenario is now STEPS, which scoped out the least aggressive energy transition in 2021. The CPS scenario – which anticipates a catastrophic 3°C increase in global warming by 2050 – was back, while net-zero by 2050 had vanished without a trace. The NZE remains, for now, but Neil Grant, senior climate policy analyst at Climate Analytics, worries about whether it will be excised next year. “If the IEA caves there and gets rid of it, I think you will start seeing people saying, ‘what’s the point?’”

In a lengthy blog post accompanying the new WEO, two senior IEA officials explained the differences between STEPS and CPS with the example of vehicle efficiency standards in Japan. “Under CPS, these policies continue after their end-date but are assumed not to be strengthened,” they wrote. “The STEPS assumes they continue and are strengthened in line with the previous ambition.” The current Japanese policy aims to improve vehicle efficiency by 20% by 2030. Both scenarios reflect the bump, but STEPS predicts that efficiency will continue improving after 2030, while CPS doesn’t assume any more momentum.

“None of the scenarios in the WEO are a forecast,” the authors wrote in a commentary outlining their methods. Nor did the IEA’s use of CPS indicate the presence of a finger on the scale. The IEA’s aim, they said, is to rationally explore the consequences of different policy choices.

It’s clear that there’s been quite a lot of pressure this year in terms of their funding.

— Guy Prince, head of energy supply for Carbon Tracker

But critics didn’t buy the IEA’s wonky explanations about the renewal of empirical rigour, pointing out that CPS ignores the inevitability of continuing technological innovation, takes uninterrupted growth in oil and gas demand as a given, and foresees no drop in emissions. “What the CPS does is take that Trump administration worldview that we’re seeing implemented the U.S. and assumes its dominance across a whole range of other sectors and across the rest of the world,” adds Grant.

In effect, the CPS provides a road map to 2050, but with 2024 policies frozen in place. IEA watchers claimed that its presence is meant to deliver cover to the fossil fuel backers in and around Trump and MAGA congressional Republicans. Indeed, on the eve of the new WEO’s release, which coincided with COP30 in Brazil, a pair of senior congressional Republicans rewarded the embattled agency with a bit of mobbish praise. In a letter, they congratulated IEA executive director Fatih Birol for freeing the agency from the evils of “activism”: “This course correction, which U.S. House Committee on Energy & Commerce leadership has been requesting, will help restore the IEA’s credibility and impartiality.”

“It’s clear that there’s been quite a lot of pressure this year in terms of their funding,” says Guy Prince, head of energy supply for Carbon Tracker. He describes the return of CPS as “a subtle re-positioning” with enormous consequences.

Dave Jones, chief analyst at U.K.-based Ember Energy Research, says that by restoring CPS and situating it as the counterpart to STEPS, the energy agency is signalling a problematic equivalence to global policymakers and investors. “The biggest issue I have with it is that the IEA have used it as equal weighting to the STEPS scenario,” he observes. “I don’t think people expected that to happen.” Most analysts, policy experts and investors would have expected to see CPS offered as a secondary scenario, he says.

The realpolitik here is about buttressing the oil and gas industry’s ability to raise capital and continue operations in the face of an increasingly efficient and inexpensive clean-electricity industry dominated by China, explains Keith Stewart, Greenpeace Canada’s energy analyst. “Adding this scenario is part of that guerrilla warfare going on to try and support an oil and gas industry that is fighting for its life,” he says. “They’re not going to disappear tomorrow, but they can see the writing on the wall unless they can somehow get enough political muscle behind them to stop the transition.” (The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers did not respond to a request for an interview.)

Slow-walking the energy transition

Trump’s targeted attack on the IEA’s long-range models operate in lockstep with his administration’s shocking assault on science. Since January, a series of moves across the U.S. government have hobbled environmental policy by choking off climate data and cancelling climate science. Agencies that gather and analyze empirical information – the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Department of Energy, as well as countless university scholars – have had their research budgets slashed, their websites raided and their data streams blocked.

A major concern is access, says Mark Winfield, a professor of environmental studies at York University. “If you were doing observational atmospheric science, for example, are you going to lose data from NOAA satellites and the kind of thing that they use on an ongoing basis? That applies to things like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, because U.S. science and data underlies an awful lot of that work.”

In the case of the IEA’s models, scenarios aren’t climate science, per se, but they involve complex economics, deep policy research and assumptions about how all sorts of industries will evolve over coming decades; the IEA even publishes a 143-page technical document showing how it builds its scenarios. Like so many other forms of climate data, these models become critical decision-making tools for government officials, investors and other stakeholders, including the fossil fuel industry itself. “They have significant weight,” says Grant. “They’re used a lot in the investment community to decide where we should be putting capital.”

The Trump administration is trying to pull every lever it can to help support its own narrative.

— Dave Jones, chief analyst at Ember Energy Research

Greenpeace’s Stewart points to the various scenarios developed by Suncor for investors back when it was more rhetorically engaged in energy transition debates. The energy giant’s 2022 ESG report talked about how it would adjust its capital investments based on high- or low-demand oil scenarios. “There was a section on how Suncor should change its business model depending on which scenario,” he says, noting that the company walked investors through both high- and low-carbon outlooks, as well as a business-as-usual version, to show their thinking about asset allocation. (Suncor didn’t respond to requests for an interview.)

The IEA’s use of the CPS assumes sluggish innovation in the clean-energy world, but all evidence points to the contrary. “CPS doesn’t reflect the reality of what is happening in terms of new technological deployment,” says Prince at Carbon Tracker. It’s a bit like someone in the 1950s imagining a long-range air pollution forecast that anticipates that leaded gasoline would always be the default vehicle fuel and that nothing like the 1963 Clean Air Act would ever become law. Indeed, CPS isn’t even a business-as-usual scenario; it’s more of a long look in the rear-view mirror at a world that is fast receding into the distance.

The IEA, which stresses that its scenarios aren’t forecasts, defends the reintroduction of the current policies scenario by arguing that as-yet-unforeseen constraints might drag on the current dynamic of change, such as “insufficient infrastructure, grid integration costs, a lack of institutional capacity or financing, or the absence of continued policy support.” As a result, its authors acknowledge, it projects a slower adoption of new technologies than recently seen.

The problem, as history has repeatedly shown, is that neither technological innovation nor economies of scale run in reverse, so CPS doesn’t even function as a bracing worst-case scenario. Stewart points out that Chinese-made solar panels now produce the cheapest energy on the planet, with extraordinary deployment rates, especially in Asia. (China is building an eight-gigawatt solar farm in inner Mongolia that will be 30 square kilometres larger than New York City.) Trump strong-armed constraints on U.S. renewables producers, even as the rest of the world’s nations beat a path to China’s doorstep to place their own mass orders for inexpensive panels and EVs. Such is economics: the evidence suggests that demand for renewables is growing, not slipping.

The bottom line is that the CPS may become the oil and gas sector’s aspirational anchor, a plausible version of the future that it can tout to fossil fuel investors. But the industry will eventually have to confront the implacable fact that it no longer produces a cost-competitive product, much less an environmentally friendly one – regardless of what the IEA’s dubious model envisions.

Jones at Ember Energy Research takes the wide view. The IEA’s decision to bring back CPS, he says, feeds into a broader push to put fossil fuels back to a place of energy primacy – a place the industry feared it had surrendered during the peak oil days. It’s about storytelling, not what’s actually going to happen, Jones observes. “The evidence is the Trump administration is trying to pull every lever it can to help support its own narrative.”

Like so many global institutions that have found themselves under siege from this president, the IEA may find its reputation as an honest information broker broken, which is a scenario no one wants to see.

John Lorinc is a journalist and author specializing in urban issues, business and culture.

The post Is the International Energy Agency bending to Big Oil? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

All that began to change in the 1950s in Puerto Rico, when legislators there enacted the first condo laws in response to chronic housing shortages. The idea of horizontal ownership – aka strata – spread rapidly, first to Utah, then many other U.S. states, and eventually Canada in the late 1960s. Legal recognition unlocked consumer interest, especially among lower-income households, as well as mortgages and capital for new projects.

In the early 1960s, many people in the United States did not know how to pronounce the word “condominium,” but by 1972 three out of four people knew the term, the scholar Donna Bennett observed in a 2011 paper in Law Library Journal. Today, there are about 7.4 million condos in the United States, accounting for 6% of all homes. In Canada, the proportion is far greater: 15% nationally, and even higher in cities like Vancouver (32.8% of all dwellings), Calgary and Toronto (both just under 24%).

The appeal acknowledges that most people prefer to own a home rather than rent an apartment. In a growing number of cities, the flow of capital for conventional apartment building projects began to thin in the 1980s, while demand for condo apartments expanded. In some markets, like Vancouver and Toronto, the condo model, which promised developers fast returns, came to dominate the purpose-built rental sector. Conventional private apartment complexes were sustained by rental income as opposed to the sales of individual units, and the landlords had to contend with all the headaches that come with managing large properties. The swap took about three decades, with the condo – both owner-occupied and those acquired by small-time investors – emerging in some markets as the undisputed winner in the competition for real-estate-bound investment capital.

I see it as a structural reset and a return to fundamentals.

– Brandon Donnelly, founder, Globizen Group

Such was the case until about the last year or so. Today, in many big cities like Toronto and Vancouver, as well as metros in Florida, Texas and California, the condo market is either way down or comatose. Developers can’t pre-sell new units, so they can’t secure construction loans, so their projects are iced, scrapped or converted into conventional apartment buildings.

Despite these convulsions, housing affordability continues to erode, not just in Canada and the United States, but also in the supposed housing havens in large European cities – with a few exceptions, such as Vienna, where the Austrian government heavily subsidizes rentals.

The blinding speed of the condo market’s collapse – evidence of a speculative bubble just waiting to burst – raises intriguing questions: Is the condo business model dead? And if so, what will replace it? After all, demand for more housing, and affordable housing in particular, hasn’t gone away, and someone’s eventually going to figure out how to meet all that need.

A changing narrative

Most condo industry leaders are in a white-hot panic about the collapsing market, but some have begun to acknowledge that the current condo business model is done, and not just in a cyclical funk. “I see it as a structural reset and a return to fundamentals,” says Globizen Group founder Brandon Donnelly, an Ontario developer.

In recent years, in frothy markets fuelled by financialization, developers marketed ever-smaller units in ever-larger towers to mom-and-pop investors who reckoned they’d make money in two ways: renting out the units as income properties and then selling them for a capital gain; or buying “pre-sale” units by making a five-figure down payment, waiting for the market price to rise, and then flipping them for a quick profit.

“The reason we had this big surge of condo development had to do with the fact that land zoned for high-density residential earned a greater return for condos than purpose-built rental,” says economist and planner David Amborski, director of Toronto Metropolitan University’s Centre for Urban Research and Land Development. “Basically, there was an investor opportunity on the condo side to buy these [units] and rent them.”

Cooperative housing is making a comeback

When interest rates plunged after the 2008 credit crisis, a gold-rush mentality set in. “The irrational exuberance around pre-sale condos that existed during very low interest rates, particularly in the Greater Toronto market, [from] 2019 through to 2023, was sort of the crystal meth of the condo years,” says Mark Richardson, an affordable-housing activist. And as in any other speculative bubble, sales grind to a halt when prices begin to drop because the expectation of price appreciation vanishes.

The condo narrative has played out differently elsewhere. Many U.S. metros have experienced long declines in their condo sectors because of regulatory barriers: federal mortgage rules preventing more than a certain portion of units to be acquired by investors, or regulations that put developers on the hook for structural defects for up to a decade – a consumer-protection measure that drove up prices (the developers had to buy a lot of insurance and fight a lot of legal battles) and depressed sales. As the Urban Land Institute reported in 2022, condo sales, as a proportion of all “multi-family” projects (i.e., apartment buildings) had sunk to their lowest level in half a century in the United States. Which is to say, back to the years when a few pioneering states were passing legislation establishing strata title.

The rise of the missing middle

There are glimpses of how new housing markets might take shape. Non-profits are getting back into the game, using public subsidies to co-sponsor affordable rental projects or acquiring condo apartments in for-profit projects and then sequestering them in land trusts that hold rents low and prevent speculation.

These have been accompanied by the much discussed “missing middle” zoning reforms that allow multiplexes or accessory dwelling units (i.e., small backyard houses, now popular in regions like California and Oregon) to be built in traditional residential neighbourhoods. As well, a younger generation of builders are looking to enter an industry long dominated by very large players with the capital to finance huge high-rises.

“I do see in my interactions with missing-middle developers a significant shift, and that shift might just have to be with a new generation versus an older generation,” observes Carolyn Whitzman, an Ottawa-based planning and housing researcher, adding that these next-gen builders are interested in more modestly scaled projects.

Some missing-middle advocates are pressing for reforms to North American building-code conventions that effectively prohibit “point access block apartments,” which are legal and ubiquitous in much of the rest of the world. These tend to be low-rise apartments constructed around a single stairwell/elevator shaft as opposed to the standard apartment building configurations in North America, which require long internal corridors with apartments on both sides with emergency exits at either end of a floor (the thinking is that every occupant should be able to reach an escape route in the opposite direction from a fire).

Such safety requirements produce buildings with smaller apartments that face only in one direction. Point access blocks, on the other hand, allow for more livable apartment layouts and enable developers to make more efficient use of space (i.e., no long corridors). Nor is there any evidence that they’re less safe. Some cities, such as New York, Vancouver and Los Angeles, are experimenting with code changes that allow point access block buildings, but their potential, in North America, remains nascent.

The question is whether missing-middle-type development can be accelerated sufficiently to address the need for housing. After all, the condo business model, for all its flaws, quickly generated a lot of apartments. Many housing experts are skeptical and don’t think missing-middle projects will fill the void left by the collapse of the condo industry. Others see a half-full glass: “Right now, there’s a lot of market interest in developing at smaller scales, which wasn’t the case pre-2022,” Donnelly says, citing the “critical” importance of more permissive zoning rules in traditional house neighbourhoods.

What will take over?

The candidate most likely to fill the gap, at least in larger Canadian cities, is large-scale purpose-built rental apartment buildings. In the past few years, deep-pocketed institutional investors, such as Quebec’s Caisse de dépôt public pension fund, have become increasingly committed to underwriting these apartments. Their ranks include public-sector pension funds that have also traditionally invested in malls.

In the United States, while there’s been some growth in the development of rental apartments, the builders of multi-family housing still battle NIMBYism, land-use restrictions and powerful tax incentives that encourage sprawl.

Building and owning rental apartment towers is a very different business than erecting condos. Because there are no small investors to buy individual units in advance of construction, as is the case with condos, apartment developers have to take on long-term mortgages, which means they need healthy balance sheets. It’s not an in-and-out type business. Yet apartment buildings generate exceptionally stable income streams, which appeal to institutional investors like pension plans or real estate investment trusts (REITs). They also tend to be better built than condo towers, Richardson notes. “The developers themselves have some skin in the game long-term.”

The rental market has a carbon problem – here’s how to solve it

Like almost all categories of residential real estate, the viability of rental projects has turned on certain public policies. In the case of apartment buildings in Canada, in the 1960s and 1970s, an obscure federal tax credit permitted investors to write off losses in their non-real-estate holdings against income generated by rental buildings. That measure attracted a massive amount of capital from smaller investors and underwrote an entire generation of slab apartment buildings in many large Canadian cities.

Mark Carney’s Liberals have promised to resurrect this tax break, and the federal government is also plowing billions in loans and loan guarantees into purpose-built rental projects that offer affordable rents to lower- and middle-income tenants. Given the moribund state of the condo business, where developers can’t start new projects because so few people are prepared to put down deposits on pre-sale units, Carney’s timing couldn’t be better.

Whether the rental sector surges, as it did half a century ago, remains to be seen. Donnelly feels the jury is out. “It’s hard to say because the development landscape is very much in flux right now. But the margins on new purpose-built rental projects are significantly tighter than what they were on new condominiums pre-2022. I don’t think we’ll see [purpose-built rentals] dominate in the way condominiums did unless the returns become more attractive.”

Yet, as Amborski notes, investors no longer see condos as a viable asset class that can generate better returns than the stock market or gold, which means all those dollars that flowed freely into tiny investor-owned units have gone elsewhere and may not return any time soon.

Donnelly is optimistic about the fact that the bursting of the condo bubble has driven out speculators, which is good news for people who want to live in the apartments they buy, and also for asset managers who want to invest in rental buildings. Without the condo sector, these firms will no longer be forced to compete for outrageously overvalued real estate with small-time investors looking to make a quick capital gain. “The focus going forward is going to be on meeting end-user demand,” he says. “This is a healthy thing for the market.”

John Lorinc is a journalist and author specializing in urban issues, business and culture.

The post The condo model is collapsing. What comes next? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

“A number of us were working in food-security and food-systems advocacy and seeing the interconnection between food insecurity and the housing crisis,” she recounts. “We [took] those skills that we had in grassroots community organizing and said, ‘Let’s become housing developers.’” None of them, Harris admits, had a clue how to do it. 

Five years later, Propolis has secured a piece of land, raised $1.1 million through a community bond and attracted private backers. They’re currently applying for a low-interest loan from Canada’s $1.5-billion fund to increase co-op housing nationwide, launched in 2022. 

The group will also apply for a municipal building permit this summer, allowing them to construct a six-storey apartment building with 53 units, some community and retail space at street level, a rooftop garden and a car share program. “We’re working really hard for there to be a consistent level of affordability across all of the units,” says Harris, who is Propolis’s executive director, “understanding that the real benefit of cooperative housing is that it becomes permanently affordable.”

At a time when even basic housing has become unattainable for many in advanced economies, the housing co-op movement – which was born in England in 1844 and reached peak popularity in the 1960s and 1970s before a multi-decade decline – is making a comeback, at least in Canada. In February 2025, an Abacus poll of 6,000 Canadians found that three in five respondents “believe there isn’t enough non-profit and co-op housing in their communities, and 61% say increasing availability should be a top priority.” 

“This is a high moment,” says Tom Clement, the executive director of the Co-operative Housing Federation of Toronto (CHFT). “I’m very optimistic.” Julie LaPalme, secretary-general of Ottawa-based Cooperative Housing International, agrees. “Affordability is affecting all ages, [but] it’s different with younger generations in that they’re pretty much priced out of the purchasing market,” she says. “The resurgence [of cooperative housing] is driven by necessity.”

Read more from our collective economy series

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The return of the collective economy

The confidence barometer, however, varies by geography. About half of the 1.2 million co-op apartments in the United States are located in New York City. These are infamous for their exclusivity and low rents, but there’s not much growth elsewhere. Likewise in the United Kingdom, the co-op housing sector is “stagnant,” says Rebecca Harvey, executive editor at Co-operative News, a Manchester, U.K.–based trade publication. But, she adds, the movement has made rapid gains in Europe and Australia and will get a plug at the United Nations’ Second World Summit for Social Development, in Doha in November. “There’s going to be a big co-op delegation heading there to present the cooperative case for a lot of the issues that exacerbate housing issues around the world.” (A March 2025 report by Housing Europe estimates that there are about 7.9 million co-op dwellings in the European Union as well as non-EU countries like Iceland, Norway and Switzerland.)

Cooperative housing, Harvey explains, isn’t just about affordability. The sector is defined by seven guiding principles, which delineate the democratic ways in which cooperative housing societies are managed. Residents own them jointly, on a not-for-profit basis. They are expected to take part in the work of running their dwellings but also to participate in the communal life of communities where tenants will share everything from amenity spaces to bikes and tools. 

Some sectors of the movement are seeing especially robust growth, such as student housing co-ops, land trusts and intergenerational projects. “Loneliness of elderly or older people is being mitigated by having a mixed-use cooperative housing where older people and younger people are in the same space,” Harvey says. “Actually, that works really, really well.”

The real benefit of cooperative housing is that it becomes permanently affordable.

— Lindsay Harris, executive director, Propolis Housing Cooperative

LaPalme points to Zurich, where the municipality adds co-ops on a yearly basis, with a goal of reaching a third of all housing in the city. One of the most notable is Mehr als Wohnen, which means “more than living.” Built on a former industrial site owned by the city and leased to the cooperative for a century, Mehr als Wohnen is a cluster of 13 six- to seven-storey blocks constructed between 2008 and 2015, with more than 370 apartments for some 1,300 residents, as well as amenities such as daycares, cafés and co-working spaces. It offers leases 20% below average market rates in Zurich. The project attracted serious architectural talent and was backed by 35 Swiss co-ops, which collectively contributed the professional and financial heft to bring such a large venture to fruition. 

Despite the long decline of public support for co-op housing in Canadian cities, the Toronto federation, Clement says, continued to create or refurbish some co-ops over the past 25 years – a total of 548 units in six projects between 2000 and 2022, compared to 2,500 to 3,000 in the 1980s and 1990s. 

Yet the recent public policy pivot has resulted in some landmark new ventures. Case in point: a newly approved three-tower joint venture between CHFT, Civic Developments and Windmill Developments to construct 612 co-op apartments and 306 condos in three towers on a city-owned property next to a major transit hub. It’s the largest co-op to be built in Canada in three decades. 

There will likely be more at this scale, given the new federal funding and municipal contributions of land. Vancouver City Council, for example, voted last fall to fast-track social and cooperative housing projects. Not all communities, however, have welcomed these ventures. In March, the eastern Ontario city of Kingston blocked a $127-million/248-unit co-op proposal.

In Kamloops, Propolis is now vetting architects and contractors and grappling with the task of translating lofty design principles – resilience and energy efficiency, for instance – into bricks and mortar. 

“It requires so many people pulling together to make it happen,” Harris says, echoing the essence of the co-op philosophy. 

John Lorinc is a journalist and author specializing in urban issues, business and culture.

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Case in point: electric bus adoption. The Toronto Transit Commission has 400 in operation – a fifth of its fleet – and claims to be North America’s leader. New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, has about 500 – less than a 10th of its fleet – and aims to complete the transition by 2040. Metrolinx, which operates hundreds of GO buses in the Greater Toronto region, is still plodding through a six-stage procurement initiative.

But the pace of conversion isn’t slow everywhere. Transport for London (TfL), for instance, now has 1,900 e-buses, while Santiago, Chile, has 1,800, up from just two in 2017. The agency, known formally as Red Metropolitana de Movilidad (RMM), says it will have 4,400 e-buses by next year – 68% of its total fleet – and asserts that it has become the second-largest e-bus operator in the world, outside China. (RMM runs 391 bus lines that carry 3.3 million passengers per day across Greater Santiago, which has a population of almost seven million people.)

China, in fact, is the telling detail in this decarbonization narrative. TfL’s new e-buses, including new double-deckers, are made by Shenzhen-based BYD, the world’s largest manufacturer of electric vehicles. Santiago’s are also sourced from Chinese manufacturers. The unit prices have fallen from about US$400,000, when the agency secured its first pilot vehicles, to about US$260,000 today, according to Alejandro Schmidt, chief technology officer.

“The buses we have in operation are from China,” he adds. “They have been very aggressive in terms of the pricing of the product, but now we are seeing also competition from European OEMs like Volvo, Scania and Daimler, with their bodies built in Brazil.” Even more relevant: the Chinese bus makers can deliver vehicles in six to nine months, which is considerably faster than what’s on offer among other manufacturers.

As Chile’s transportation minister, Juan Carlos Muñoz, an academic specializing in transit and logistics, put it at an international forum in Leipzig on May 21, “We do not close the door to technologies coming from any country, and that has been very good in terms of finding competition. It has been key for us to allow every charging system in the world to be open for operators to provide.” A former board member of Santiago’s Metro system, Muñoz has been one of the driving forces behind the electrification of the city’s far-flung transit agency.

Santiago’s transformation isn’t only about going after low-cost suppliers, and as such serves as an interesting model for transit operators looking to, well, accelerate.

The national government in Chile provides transit subsidies and has also agreed to backstop private-sector investment in the new fleets. (The Canadian government in 2023 kicked in $700 million for the TTC’s e-bus fleet.) Early on, Schmidt explains, the first external investors were actually Chilean electrical utilities, which had a commercial interest in fleet electrification. But the financing now also comes from private equity firms, which ink leasing deals with the local operators (several municipal bus companies operate within Metro Santiago).

Hastening the changeover is a law banning the purchase of diesel buses and an open procurement approach that sets out the performance specifications. However, the agency’s e-bus procurement policy doesn’t include pre-conditions stipulating locally manufactured content – a reflection of Chile’s long-standing and at times controversial neo-liberal political outlook in the post-Pinochet era. “We are a very open economy,” Schmidt says, adding that there’s no vehicle production in Chile, and thus no incumbent that needs to be protected, as is the case in Brazil as well as North America (New Flyer Industries is the dominant supplier).

Energy, of course, is the final piece of this puzzle. According to Schmidt, Chile’s electricity mix includes hydro, fossil fuels and a rapidly expanding portfolio of solar, in the country’s north, and offshore wind, in the south. “We’re reaching 75% green energy,” he says. For the e-bus fleet operators, the trick has been to ensure that they’re not overly exposed to high spot market rates for green energy. The agency is also looking at using hydrogen to round out the supply of low-carbon electricity. “We’re trying to figure out the best way to solve these challenges,” Schmidt says.

Public response has been, unsurprisingly, positive. Electric buses are quieter and provide a smoother ride, and there are predictable air-quality improvements.

With RMM’s e-bus transition now irreversible, Schmidt explains that Santiago’s remarkable pivot was the result, initially, of some political risk-taking at the national level, plus a totally open approach to technology procurement, the involvement of private capital and the willingness of the local bus operators to make the shift. “We weren’t able to do it by ourselves.”

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Under a new blue-box program developed in partnership with a provincially established non-profit called Circular Materials, residents of London, Ontario, can drop their used pods, which are made with an aluminum mesh and frame, in a special bag that comes in the Nespresso package. Then they put the sack in the blue bin on recycling days. The spent pods are collected and sent to one of three recycling facilities, where the coffee and the casing are separated. The aluminum is compacted and shredded, and then sent to a smelter to be reprocessed.

According to the company, the program has been rolled out in hundreds of communities across Canada. “Nespresso Canada currently pays the entire costs of the capsule recycling program,” a spokesperson says. “This approach does not generate any costs for residents or municipalities.”

This venture, so far, is a small but revealing example of an important shift taking place when it comes to waste diversion. For decades, most Canadian and U.S. municipalities have operated blue-box programs, charging residents and some businesses for the service through taxes or fees. But diversion rates remain stubbornly low, and a lot of contaminated material that gets tossed in blue bins finds its way to landfills.

All of the same accelerants we saw in the climate change debate, we’re seeing take hold now with plastic pollution.

– Rick Smith, executive director, Canadian Climate Institute

The “extended producer responsibility” (EPR) model, popular in much of Europe, places the financial burden squarely in the laps of producers. The thinking is that the industries affected will be motivated to find or develop new end markets or reduce packaging to avoid landfill fees. 

The producer-pays model propels innovation

Early this year, Quebec producers and packagers formally assumed responsibility for waste gathered from municipal blue-box programs – the latest Canadian jurisdiction to shift its recycling services to EPR. 

Ontario is in the midst of its own EPR transition, setting up “producer responsibility organizations” to manage different portions of the blue-box waste streams. 

Sarah King, who heads Greenpeace Canada’s oceans and plastics campaign, points out that Recycle B.C., the oldest and most highly regarded EPR program in North America, has built an encouraging track record. Created in 2014 by the province’s Ministry of Environment, the not-for-profit reported that for 2023, 43% of plastics were sold to end markets, while the agency has established a partnership with GFL, the waste-management giant, to invest in new recycling infrastructure and technology. 

EPR, King says, “can have really positive impacts in terms of eliminating problematic materials and formats.” Yet, she offers up cautions: “Unfortunately, what we’ve seen is that it’s really focused on transferring collection and recycling [away from municipalities] as opposed to reducing overall waste generation. It’s not a replacement for eliminating or banning certain types of plastics or materials.”

The transformation of high-profile recycling programs coincides with a boom in research and development and business innovation when it comes to waste materials. Herewith, some notable case studies. 

1. Building in reverse through deconstruction

Construction and demolition waste remains a black box in the recycling world, as is true of much of the so-called IC&I (industrial, commercial and institutional) waste stream, of which only about 12% is diverted from landfill in Ontario, according to the Council of the Great Lakes Region. The United States, in turn, generates 600 million tonnes of construction and demolition debris annually, about a quarter of which goes to landfill. The rest, such as scrap metal, is diverted. 

Meredith Moore, an interior designer originally from New York, belongs to a growing movement within the contracting business. Her Toronto firm, Ouroboros, provides “deconstruction” services to renovators, essentially salvaging and reselling materials that normally end up in industrial waste bins: old studs, asphalt shingles, flooring and so on. The firm grew out of a home reno she and her partner completed during the pandemic and was inspired, in part, by the sight of so many overflowing bins in front of homes getting makeovers, she says. “I was just pretty much blown away by the amount of really wonderful materials that were being tossed out.” 

“Deconstruction is basically building a home in reverse,” Moore explains. “The last things that you’re putting in are going to be your baseboards, kitchen, appliances. All of that gets salvaged. Then we go on to the flooring, and that gets salvaged. Once we get to the drywall, that goes to recycling partners or gets disposed of. There are still not really any great options for fibreglass insulation for recycling right now. Then, once we get back to the stud walls, we basically work from the top down.” Ouroboros can achieve 90% diversion on most projects.

A growing number of municipal, state and provincial jurisdictions have established deconstruction rules, including places like Seattle, Washington, and San Antonio, Texas, where deconstruction is required or regulated. In Ontario, salvaged lumber – which is often much sturdier than what’s on offer at Home Depot – has to be regraded, per the provincial building code. Initially, that rule was a significant impediment to finding buyers, but Moore developed an approach that allows her to sell salvaged beams and studs to homebuilders. 

As for the business model, she says there’s still a cost premium for deconstruction services, even after factoring in revenues from resold materials. But Moore has figured out how to reduce that price differential by providing charitable-donation receipts for salvaged scrap that the homeowner can donate. Under those conditions, “we become, on par, less expensive than demolition.”

2. Stopping plastic pollution from synthetic fabrics

As of January 2025, France became the first country to mandate the installation of microfibre filters in washing machines – a move that will reduce the leaching of microplastics into the water system. 

European Union data shows that plastic microfibres in textiles are responsible for 15% to 31% of the 9.5 million tonnes of plastics that end up in the world’s oceans each year. In the United States, according to a 2019 literature review published in the Journal of Cleaner Production, textiles accounted for 6% of all municipal waste in 2014, of which only about 16% was recycled. (A few jurisdictions, like Markham, Ontario, offer or mandate textile recycling.)

A 2024 study by Ocean Diagnostics and the Rainforest Conservation Foundation found that annually about 1,920 tonnes of microfibres find their way into the environment from Canadian laundry activities, with almost 400 tonnes released into the air via dryers, with the balance in treated wastewater and biosolids used in farming and forestry. 

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Concerns about synthetic fabrics have escalated dramatically in recent years with the advent of fast fashion, as well as the growing popularity of blended materials that include both natural and synthetic fibres that enable clothing to be stretchier. A U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) study released last December estimated that 60% of textiles made today include plastics and cited Environmental Protection Agency studies showing a 50% increase in textile waste between 2000 and 2018.

Some brands – Canada’s Frank and Oak, Patagonia, and Finland’s Pure Waste – now promote either all-natural textiles or products made from post-consumer recycled fabrics. Lululemon last year introduced products made from “enzymatically recycled” polyester. End-of-life diversion, however, has had limited success because clothing and textiles are not allowed in most blue-box programs. Used synthetics that go to landfill or incinerators release greenhouse gases and leachates that shunt microplastics into lakes, rivers and oceans, soil, micro-organisms and, ultimately, human bodies. 

While some textile-recycling facilities now deploy hand-held devices that use infrared scanning to identify different types of fabrics, these technologies don’t solve the blended-fabric problem, and, as the GAO report goes on to note, advanced textile-recycling technology is still in its infancy. 

A US$1.28-million research study, commissioned by Goodwill and funded by Walmart’s philanthropic arm, seems to support that conclusion. Conducted at four regional textile hubs in the United States and Canada serving 28 Goodwill divisions, the two-year pilot concluded that 60% of the material studied – cottons, blends and polyster – could be reprocessed with existing recycling technologies.

While such findings are encouraging, regulations to mandate microfibre filters in washing machines will likely be more effective at reducing microplastic pollution well before clothing is thrown out. Just don’t dump your accumulated lint down the drain after collecting it. Better yet, experts say: dry your clothes on a line. 

3. Recovering EV battery materials through ‘direct recycling’

The surge in sales of electric vehicles in recent years foreshadows a similar surge in EV battery recycling as all those vehicles begin to reach the end of their lives. Battery metals and components like cathodes and anodes can then be reprocessed and cycled back into battery production. 

But the traditional means for salvaging these materials rely on high heat (smelting), chemicals or water, producing by-products that harm the environment, including greenhouse gases, acid leachate and an abundance of sodium sulfate, a cast-off compound that’s harmful in high concentrations. For every tonne of battery metals, conventional recycling produces 800 kilograms of this salt-like powder, which is difficult to dispose of and has few further commercial uses. Chinese battery recyclers sell it for use in detergent, while North American and European firms pay to dispose of it. “There’s not really an industry for this material,” says Beatrice Browning, a senior recycling analyst at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, a global EV supply chain consultancy. 

“In the competitive battery industry, the difference between sodium sulfate being a sellable product and a cost centre for disposal is one of the main reasons why battery producers in the U.S. and Europe can’t compete on cost with Chinese battery companies,” says Micha Ben-Naim, a scientist and investor with Boston-based Clean Energy Ventures. 

Browning points to the emergence of “direct recycling,” a simplified process for salvaging the various components of a spent battery without shredding the modules. “The direct recycling process’s easy scale-up is expected to generate higher revenue due to higher material recovery and few processing steps,” a team of researchers from India, Singapore and France concluded in a study released last year. 

Several start-ups are now working in this emerging market, Browning says: Kyburz, a Swiss EV company with a battery recycling division; Princeton NuEnergy, which has raised US$55 million and is now building a commercial-scale plant in South Carolina; and Ascend Elements, which has raised more than US$700 million in recent years and signed a 2023 deal to supply recycled battery materials to Honda. Clean Energy Ventures, meanwhile, recently led a US$8-million seed round, to be invested in Aepnus Technologies, a California firm commercializing a sodium sulfate recycling technology. 

Unlike conventional methods, direct recycling doesn’t produce the black mass that’s used to produce cathodes. That’s an advantage, because it eliminates the need to ship black mass to Asia for reprocessing, Browning notes. “The aim is to try and localize the whole supply chain.” 

4. Replacing plastics with new biodegradable materials

At some point this year, the UN member nations will resume a long-delayed negotiation over the implementation of a global treaty, adopted in 2022, to end plastics pollution. Even without the environmental hostility and climate denialism of the Trump administration, the goal remains elusive. 

For decades, plastic packaging has been the Achilles heel of the recycling industry. With a few exceptions (e.g., fleece made from recycled bottles), plastic is stubbornly resistant to circular applications for a range of familiar reasons: the proliferation of single-use plastics, inadequate sorting, mixed and contaminated feedstock, and simply the skyrocketing quantity of plastic packaging.

Veteran plastics researcher Rick Smith, executive director of the Canadian Climate Institute, says that new recycling technology won’t alter this narrative; rather, he predicts, the trajectory of plastics use will yield to rapidly emerging insights about the health impacts. Microplastics “are widely distributed throughout the natural environment, with evidence of harm at multiple levels of biological organization,” the authors of a wide-ranging literature review published last year in Science observed. “They are pervasive in food and drink and have been detected throughout the human body, with emerging evidence of negative effects.” 

Smith points out that the microplastics debate today is where the climate crisis discourse was a generation ago. “All of the same accelerants we saw in the climate change debate – the increasing awareness that climate change is not some sort of notional concern for our grandchildren, but a proximate threat to human security in the here and now – we’re seeing take hold now, just in the last year, with plastic pollution. For a plastics company, there’s no way you’re going to explain away the horrible, increasing scientific evidence that small plastic particles have penetrated every human body on Earth.”

Those revelations, he predicts, “will drive incredible new solutions in terms of non-toxic new materials and truly biodegradable plastic-type materials. That’s happening quickly, but we’re not there yet.”

John Lorinc is a journalist and author specializing in urban issues, business and culture.

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The plant – operated by CertainTeed Canada, a division of the French construction giant Saint-Gobain – will transition from the use of fossil fuels to clean power provided by Hydro-Québec and increase its use of recycled materials to cut its reliance on incoming shipments of virgin gypsum.

Such carbon-reduction initiatives are becoming increasingly common among industrial operators, data-centre developers and electrical utilities, all of which are pushing to find efficiencies to cut their emissions in response to regulatory, consumer and investor pressure. Cities, countries and corporations are looking for ways to get ahead of the climate crisis, with a range of measures driving green trends behind the scenes.

Herewith, Corporate Knights’ annual survey of important trends for 2025:

More cities will be designing for extreme heat

The summer of 2024 was the hottest on record, and there’s every reason to expect more of the same this year, with similar results. A growing number of urban regions that now endure extended periods of extreme temperatures are looking at responding more proactively to deadly heat waves. As Corporate Knights reported last year, several city regions have appointed “chief heat officers” to spearhead a range of measures, from public health initiatives to safety practices for firms with outdoor employees, and many more municipally driven extreme-heat strategies will roll out 2025.

Indeed, planners, designers, landscape architects and municipal governments are stepping up their efforts to alter or adapt the built forms in cities in 2025 to mitigate the urban heat-island effect. From the construction of shade structures in public spaces to the use of light-coloured exteriors on buildings and white paint on paved surfaces, expect to see more of them in urban centres around the world. Many cities are also adopting more aggressive approaches to tree planting on streets, along bike paths and in parks, creating more green corridors and replacing hard impervious surfaces.

More new builds will also have fewer staircases. Some North American jurisdictions (British Columbia and Washington State, among others) are easing up on fire codes to allow single-stair apartment buildings, which are commonplace in much of the world. This reform provides a range of benefits, not least of which is cross-ventilation within individual apartments, reducing the need for air conditioning.

Power-hungry data centres face a reckoning

The Canadian government’s decision, late in 2024, to incentivize major pension plans to invest up to $15 billion in “green” data centres is the latest piece of evidence about the growing recognition of artificial intelligence’s heavy carbon footprint. The program is aimed at encouraging data-centre developers and tech giants to use low-carbon electricity to power the huge amount of cooling required to allow these vast server farms to operate safely.

There have been several recent developments on this front, including Microsoft’s move, announced in September, to purchase 20 years of electricity from a refurbished reactor at Three Mile Island. “The agreement is intended to provide the company with a clean source of energy as power-hungry data centres for artificial intelligence (AI) expand,” the BBC reported.

Other developers are anticipating the arrival of small nuclear reactors as a means of providing low-carbon electricity, although these modular plants are still 10 to 15 years from coming online.

As data centres pop up in urban areas, some architects and critics have called out the monolithic and dehumanizing design of these “anti-monuments,” while data-centre developers are looking to reduce embodied carbon, using modular construction techniques and even employing green materials like cross-laminated timber.

Such changes reflect the data-centre industry’s awareness that increasingly stringent regulation is on the way. Starting in fall 2024, the European Union is targeting data centres with tougher regulations, including the disclosure of energy and water consumption. Other jurisdictions, including Australia, Singapore and a growing number of U.S. state governments, are following suit with their own regulations.

Giant ‘grid’ batteries are making renewables more viable

As wind and solar installations account for an ever-larger supply of renewable electricity, some utilities and systems operators have realized they need to figure out how to make better use of these low-cost/low-carbon sources. Systems operators for decades stored power behind hydro dams, using the renewable electricity to pump water up into reservoirs.

But in recent years, so-called long-duration energy storage (LDES) has become an increasingly viable low-carbon alternative. Citing International Energy Agency forecasts, The Economist reported in November that grid storage has become the fastest-growing energy technology, with 80 gigawatts forecast to be added in 2025, three times the level achieved in 2021. (For comparison, Canada has electricity capacity of 149 GW nationwide.)

The idea behind grid storage is to create what are effectively giant banks of batteries that can be recharged with renewable power when the wind blows and the sun shines. These batteries can then be discharged over the course of eight or 12 hours, thereby providing backup low-carbon power to the grid at scale.

China has the world’s largest supply of grid-storage capacity, but other jurisdictions will be racing to catch up over the next decade.

In the United States, California leads the pack, announcing the procurement last year of two gigawatts of 12- to 24-hour LDES, to be built out in the 2030s. Which is critical, since California requires solar and energy storage in new homes.

Elsewhere, Australian authorities are also commissioning several LDES projects, typically providing hundreds of megawatts of capacity using various technologies, including a 200-megawatt compressed air system with eight hours of capacity, developed by Toronto-based Hydrostor.

Tariffs will help fight climate change

At a period when the incoming Trump administration has threatened large-scale tariffs as a means of driving investment into the United States, the European Union’s carbon border tax, or “carbon border adjustment mechanism” (CBAM), adopted in 2023, will become a hot topic of diplomatic debate as the 27-nation bloc spends this year preparing for the launch in 2026.

An EU innovation, CBAMs are essentially carbon levies on imported goods and commodities, designed to mitigate against carbon “leakage,” or the problem of importers in high-regulation regions bringing in materials from countries with lax carbon policies. A few jurisdictions, such as Brazil and the United Kingdom, have followed suit, while the Canadian government is considering its own version, although, like so many trade-related files, this one is up in the air.

Not surprisingly, this policy approach received a good deal of pushback last year from Brazilian and Indian steelmakers. It seems likely that the chorus of objections will grow louder this year as EU member states ramp up their CBAM regulations.

Either way, CBAM will play a key role in 2025 in aligning trade policy with the broader climate targets.

Given the anticipated political headwinds facing climate policy, 2025 may be the year in which rapidly maturing climate technologies and resiliency solutions will be called upon to prove their own significance in combating extreme weather and intensified stresses on our energy systems.

John Lorinc is a Toronto journalist, author and editor. He writes about cities, climate and cleantech.

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The initiative, a partnership between veterans of Canada’s climate fight and relative newcomers, raises the ante, with deep-pocketed foundations and wealthy individuals stepping into the limelight to demonstrate their willingness to spend large sums at a time when many governments seem to be retreating from climate policies.

Two prominent foundations – the Trottier Family Foundation and the Peter Gilgan Foundation – contributed $250 million, with the balance coming from smaller and newer funds, including one set up by direct-air-capture pioneer David Keith, a University of Chicago physicist who last year sold his start-up, Carbon Engineering, to Texas-based Occidental for US$1.1 billion. The Ivey Foundation also recommitted an earlier pledge of $100 million.

According to a press release, “the new commitments were made through the Climate Champions initiative, coordinated by Clean Economy Fund, which has the goal of tripling climate philanthropy in Canada from roughly $100 million to more than $300 million per year by 2030.” The Clean Economy Fund released data in September indicating that Canadian climate donations – $106 million in 2022 – represent less than 1% of all giving.

The committed funds will be allocated by the individual foundations, according to their own philanthropic programs, which may direct grants to advocacy, technology, policy-making or other initiatives, Eric St-Pierre says in an interview. St-Pierre is the executive director of the Trottier Family Foundation, which has long been active in climate philanthropy. “I would say this $405 million is first a pledge, it’s a commitment, and it’s basically a call to action.”

The target audience for this appeal, however, is definitely not mass-market. For the past two years, according to St-Pierre, officials from Trottier and a few other climate philanthropies have been quietly meeting with high-net-worth individuals and families, sounding them out on committing donations to some aspect of the fight against climate change.

This outreach campaign has sought to help smaller foundations figure out how to dip their toes in a space that can involve a good deal of technical complexity, as well as uncertainty as to the effectiveness of those donations. In many cases, wealthy families will set up family foundations with very specific philanthropic goals – healthcare, humanitarian relief, culture, scholarships, et cetera. “We’ve been sitting down for coffee, trying to explain the work that we do, trying to answer questions, trying to bring them along,” St-Pierre says.

An evolving approach to climate philanthropy

Historically, a large chunk of climate-adjacent philanthropy has gone toward conservancy organizations that buy ecologically sensitive land and establish anti-development easements that will protect those tracts in perpetuity. These gifts are also eligible for various types of tax exemptions.

Advocacy groups that target mainly individuals for support have been the other long-standing fixture of climate philanthropy, with donations underwriting lobbying, legal challenges and public action campaigns.

More recently, some foundations have invested in both advocacy and impact funding, meaning investments in either not-for-profit or for-profit revenue-generating activities, or technology start-ups, that may bring some kind of environmental benefit as well as a return on investment. But even climate-focused foundations acknowledge it will take trillions of dollars in private capital to transform and decarbonize massive sectors like energy, transportation and building materials.

Some climate philanthropists now position their role as catalysts pursuing a “theory of change,” with funding that underwrites or supports emerging economic activity, such as electric vehicle supply chains or green steel. “One of the fundamental ways in which we observe and measure this effect is in the unleashing of capital,” observed Eric Campbell, executive director of the Clean Economy Fund, in a recent blog post. “Like the small-sized domino, well-targeted and well-timed philanthropic capital can unlock much greater amounts of public and private capital.”

St-Pierre says that some climate foundations have explored the idea of establishing a pooled climate fund, to which smaller and less experienced, or less well-resourced, family foundations could contribute. “We had looked at that initially, and we’re keeping that option on the table,” he says. “There might be some foundations that might not want to make the decision on where to allocate to specific funders.”

For the time being, the foundations that signed on to today’s commitment will be able to coordinate some of their giving through the Climate Champions initiative, which is a program by the Clean Economy Fund.

Given the broad political swing to the right, and the Trump administration’s signalling that it will pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement, it might seem as if such efforts, even well-financed ones, are destined to hit a wall. But St-Pierre says he remains optimistic, noting the precipitous fall in solar and wind prices, as well as the dramatic take-up of EVs in China.

He also points out that when he talks to wealthy families, he no longer has to spend much time convincing them of the issue. “They get it. They’ve seen Jasper burn down, or they’ve witnessed smoke through their communities, and they’re probably physically feeling the effects of flooded basements. There’s no need to convince people of the gravity of climate change.”

Disclosure: John Lorinc has been retained independently by the Ivey Foundation to write a report on their efforts to wind down their granting operations.

John Lorinc is a Toronto journalist, author and editor. He writes about cities, climate and cleantech.

The post Some of Canada’s wealthiest families are putting up $405M for climate change efforts appeared first on Corporate Knights.

But what makes this development – which includes 12 deeply affordable apartments to be operated by a local non-profit – unusual is that it is hooked into a geo-exchange system. That means it is tapping the earth’s heat, rather than conventional gas-fired boilers, to warm and cool the building’s interior spaces. 

According to Adam Molson, vice-president of the Daniels Corporation, the project’s developer, Uniti is one of the first completed projects in the company’s 2030 decarbonization strategy, which begins with geo-exchange systems or air-source heat pumps in all its new rental projects, followed by the use of low-carbon concrete, efficiency improvements in the building’s exterior walls, rooftop solar and mass timber. 

“We broke the ice and got over the fear factor,” Molson says of the geo-exchange system. “That essentially opened the floodgates to us being able to move to geothermal as our default heating system. Unless there are site-specific reasons to pursue another technology, which there may be, we’re not using natural-gas space heating anymore.” 

The one-two punch of the climate crisis driving up utility bills in buildings that already generate 40% of global carbon emissions, while the housing crisis leaves few affordable rental options, puts units like the ones in Uniti in high demand. 

Across North America, rental units represent roughly one-third of dwellings, and steep rent hikes in many metropolitan areas have added enormous strain to those household budgets. A March 2024 research report for Canada’s Task Force for Housing and Climate recommended that purpose-built rentals account for 35% to 40% of all new starts for the balance of the decade. 

With condos, there’s little incentive for developers to invest in low-carbon systems because the benefits don’t accrue to the developers, whose goal is to sell off the units as quickly as possible, nor their investors – that is, the people who buy condos and rent them out, and thus pass on the utility costs to their tenants. But the math works quite differently for an asset manager that’s going to own and operate an apartment building for decades, especially if their institutional investors have explicit ESG (environmental, social and governance) targets, including emission reductions, as is the case with Choice Properties, the real estate investment trust that partnered with Daniels to build Uniti. What’s more, geo-exchange infrastructure, which remains costly to build and install, is ideal for larger buildings that can create the economies of scale necessary to deliver those lower operating costs over the long term. When the planets align, the sustainability investments yield meaningful emission reductions and a payoff for the owner. 

Investors are shopping for rental buildings

In fact, there’s good evidence in both Canada and the United States that investment capital is now flowing into rental apartments at a pace not seen in decades. There are various reasons for the shift, including the high interest rates of recent years that have scared off condo buyers, as well as the fact that all forms of housing, including condos, have become so expensive that most people are completely priced out of the market. 

While the market transition toward purpose-built rentals may bring about more lower-carbon housing because landlords have a financial incentive to minimize energy costs, the change isn’t sufficient to guarantee a payoff that is both green and affordable, nor does this trend assure a supply of affordable rentals. Deep retrofits of drafty older rental stock remain financially daunting, especially for affordable housing providers. Some landlords have struggled to comply with strict decarbonization regulations cropping up in jurisdictions like British Columbia and California, among them building code requirements to “fuel switch” (i.e., from gas to electricity), slash carbon embodied in building materials (e.g., by constructing with mass timber to reduce concrete) or add battery storage systems. 

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Others, meanwhile, have resorted to greenwashing, touting essentially cosmetic environmental improvements in their buildings as a way of justifying rent hikes and displacing low-income tenants. Case in point: a rental high-rise in northwest Toronto, where tenants last year staged a rent strike, accusing the owners of using an energy retrofit renovation to justify above-guideline rent increases of as much as 7% to 10% (Ontario landlords are permitted to increase rents by no more than 2.5% per year but can apply for more if they’ve renovated the building significantly). “This year, my rent went up from $2,100 to almost $2,400 per month,” one tenant told The National Observer. “I don’t know any tenants in Ontario right now who are getting a 10% increase in their income every year, including myself.” (The landlord, Dream Unlimited, disputed the accusations.)

Indeed, as tenant advocacy groups point out, there’s no guarantee that the benefits from energy-efficiency improvements – everything from installing new appliances to replacing drafty windows or baseboard heaters – will trickle down to renters in the form of lower rental rates or reduced energy bills. “We do believe that in many ways, tenants and landlords have differing interests,” says Eddy Roué, chair of the Central Ottawa chapter of ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), a tenants’ advocacy union that recently launched an “eco-tenant” platform for its membership. “But when it comes to things like energy efficiency, this can absolutely be a win-win scenario.” The wrinkle, he adds, is finding the right way to pressure property managers to make the investments. 

Roué cites ACORN’s advocacy strategy, which includes calling for reforms such as anti-eviction covenants on publicly subsidized retrofit projects, free heat pumps for low-income tenants, and a requirement that landlords “demonstrate that the retrofits will result in benefits for tenants, particularly in cases where the landlord pays the energy costs.”

What it takes to green a retrofit

Retrofits on older rental apartments are capital-intensive because they involve the transplant of vital organs – from mechanical HVAC systems to insulation, windows and exterior cladding – in structures filled with tenants. Many property managers will stage these retrofits over a longer period, replacing the various elements only when they’ve reached the end of their usable life. Some cleantech start-ups are also developing approaches to take some of the pain out of retrofits, such as New York–based Hydronic Shell Technologies, which is developing a concept for exterior facade panels that incorporate heat pumps. 

The question confronting policy-makers is how to accelerate this transition. 

Certain jurisdictions have made energy retrofits mandatory. New York City, for example, enacted Local Law 97, which requires landlords of large buildings, many of them rentals that use carbon-intensive heating oil, to meet emission targets or face stiff fines. Some New York landlords have also experimented with so-called green leases, which are structured so that the property manager and tenants share the upfront capital costs for retrofits while also dividing up the savings from lower utility bills. 

Other governments have opted for carrots instead of sticks. The State of Massachusetts last year established a Community Climate Bank to fund low-carbon projects aimed at affordable rental housing agencies. The Canadian government, in turn, has begun offering loans for purpose-built rental development and retrofit projects in multi-family buildings.

It can sometimes just be cheaper to knock down a building rather than retrofit it. It’s hugely destructive and very environmentally unfriendly.

—Tom Wainwright, London’s Royal Holloway University

Yet some places have seen backsliding from earlier efforts to decarbonize rental housing, including housing targeted at low-income households. Before the election of a Labour government in the United Kingdom last summer, initiatives to backstop energy-efficiency programs targeting private rental housing were either stalled or cancelled. 

Real estate expert Tom Wainwright, a professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at London’s Royal Holloway University, also points to unresolved policy contradictions. In the U.K., rental housing developers no longer pay value-added taxes on their projects. However, there’s no such exemption for retrofits, which creates a perverse incentive for landlords, including the removal of existing apartments from the market. “It can sometimes just be cheaper to knock down a building rather than retrofit it,” Wainwright observes. “When you think about all the embodied carbon in the concrete that gets knocked down or landfilled and doesn’t get recycled, it’s hugely destructive and very environmentally unfriendly.” 

Even in climate- and rental-friendly jurisdictions, like Germany, the payback on energy retrofits is difficult to realize. As a 2022 University of Regensburg study found, landlords couldn’t expect to recoup their investment by charging a “green premium” for retrofitted rental units, even after the government kicked in some of the carbon levy as an incentive. 

Scaling low-carbon rentals

The prospect of building new low-carbon rental projects involves far fewer obstacles and has attracted the attention of not just policy-makers and investors, but also innovative designers eager to push well beyond the familiar green benchmarks, like LEED certification.

Shawn Lapointe, a principal with Vancouver-based Henriquez Partners Architects (HPA), describes one such initiative the firm has created with developer Westbank, dubbed Prototype. It’s an attempt to determine an optimal design for a 25-storey mass timber building in Vancouver (that will use some steel) while minimizing cement-hungry underground parking and exterior windows (floor-to-ceiling “glass curtain walls” being incredibly inefficient). They’re also folding in plans for a connection to a local district-energy utility. (District-energy systems distribute low-emission forms of energy such as deep lake water for cooling or recovered sewer gas to run boilers to generate steam for heat.) Prototype, moreover, will be entirely rental, with 20% of the units set at below-market rates and a third suitable for families with children. The project is located on a transit corridor in Vancouver where the city is encouraging rental development by offering density bonuses to builders willing to forgo the condo model.  

What’s more, the design is intended to be portable, meaning that all of HPA’s calculations can be put to use in other locations. “We wanted to make sure that what we’ve developed works for a variety of different sites and conditions, so it can be as replicable as possible,” says Lapointe, who is overseeing Westbank’s Mirvish Village development in downtown Toronto. “We’re also hoping to be able to share that information with others.”

As he looks at Daniels Corporation’s project pipeline, Adam Molson reckons that the current policy and investment climate favours low-carbon purpose-built rentals. With governments scrambling to meet public outcry over the lack of affordable housing, the public policy environment has become highly receptive, with grant programs and tax credits meant to assist both affordable rental and previously unattainable carbon-reducing features, such as geothermal heating. 

There is one storm cloud in Canada, however: natural gas prices, which are now high enough to make the math work on the geo-exchange infrastructure planned for future Daniels/Choice rental projects. But if a future Conservative government slashes or eliminates Canada’s carbon-pricing system, all bets are off. “Right now, you have a payback that might be 10 to 15 years,” Molson says. Without carbon pricing to prime the pump of sustainable rental housing, “you could have a payback that’s well in excess of that, and maybe no longer under-writeable on a purely economic case.”

In that case, it’s hard to imagine that the much-touted financial benefits of “axing the tax” will trickle down to renters living in all those gas-heated buildings. Either way, sky-high rents and energy-inefficient apartments are a burden millennials and Gen Z simply should no longer tolerate.

John Lorinc is a journalist and author specializing in urban issues, business and culture. 

The post The rental market has a carbon problem – here’s how to solve it appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Such dramatic moves underscore the extraordinary amount of energy required to power the exponential growth in generative artificial intelligence computing, which completely eclipses many current uses. For example, according to a recent calculation performed by The Washington Post and the University of California, Riverside, a single ChatGPT prompt (say, to construct a response to an email) consumes the equivalent of about a bottle of water (for cooling the massive data centres run by AI giants).   

Here’s another: the energy consumed by a prompt that generates a single high-resolution AI image is about equivalent to the electricity used to recharge a smartphone. It may sound small enough, but in both cases, the sheer scale of the collective impact of millions of users is bracing, and goes some way to explain why the large language models that are driving the massive surge in generative AI usage leave environmental footprints that are only getting larger as the number of users expands.   

The growth, in part, is also attributable to the fact that a steadily increasing number of generative AI users rely on these powerful platforms to carry out tasks that a standard search – which requires far less energy and water – can readily perform, according to some AI experts.      

“Using ChatGPT to generate text uses somewhere between 10 to 90 times more energy per query than a conventional Google search,” Ascelin Gordon, a senior lecturer at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, testified earlier this fall before an Australian parliamentary committee investigating the impact of AI. “Producing an image via generative AI uses about 20 times more energy than a generative AI text query. This year, producing videos via generative AI is taking off, and the energy to produce videos is likely to be an order of magnitude higher again.”   

“I find it particularly disappointing that generative AI is used to search the internet,” Sasha Luccioni, the Montreal-based AI and climate lead for Hugging Face, a machine learning firm for builders, told AFP (Agence France-Presse) recently, adding that it’s important for AI firms to “explain to people what generative AI can and cannot do, and at what cost.”  

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Those costs – hidden and otherwise – have been drawing intense scrutiny from climate researchers and policy-makers who point to the dramatic growth in the data-centre industry and its voracious demands for both power and water. According to the International Energy Agency, data centres and bitcoin mining accounted for 2% of electricity demand in 2022, and the growth in those verticals has exceeded all other drivers of electricity consumption.   

Morgan Stanley published its own projection in September, estimating that the global data-centre sector would emit 2.5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide – equivalent to the emissions created by 766 million automobiles – annually by 2030.   

The tech giants driving the generative AI revolution – Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Amazon and Meta – all contend that they’re working hard to mitigate the impact of all this consumption with energy-efficiency improvements designed to reduce the carbon intensity of their AI applications, as well as the purchase of “renewable energy certificates” (RECs), which are essentially carbon-offset agreements. Microsoft’s new arrangement with Three Mile Island is an example.  

Yet the use of RECs has come under fire as some climate experts warn that these instruments essentially allow the double-counting of carbon-reduction measures, at both the production stage and at the consumption point, which is to say the AI giants. As an investigation by The Guardian published this past September concluded, the true impact could be in excess of seven times higher than what the tech giants are claiming in their environmental impact disclosures to investors. Soberingly, those conclusions were based on data published between 2020 and 2022 – a year before the advent of image-based generative applications.  

The post Power-hungry AI fires up Three Mile Island reactor in Microsoft deal  appeared first on Corporate Knights.