When the federal Liberals announced the Greener Homes deep retrofit program, back in the 2021 budget, we decided to take the plunge and enroll, hoping to tap some of the $5,000 in grants available to homeowners.

About a year and a half later, we crossed the retrofit finish line, with a range of moves, from stopping up some of the leaks in the walls to the purchase of a pair of big-ticket items: a high-efficiency electric water heater and a hybrid air-source heat pump, including the electrical upgrades required to handle them. From a climate perspective, the investments are worth every penny as our home’s carbon emissions will be about 80% lower than they were previously. From a money-saving perspective, we’re already seeing lower gas bills, and a $2,200 rebate cheque (16% of our capital cost) should arrive, well, eventually.

The Canada Greener Homes Grant, and the accompanying low-interest loan, belong to the smorgasbord of incentives that aim to nudge Canadians’ dwellings in the direction of our Paris Agreement targets. Some provinces – B.C. and Quebec, for instance – offer generous inducements alongside Greener Homes, while others – notably Ontario – do very little. By contrast, Italian homeowners can get 110% of their retrofit costs covered, meaning they’re not out of pocket when they decide to cut their residential carbon.

Italy’s program (more about which in a moment) raises a critical philosophical question: if society agrees that it needs to slash building-related carbon, which accounts for up to 40% of global emissions, should individuals shoulder the financial burden?

“The retrofit industry that we have, with its emphasis on do-it-yourself, finance-it-yourself, manage-it-yourself, is not the retrofit industry we need,” says Corporate Knights director of research Ralph Torrie. “The homeowner should not have to finance retrofits any more than they are asked to finance the next power plant.”

Climate retrofit mission

Consider the statistics: there are almost eight million detached homes in Canada, and the Greener Homes inducements won’t touch the vast majority. The program has attracted about 170,000 applications (as of June 2022), with almost $40 million in grants distributed so far to approximately 10,300 households, for an average of $3,750.

The five-year program has a $2.6-billion budget, with a target of 700,000 homes. That figure is less than 10% of Canada’s housing stock and doesn’t include condos or rental apartments. “The retrofit imperative is so huge,” says Monte Paulsen, a Passive House specialist at RDH Building Science in Vancouver. “We can’t decarbonize without a massive scale-up. We’re going nowhere near fast enough.”

Canada is not the only country to grapple with the question of how to accelerate its pace of housing retrofits sufficiently to significantly bend the building emissions curve.

The United States has about 65 million homes that were built prior to the advent of more energy-efficient construction standards in the 1980s, according to federal data. A study released last year by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) pointed out that “deep retrofits that include a robust package of such upgrades can cut a home’s energy use by 58% to 79% and its emissions by 32% to 56%, depending on the home’s age and regional climate.”

“I don’t think any jurisdiction has found the magic formula for retrofitting at the scale required by climate change,” says Brendan Haley, director of research and policy at Efficiency Canada, a Carleton University think tank which has estimated that, at the current pace, it will take about 142 years to retrofit all the low-rise residential buildings in the country.

The group last year called for a national effort on turnkey project delivery and the aggregating of similar building retrofit projects into portfolios of contracts to drive economies of scale. The animating idea, argue Haley and co-author Ralph Torrie, is to put in place market structures that make retrofits simple to carry out, which, at present, they are most assuredly not.

The Italian job

Some jurisdictions have sought to crack this riddle with extremely generous incentives. Italy, in 2020, launched a residential retrofit program, dubbed “Superbonus,” that offers owners 110% of the cost of the retrofit, to be recouped via reduced future utility bills – an inducement that takes all the homeowner concerns about the upfront costs off the table in one gesture. For my own home, such a program would have allowed me to add a layer of insulation on the exterior walls, a very costly fix that would have gotten us pretty close to net-zero.

Italy’s green Five Star Movement, which was in power in 2020, set up the plan in part to revive an economy flattened by the pandemic and also to encourage homeowners to fix up dwellings that were shattered by a 2010 earthquake in the Abruzzo region. The take-up has been enormous: as of July, 220,000 applications had been approved, totalling €44 billion. While the program is meant to run until 2025, with a sliding-scale incentive structure, it is already vastly oversubscribed.

According to Michele Russo, a financial consultant based in Rome, the Superbonus program will reduce carbon from dwellings with the highest emissions by about 50%.

One of the most innovative aspects of the Superbonus program has to do with the fact that the incentives are provided not in the form of cash (rebates), but rather as credits against future energy bills for the homeowners.

This mechanism is designed to prevent huge outlays from government coffers, and also acknowledges, in its structure, that the work is paid off through long-term reductions in energy costs. “No exotic finance is part of this story,” Russo said in an Efficiency Canada online panel earlier this year. He likens the form of the financing to government bonds – low cost, low risk and liquid. “Most likely, there will be no financial bubble.”

It was a welcome shot in the arm for Italy’s construction sector. By the end of 2021, the program was credited with creating 153,000 jobs and generating more than €12 billion in GDP, according to a study by the Consiglio Nazionale degli Ingegneri, Italy’s national engineering association.

However, the Superbonus has generated controversy, with reports of corruption and inflated construction prices. “We do not agree on the validity of this measure,” outgoing prime minister Mario Draghi said in a speech to the European Parliament this past May. “The cost of improving efficiency has more than tripled due to the 110% scheme. The prices of the investments needed to perform the renovations have more than tripled because the 110% eliminates the incentive to negotiate on price.” The government has continued to tweak the popular program to plug loopholes in order to prevent fraud.

Going Dutch – and New York – style

Haley cites more modestly scaled retrofit programs in countries like Germany, France and the Netherlands, which pioneered the concept of the “energiesprong,” a means of grouping similar dwellings or apartments all requiring retrofits into a bundle that can achieve economies of scale for equipment and labour. These projects, he says, are carried out by market development teams instead of individual owners.

The ACEEE rates and ranks national energy-efficiency programs and this year awarded France’s overall approach to energy efficiency with top honours, although the Netherlands received the highest ranking for its “robust” approach to building-related policies. “The Dutch government has also implemented mandatory building rating systems, as well as appliance performance standards and labeling programs,” the report noted, adding that all buildings must be rated on an A to G energy-efficiency scale, meaning that owners and contractors have baseline data when doing retrofits.

In the U.S., meanwhile, New York City’s Local Law 97 uses sticks instead of carrots, driving retrofits in large buildings using the threat of substantial fines for those that fail to cut their emissions. Haley says the U.S. also has a highly effective federal energy-efficiency program targeting low-income homeowners, which has no real parallel in Canada.

But retrofit experts point out that incentives and penalties on their own go only so far; what’s missing, in many cases, are market mechanisms – in effect, a kind of concierge service – that streamlines and demystifies a process that can be technically daunting, as well as front-end loaded, in terms of cost.

Paulsen adds that Canada’s retrofit sector is problematically under-developed; there’s a lack of skilled trades contractors specializing in retrofits, as well as chronic competition with the new-home construction industry. He muses that one potential solution would be the creation of a specialized contractor designation – a skilled tradesperson who is trained to deal with all the various elements of retrofits, from HVAC installation to insulation to the various electrical work required to knit it all together. The industry, Paulsen says, “would benefit from a contractor who could do all those things” – a kind of one-stop shop that delivers a turnkey fix.

Certainly, as I reflect on the retrofit journey my wife and I took, it strikes me that there’s a lot of insight about this last point, which speaks to the difficulty of such undertakings. Meaningful financial incentives for homeowners as well as landlords are necessary, as are efforts by policy-makers to clear away the underbrush of regulatory obstacles, such as zoning laws that penalize building owners who want to add exterior insulation panels and end up running afoul of municipal density regulations. And we have to acknowledge that any system that depends on homeowners to front five-figure upfront costs or take out similarly scaled loans seems destined not to get out of first gear.

What’s more, grants and loans on their own aren’t sufficient to transform a trickle of early-adopter retrofitters into a mass movement. The lessons of my own retrofit experience seem relevant, and not atypical: that 16-month journey involved an online application, two visits from an energy auditor, a search for firms that could seal leaks and add insulation, a complicated dance with three separate electricians, a search for contractors who could install the big-ticket items at a cost that didn’t make my eyes water, and various financial obstacles imposed by my gas services company for attempting to switch to electric heat.

By contrast, if something goes sideways with my gas furnace, the fix is a one-call/one-visit operation. There’s something wrong with this picture.

As Canadian policy-makers search for a retrofit strategy that will meaningfully reduce the massive amount of carbon emitted by our existing buildings, they’d be wise to remember that financial inducements, which are crucial for priming the retrofit pump, are only half the story. Making it as easy as possible is the other.

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Canada’s housing crisis is causing distress for millions of people who are struggling to find affordable places to rent. It’s causing trouble for business owners, too. In Qualicum Beach, B.C., the town’s most popular restaurant – Lefty’s – had to close in 2022 because its staff couldn’t find anywhere to live nearby. In some of Canada’s cities, employees have to spend two to three hours a day commuting from the closest place there’s a home they can afford. 

The long-term solutions are clear: end exclusive single-family zoning; massively expand the rental housing supply, with special emphasis on public and non-profit housing and cooperatives; and tax land wealth. But all this takes time. What can governments do now, to produce rapid results? 

1. Protect and encourage mobile homes

Every local government could upgrade its bylaws to cease being so restrictive when it comes to mobile homes. Let tiny homes have wheels. Let them have sleeping lofts. Let them have composting toilets. Allow people living in RVs to park places other than official RV parks. Instruct your bylaw officers not to ticket or evict people living in unapproved suites and dwellings, as they are doing on Salt Spring Island, at least until the housing crisis eases. Allow mobile homes on private property, as Oregon has done, as long as they follow health and safety standards. Make permitting quick and easy. Let them be clustered in villages, as Victoria has done. Allow colleges to create them for students. Municipalities should write tiny-homes village zoning bylaws, enabling landowners to apply to rezone. We should also urge governments to pass legislation to prevent profit-driven private equity funds from buying mobile home parks and increasing the rents and fees.  

2. Restrict short-term vacation rentals

Shall we rent our second home to a permanent tenant, or earn more by turning it into a short-term vacation rental unit? In too many places, owners have chosen the latter. In Greater Victoria, where the vacancy rate for an affordable two-bedroom unit is a miserable 0.2%, causing massive distress, Vrbo boasts of having more than a thousand units for rent, while Airbnb has hundreds more. Across Canada, Vrbo offers 32,460 vacation rentals. Toronto and 10 U.S. cities have passed laws banning or restricting short-term rentals. In B.C., the City of Victoria and Salt Spring and Galiano islands have stopped allowing short-term rentals in secondary properties. Sechelt has decided to cap the number at 15, out of a possible 250. In Vancouver, when short-term rentals were limited to a person’s home and required a licence, listings fell by 50%. In Ontario, condo boards have been given the right to ban short-term rentals. These controls could be lifted once the local rental vacancy rate hits 3%. 

3. Impose a speculation and vacancy tax

In 2017, Vancouver introduced an Empty Homes Tax, which now stands at 5% of a property’s assessed taxable value. By 2019 it had led to a 26% reduction in vacant properties and encouraged 5,920 condo owners to offer their units for rent. By 2021, it had raised $86 million for investment in affordable housing. In 2019, the B.C. government introduced a separate speculation and vacancy tax in various regions, which encouraged 20,000 condo owners to rent their units out instead of leaving them empty. It has also generated $231 million that is being used to build affordable housing, 86% of which came from non-B.C. residents. Foreign owners of vacant homes in a designated area must pay 2% of their property’s assessed value annually; B.C. owners pay 0.5%. Beginning in 2023, Ottawa and Toronto will introduce a 1% vacancy tax. 

4. Allow secondary suites in most homes

It’s an obvious way to create more rental housing, but too often an application takes months to wind its way to approval. Oak Bay, on Vancouver Island, now allows secondary suites without need for parking. To speed up permitting, Quesnel has pre-approved five designs for suites. Toronto allows such suites in townhouses, detached homes and duplexes. Local councils should allow homeowners to have both a boarder and a secondary suite, and up to six unrelated people in a home. To encourage homeowners, the federal government should create a 10-year tax-free allowance on the income from renting a secondary suite.  

5. Buy motels

In 2020, during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Canada’s federal government earmarked $1 billion to help cities and housing providers to buy hotels and motels to keep people from becoming homeless, enabling BC Housing to buy several hotels. In California, 120 sites, mostly hotels and motels, were converted into 5,900 affordable homes for low-income renters and people who were previously homeless. It has to be done carefully, for when motels are used to shelter people who were previously unhoused there are sometimes reports of property damage, theft, drug use, and abusive behaviour toward staff. It’s a quick solution, if it’s done right.  

6. Protect tenants from eviction

The best way to stop a looming eviction for tenants who can’t afford their rent is prevention. B.C. has established a rent bank that offers interest-free loans and grants to renters who are at risk of eviction because of financial challenges. Of those whom the BC Rent Bank was able to help in the spring of 2021, 94% were able to maintain or improve their housing situations. CMHC research shows that preventing an eviction in this way saves the tenant $2,932 and saves the landlord $8,663. Burnaby has developed Canada’s best tenants’ assistance policy for renters who face “demoviction” due to a landlord’s property renovation.  

There are good tenants and bad tenants, good landlords and bad landlords. If you volunteer in a tenants’ advisory centre, you’ll hear complaints about landlords who harass their tenants out of their homes, landlords who use renovation as an excuse to evict a tenant and charge a higher rent to the next one, and fixed-term leases that allow a landlord to evict you at the end of your lease. In September, a property company called Q Residential demanded $3,000 from around a third of tenants at 1244 Donald Street, Ottawa – a huge, grey 16-storey concrete block with 250 units that houses new immigrants, Syrian refugees and low-income people who either live on disability pay or work in low-wage jobs. They were told it represented a retroactive rent increase approved by the Landlord and Tenant Board (which Q Residential says covers “costs associated with required infrastructure improvements for resident safety”), and they had until November 1 to pay up. How many will be forced to leave? 

In B.C., housing advocates are proposing vacancy-control policy as a solution that connects the rent to the unit, rather than the tenant, and prevents a landlord from increasing the rent when a tenant leaves, which is what financialized real estate investment trusts (REITs) have been doing as they look for ways to pay their shareholders a 10% annual dividend. Financial firms own 340,000 units in multi-residential rental buildings and an estimated 20 to 30% of Canada’s purpose-built rental housing. Tenants’ associations support the idea, but landlords say it would discourage developers from building new rental apartments. Provinces can also limit rent increases to 2% a year, as B.C. has done.  

These remedies are all doable, but until those suffering the brunt of the housing crisis find a way to organize, the solutions will probably get bogged down in political inertia. Canada needs a strong citizen-based affordable housing alliance with a clear platform for change and chapters in every community.  

Correction, October 20, 2022:
A previous version of this story erroneously stated that Q Residential demanded $3,000 from every tenant at its property in Ottawa. The increase applied to a third of the building’s residents. Corporate Knights regrets the error.

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 About four-fifths of the Dutch port is below sea level. As Paul van Roosmalen, the city official overseeing sustainable public real estate, puts it: “The water comes from all sides” – the sea, the sky, the river and ground water. “It’s always been a threat.” But he also sees an opportunity to use a marriage of technology and green design to elevate the role of rooftops in managing Rotterdam’s water pressures. 

While typical green roofs function like sponges and look like gardens, Rotterdam is working with public and private landlords to develop a “green-blue grid.” Instead of simply fitting out roof areas with plantings, these spaces can also be equipped with reservoirs or tanks to retain excess flow – blue roofs. The tanks, in turn, are equipped with electronic drain valves that can be opened and closed remotely, in some cases via a smart phone app.  

“The problem,” says van Roosmalen, “is that when they’re full, they’re full.” The city’s vision, he explains, is to develop a system for coordinating the water levels in these tanks to help manage sewer capacity. The idea is to link the valve control devices into a grid of blue roofs that function, in effect, like a dispersed network of storm water reservoirs. When there’s rain in the forecast, the reservoirs can be drained automatically. Then, during heavy weather, they can store rainwater, reducing pressure and flooding in the sewer system.  

While Rotterdam’s blue-green grid is still far from completion, it represents an example of how a set of digital sensing technologies can be potentially harnessed to produce a smart city solution to an urban sustainability problem.  

The technological lynchpin in Rotterdam’s strategy has been the installation of a highly sensitive weather radar on the roof of the city’s tallest building. The device is capable of detecting rainfall 16 to 20 kilometres away. Remotely operated blue-green roof control systems can be programmed to dynamically respond to those forecasts and release water that sits in the reservoirs. (A similar project, the Resilience Network of Smart and Innovative Climate Adaptive Rooftops, or Resilio, is underway at several Amsterdam social housing complexes.)  

As of 2021, Rotterdam officials were testing a pilot version of this grid. To scale it up, the city has to figure out how to co-ordinate with Rotterdam’s water board, which manages the sewer infrastructure, as well as property owners. The strategy potentially complements other water management planning moves, among them retrofitting public squares with “rain gardens” – i.e., clusters of water-absorbing shrubs and perennials planted in a small depression in the ground. “Instead of making bigger sewer pipes, we made a choice to invest in redesigning public space in a way that contributes to a nicer, better, more attractive district,” Arnound Molenaar, Rotterdam’s chief resilience officer, told Thomson Reuters in 2019.  

Van Roosmalen adds that a green roof can absorb about 15 milometres of rain per square-metre, whereas a roof with a reservoir can retain 10 times as much. The city’s goal is to convert one million square metres of flat roofs to include water retention systems and solar panels. Aggregated across even a portion of the city’s flat roofs, he says, “it’s a tremendous amount of water.” 

The Netherlands’ climate policies reflect a sense of urgency, given its exposure to sea level rise and flooding on rivers that flow into the country from the east. For that reason, both adaptation and mitigation have been central to the country’s plans for future-proofing its cities.   

Rob Schmidt, a sustainability policy expert with the City of Rotterdam, points out that the Netherland’s nine largest city-regions collaborate to develop and test approaches and technologies. “We learn from each other how to cope with these so-called smart city projects.” Each city has adopted a policy area: Rotterdam is focused on climate adaptation; Amsterdam, circular economy; Eindhoven, low-carbon mobility and energy transition, and so on.  

The national government has launched an Urban Agenda that involves negotiating “city deals” many involving smart city projects that typically include multiple partners, including research institutions. “Our approach is focused on the opportunity and finding everyone you need to get to a solution,” says Urban Agenda program manager Frank Reniers. “You put them in a room and try to innovate your way out of the problem.” 

“We learn from each other how to cope with these so-called smart city projects.”

-Rob Schmidt, a sustainability policy expert with the City of Rotterdam

The Netherlands wasn’t always so collaborative. According to Frank Kresin, dean of the Faculty of Digital Media and Creative Industry at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, Amsterdam in the late 2000s and early 2010s “was doing everything in its power to become `smart.’” The city’s appetite for tech drove a great deal of investment in automation and digitization.  

But the infatuation with these corporate solutions, Kresin wrote in a 2016 study, “had some flaws,” including the risk of excessive surveillance and an unquestioning embrace of the idea that the smart city was “a machine that needs to be optimized, with no consideration or understanding of the organic reality. It wants to maximize efficiency and avoid friction, so it simply and non-negotiably imposes top-down, non-transparent technological solutions.” 

Kresin wasn’t the only one concerned about this drift. Beginning in the mid-2010s, citizens groups, entrepreneurs and academic institutions pushed Dutch policy-makers and companies to swap out the top-down approach in favour of a more grass-roots philosophy that features extensive public engagement, citizen-science projects and applied research.  

“The big threat is loss of autonomy,” says Jan-Willem Wesselink of Future City Foundation, a Dutch network of municipal agencies, civil society organizations, universities and technology companies seeking to promote a democratic approach to smart urbanism that aligns with a U.N. social development goal (#11) about resilient, sustainable and inclusive cities. “Does Google or some other company decide how you use the city?”  

Kresin describes one early effort at broadening the conversation. In 2014, Amsterdam Smart City, a tech incubator, distributed several hundred “smart citizen kits,” which provided rudimentary sensors to allow people to perform environmental indicator tests on water and air quality around the city. Their findings were fed to the city. While the readings fell short of research-grade data, this experiment in citizen science attracted many participants, generated upbeat media coverage and, in a few cases, led the city to clean up local beach areas. Its popularity also inspired Kresin and some colleagues to establish the Amsterdam Smart Citizens Lab, where civil society groups, academics and government officials work together to find solutions to other urban problems.  

The distribution of the kits “was a surprisingly successful project,” says soil chemist Gerben Mol, a resilient cities researcher at Amsterdam’s Advanced Metropolitan Solutions Institute (AMS), a university-municipal government joint venture established to conduct more formal applied urban research.  

In recent years, a growing number of Dutch city-dwellers are finding venues to engage in local conversations or projects about how to put urban data and technology to work in addressing the problems they see in their communities – in effect, a cultural, as opposed to corporate or bureaucratic, response. One example: an AMS project that created a composite out of a glue-like bacterial residue and de-contaminated wood fibre culled from septic waste (i.e., used toilet paper). A potential application is being tested to use this composite as a binding agent in road asphalt.  

There are other more traditional tech ventures, such as Amsterdam Smart City, an incubator with numerous public and private partners, all working collaboratively to benefit the city. Community manager Nancy Zikken says the City of Amsterdam has “embraced” TADA.city, a network of European organizations that have pledged adhere to six core principles for digital city initiatives (inclusive, locally focused, controlled by residents, monitored, transparent and broadly accessible).  

She also says that Amsterdam Smart City screens applicants, such as start-ups, to ensure their proposals align with broader policy goals and have what Zikken calls “social value.” As an example, she cites a firm that recently pitched a parking app but was rejected because it would likely encourage car use in a congested city that wants the opposite. “Most of the companies we’re working with really do see the value of incorporating citizens and using the wisdom of the crowd.” 

In Rotterdam, city officials, who are driving the blue-green grid initiative, are also using public education, open houses and other engagement tools to promote these projects, many of which will be installed on privately owned dwellings, using private capital, if the strategy is to attain sufficient scale to make an impact.  

Rotterdam, interestingly, hasn’t created financial incentives. Rather, in discussions with private property owners, Paul van Roosmalen says his team stresses the benefits and explains the options for what’s possible, for example combining a roof-top reservoir with solar. “They can pick what they think would add to the quality of their specific land,” he says. But there’s also a more urgent appeal, too: “You can save your city from drowning.”  

Adapted with permission from Dream States: Smart Cities, Technology and the Pursuit of Urban Utopias (Coach House Books, 2022).  

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Out of sight, meanwhile, the towering net-zero complex incorporates an entirely electric community energy system (a.k.a. district energy) designed by another Vancouver outfit – Creative Energy, the descendant of the city’s district heating utility, which was founded in 1968 with a mandate to pump steam through a network of pipes connecting buildings around the downtown core. 

As an approach to distributing energy in cities, district heating isn’t new; the earliest systems date to the late 19th century, in cities like Hamburg and New York. The benefits and economies of scale were obvious: individual buildings could buy their heat from the district heating agency instead of maintaining boilers in the basement. The problem was that district heating utilities – some municipal, others limited to campuses – tended to rely on dirty or carbon-intensive energy: municipal waste incinerators and fossil-fuel-fired boilers. 

In the 2000s, however, Toronto and other waterfront cities like Amsterdam and Singapore built district cooling systems based on the same principle: pipes linking clusters of buildings and using lake or ocean water as the coolant. As with district heating, property owners didn’t have to maintain expensive HVAC equipment, while local utilities benefited because these systems reduced loads during hot summer days when demand for air conditioning was high.

These days, district energy companies like Enwave, which built Toronto’s deep lake water cooling system, are drawing on a far broader range of low- and no-carbon technologies to make and distribute clean heating and cooling, including geo-exchange, electric boilers and heat pumps for recovering waste heat, including heat from municipal sewer mains. 

Amy Jacobs, Enwave’s senior vice-president of commercial operations, says that large-scale community developments are installing geo-exchange systems – pipes that go deep into the ground, where they absorb and compress heat. Enwave is building out one such network for a six-building redevelopment of a former civic centre precinct in the Toronto suburb of Etobicoke. “There’s a lot of interest from all developers to move toward a low-carbon technology, and geo-exchange is top of mind for many of them,” she says.

Matthew Tokarik, president of Subterra Renewables, a geo-exchange developer, agrees. He observes that geo-exchange firms are seeing so much demand that they’re scrambling to secure access to drilling equipment. “We’re starting to feel a tipping point,” he says. 

Unlike traditional district heating networks, which pump steam through pipes, geo-exchange projects distribute lower-temperature heat from the ground, which is then upgraded by electric heat pumps. The same systems – so-called ambient loops – can be run in reverse to remove excess heat from buildings in the summer. 

There’s a lot of interest from all developers to move toward a low-carbon technology.

–Amy Jacobs, Enwave’s senior vice-president of commercial operations

Subterra, whose financial partner is Forum Equity Partners, which invests in real estate and infrastructure, has also seen growing interest in what Tokarik describes as a key financial innovation that has enabled developers to wrap their minds around geo-exchange more readily. The company both builds the systems and then operates them on behalf of landlords or condo corporations, whose boards and property managers have neither the interest nor expertise to run this kind of infrastructure. 

“We understand that the market is asking us to do this,” he explains. “If I’m a condo developer, [either for a] single building or community, I don’t want to put up the increased capital to build these systems out because I’m not going to be here to recover that cost over the long-term.”

What’s more, not all of Subterra’s projects involve condos. Tokarik cites subdivisions being built by Mattamy Homes that will rely on a community geo-exchange system, and each new home is fitted out with a heat pump. 

Creative Energy has tapped this market as well and is building district energy infrastructure for high-rise development projects, including Toronto’s Honest Ed’s site and another cluster of condos in Oakville. 

Diego Mandelbaum, Creative’s vice-president of development, also points to a yet-to-be-announced subdivision in one of the Greater Toronto Area’s eastern suburbs that will use waste heat from a large regional sewer main as its energy source. The technology to capture sewer heat was pioneered by a Vancouver company, Sharc Energy. The City of Toronto in 2019 decided to launch a similar Wastewater Energy Transfer program, dubbed WET. The first project, currently under construction, will provide heat to the Toronto Western Hospital, displacing an estimated 90% of its current natural gas consumption, making it the largest such installation in the world at the moment. City officials calculate that waste heat from the sanitary trunk sewer network could support up to 20 more hook-ups, reducing emissions by 200,000 tonnes of CO2e annually.

Creative’s other new district energy projects include a large Seattle health services complex and Thompson Rivers University, whose board has pledged to make its Kamloops campus carbon neutral by 2030. 

The company is also building an innovative system for a cluster of five residential towers on Vancouver’s Horseshoe Bay. “We looked at ‘How do we eliminate cooling towers from that project, and almost eliminate natural gas? says Krishnan Iyer, Creative’s president and CEO. “We looked at geothermal, but the best single source of energy was actually the ocean. And so we submerged two very large heat exchangers into the Pacific Ocean, where we anchored them down, ran piping across the ocean floor to a plant that we own and operate. And then we’re providing heating and cooling using the ocean as a giant thermal battery.” 

Iyer’s key point – and one that speaks to the evolution of the district energy industry – is that Creative’s approach, like those of its competitors, is increasingly “technology agnostic.” The fundamental economics hasn’t changed much since the 19th century – it makes good financial sense to distribute heating and cooling through a network that links up buildings within a district. But thanks to rapid advances in technologies that can tap all sorts of renewable heating and cooling sources, the energy powering such infrastructure can now be generated in ways that don’t emit carbon. It’s a green take on an old idea. 

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If you could live in a home that was highly energy efficient, climate resilient, comfortable and healthy for about the same cost as a code-built home and was built to outlast current buildings, would you move in?

All that’s missing to make that a reality for homebuyers is an improved government building code that recognizes how easy – and important – it is to lower household energy bills and provide shelter during extreme weather events. 

Unfortunately, governments around the world have repeatedly failed to deliver, and this cycle of building-code failure is about to continue in Ontario.

During a short and rushed consultation that ended in March, the provincial government released a proposed update to the building code. The latest changes were meant to be based on the model national code released last month. The proposed federal code isn’t the pathway to net-zero it’s hyped to be; it’s an improvement but not there yet. Meanwhile, Ontario’s proposed code is a step backward when it comes to making buildings more energy efficient and resilient in the face of the climate crisis.

A quick code refresher: every five years, the Canadian Commission on Building and Fire Codes, established by the National Research Council of Canada, develops and publishes the model Canadian National Building Code. The federal code is voluntary, but since many provinces lack the ability or desire to develop their own, most adopt some or all of it.

The latest federal model code is a step code, much like that found in British Columbia. This means it’s designed to allow provinces to ratchet up energy performance levels over time to increase efficiency and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. By having steps, it gives the building industry a clear idea of what will come next, performance-wise.

The proposed federal code isn’t the pathway to net-zero it’s hyped to be; it’s an improvement but not there yet.

Rather than adopt the step code, the provincial government in Ontario proposes to opt for the lowest possible efficiency level. For smaller buildings, Ontario will make no improvements in energy efficiency. For larger buildings, the province will put in place a standard that is less efficient on some of the requirements for windows, doors and insulation, making it less stringent than what is in place today. With everything we know about the climate crisis and building solutions, this is not only a wasted opportunity that will end up costing Ontario more in the long run; it will also hurt the province’s long-term competitiveness to attract jobs in the low-carbon economy. Real estate investors in Europe and the United Kingdom are already seeing inefficient buildings suffer a 30% reduction in value, while a robust Canadian energy-efficiency marketplace could add up to $48 billion to GDP.

Worse still, it may come with the collateral damage of those homes and lives when buildings are not able to withstand extreme weather events. For example, buildings with generous insulation, triple-pane windows, air tightness, heat-recovery ventilators and low energy use can support residents during extreme temperatures, like those during the unprecedented heat dome that killed 600 people in B.C. last summer.

Ontario municipalities looking to improve their green-building standards will find that the regressive provincial code stymies their plans. Municipalities use a process called site plan control to develop green building standards, but having more tools, such as a unified robust building code, would drive consistency, predictability and capacity to help transform the market across the province.

Federal code is an improvement but a missed opportunity

Meanwhile, the top step of the new federal code calls for a 60% reduction in energy use over the previous model code, released in 2015. It’s an improvement but not as ambitious as B.C.’s step code, which has limitations but targets a near 90% reduction. There’s plenty of evidence demonstrating that more is possible, with minimal cost increases, but that ambition did not make it into the code. In a world where Canada will have to double its electricity supply to get to net-zero, shouldn’t we look to save energy at every step?

In today’s building stock, including “green buildings,” there is a performance gap between expected and actual energy performance. A low-cost way to close this gap and verify the efficiency level of buildings is by conducting what’s called a blower-door test to see how air-tight they are. With heavy lobbying from the building industry, air-tightness testing was first added to and then pulled from the federal code (and wasn’t added to the Ontario code). 

The federal code also continues to use a “reference building approach,” where energy performance is assessed against a similar hypothetical building – an approach that will continue to exacerbate the performance gap problem. In a net-zero world, where investors are seeking decision-useful climate data, shouldn’t we aim to deliver quantifiable reductions in carbon pollution over the life of the building? Instead, we are expected to just trust the building industry.

Equally troubling is the near complete absence of resiliency measures added to the federal code to protect buildings from high winds, floods, wildfires and more. Incorporating projections about future climate conditions into the codes will reduce the need for costly future retrofits, according to the federal government’s own expert panel on disaster resilience.

Ontario municipalities looking to improve their green-building standards will find that the regressive provincial code stymies their plans.

One major problem: developing Canada’s model code is a conservative and opaque process. 

The Canadian Commission on Building and Fire Codes uses a series of committees composed primarily of members of the building industry to develop the new code. Gaining a seat at the table is near impossible. The commission also receives advice from provinces and territories through a committee that can block virtually anything the code committee wants to move forward.

While the commission may have done good work in the past to ensure the integrity of our buildings, the process is too slow to address the innovative building needs of Canadians during a worsening climate crisis.

If the federal government wants to meet its climate-mitigation and -resilience goals, it needs a stronger code, and it needs provinces and territories to take a step forward, not back. The code-development process needs to be reformed to make it faster, more accountable, transparent and innovative to help solve the climate crisis. 

More ambitious codes will spur jobs and innovation while delivering high-performing buildings that are comfortable and better for your health. If built correctly, they will have the potential to significantly cut carbon pollution while also sheltering us from some of the worst climate-related impacts. Change is needed because the codes belong to the public, not entrenched interests and recalcitrant provinces.

The post Why is Ontario making new buildings less energy efficient? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

New York City has been requiring building owners to submit information about the energy performance of their buildings for a decade, and this “benchmarking” policy has become gradually more aggressive, beginning with very large structures, then expanding to somewhat smaller buildings, banning the use of heating oil, and finally requiring disclosure. 

“There’s some element of naming and shaming to inspire some action,” observes Chris Halfnight, policy director of the Urban Green Council, a non-profit focused on promoting building sustainability in New York. “Nobody wants to live and work in or own and operate a building that’s getting a D when there are buildings getting As and Bs.”

The premise behind regulated building benchmarking is that it forces asset managers to measure energy performance, which provides them with information they can use to upgrade their systems. While the capital costs of those retrofits aren’t trivial, more energy-efficient buildings have lower operating costs, less exposure to rising energy prices and smaller carbon footprints.

The policy is rooted in the old accountant’s adage about not being able to manage what you don’t measure. But does benchmarking produce results?

In December 2020, after a decade of benchmarking, the results of New York’s policy were impressive: “Over the last 10 years,” according to a summary by the Urban Green Council, “total emissions from roughly 3,200 regularly benchmarked properties fell by about 22.6 percent.” Levels of four major air pollutants related to the use of now banned heating oil fell by 29%.

Those results built on earlier assessments that provided proof of concept. In 2017, the National Electrical Manufacturers Association produced a survey that looked just at NYC. It found that 77% of building owners changed the way they manage their assets because of benchmarking, for example investing in more energy-efficient lighting or calibrating their HVAC systems so they wouldn’t heat and cool simultaneously. The authors cite results from other studies showing that compliance with the bylaws led to an overall 14% reduction in building energy-use intensity (i.e., energy use as a function of size) between 2011 and 2014. 

A Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory evaluation pointed out that, as of 2016, 24 jurisdictions in the U.S. had benchmarking and transparency (B&T) rules. It found that in 10 of the largest cities in those regions, buildings demonstrated “a 3 to 8 percent reduction in gross energy consumption or energy use intensity over a two- to four-year period of B&T policy implementation.” While the authors cautioned that some of the findings were preliminary, they did note that building owners also made non-energy improvements to their assets – water consumption, for instance – resulting in higher property values and improved productivity for tenants. 

There’s some element of naming and shaming to inspire some action.

-Chris Halfnight, policy director of the Urban Green Council

The cities that have B&T rules aren’t just the usual suspects; they include places like Kansas City, Denver and Orlando, and (red) states like Utah and Ohio. In other words, this approach isn’t just the preserve of cities under Democratic administrations, like NYC or Seattle.

Canada, interestingly, is way behind. British Columbia has a benchmarking program, but it is voluntary, and only a year old. In Ontario, the previous Liberal government passed benchmarking legislation but didn’t bring it into effect. The Tories did enact the law, known as Energy and Water Reporting and Benchmarking (EWRB), but the regulations apply only to buildings over 100,000 square feet and exempt public sector real estate. The regulations will extend to buildings over 50,000 square feet in 2023.

As for the transparency part, the raw data collected under EWRB is released through Ontario’s open data portal. But, unlike many of the U.S. B&T laws, including New York’s, addresses aren’t disclosed, nor has the Ontario government done much with the data it does gather. As one City of Toronto energy official puts it, the information is “not particularly useful.”

Sean Brennan, Urban Green Council’s director of research, says the location data is crucial because it enables policy-makers and researchers to make detailed location-based evaluations of energy consumption patterns in the city, which in turn allows the city to focus its enforcement efforts. 

The transparency, he adds, “helps the public grasp what is going on.” For example, the B&T data has been used to map energy efficiency within the city.

Anecdotally, Brennan says, the subject of a building’s energy-efficiency ratings now comes up in the context of meetings of the occupants of co-ops, or when firms looking to rent office space are reviewing leases and wondering if they’re moving into a healthy building. 

Halfnight points out that B&T policies are not “a mandate to take action … It’s a necessary first step.” What’s clear, however, is that when benchmarking rules force landlords to measure and disclose how they run their assets from an energy-efficiency point of view, many will take the next step because it makes good business sense. 

The emission reduction is the bonus. 

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“We can’t keep trying to do retrofits in the way we were doing them in the 1980s and 1990s and expect to bend this curve,” said Ralph Torrie, head of research at Corporate Knights, at part four of our Earth Index event series tracking the “say–do” gap between Canada’s climate action and targets. Torrie estimates we will need to spend between $14 and $48 billion per year to achieve net-zero buildings by 2035, roughly on par with the $20 to $40 billion spent in Canada each year on routine maintenance and repairs. 

“This cannot be our parents’ retrofit program,” Torrie said.

By 2030, existing Canadian homes will be responsible for 90% of residential emissions, so it won’t be enough to just ban gas hookups in new developments. Decarbonizing this sector will require an unprecedented scale of fuel switching to heat pumps and deep retrofit programs for existing buildings, he added. 

Our general mindset has to change, panellists said. We have to stop thinking that the building industry’s emissions will gradually decline and realize that they must descend down a number of steep steps, said Akua Schatz, vice-president of market engagement and advocacy at the Canada Green Building Council. This will mean taking on an aggressive schedule of deep retrofits rather than depending on constant incremental ones. “You don’t have many chances. So every step matters,” Schatz said. 

We also need to stop thinking of housing affordability and climate compatibility as opposing goals, said Steve Mennill, chief climate officer for Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, as deep retrofit programs will be central to bringing down the energy costs of the more than 2.8 million households in Canada that spend a disproportionate amount on energy, and sometimes have to choose between heating their homes and eating. 

This has been particularly apparent in Heiltsuk First Nation in British Columbia, where leaders say an initiative to install heat pumps in homes has reduced residents’ heating costs and brought more energy sovereignty to the community. “It costs less to save a kilowatt than to generate one,” Leona Humchitt, a member of the Heiltsuk Tribal Council, told the panel. The community has installed heat pumps in more than 150 homes and hopes to complete retrofits in all 420 of its residential buildings. 

Climate compatibility

Mennill pointed out that we need different solutions for retrofitting private rental housing, community housing and private homes. He said private rental housing needs greater access to capital, the community housing sector needs greater support through subsidy programs, and we need to look at ways to make these changes more affordable for homeowners. “Right now, your cost of capital as a homeowner, if you’re going to do a retrofit to your house, is basically the same [as] if you’re purchasing a new or existing non-climate-compatible house.” 

Either way, when it comes to retrofitting multi-unit buildings, Mennil says both mitigation and adaptation need to be top of mind. “It’s not sufficient to consider just one or the other,” he told the panel. Reducing a building’s emissions needs to be done in lockstep with preparing it for the rising threat of floods and storms. 

Barriers abound

One of the biggest and most obvious barriers to building owners taking on deep retrofits is asking them to pay for them out of pocket. “This needs to be a public service,” said Julia Langer, CEO of the Atmospheric Fund. Her organization is pushing for a fund to support these kinds of projects. 

Building owners also simply don’t have the technical and financial expertise to carry out deep retrofit projects, which have lots of moving pieces. In an effort to help them navigate this process, the Atmospheric Fund has launched what it calls retrofit accelerators. “If you want to go deep in terms of retrofits, we need to ‘multi-solve.’ We can’t just look at the carbon,” Langer said. “We’ve got to look at social aspects, resilience, [and] financial aspects all together.” 

In commercial real estate, Jamie Gray-Donald, senior vice-president of sustainability at QuadReal Property Group, said it will take more policy certainty from governments and much better data-gathering to rapidly decarbonize the sector. Gray-Donald said that the real estate sector is 20 years behind others when it comes to the type of data it has but that for every dollar invested in energy and carbon data, it’s possible to see a three- or fourfold return. “Once you have really granular stuff, amazing solutions open up,” he said.

Building innovation

While retrofitting existing buildings will make up the largest chunk of decarbonizing the real estate sector, research is underway to make constructing new developments carbon neutral. A Toronto-based start-up called Promise Robotics is working to use robotics and artificial intelligence to reduce the carbon footprint of building new homes. 

And last year, Vancouver-based Nexii Building Solutions became Canada’s fastest company to reach “unicorn status” (when a start-up gains a value of $1 billion.) The company manufactures building panels made with a proprietary material called Nexiite, which it claims will reduce the building process’s carbon emissions by a third and cut energy demand to heat homes by 55%. 

From an energy-source standpoint, Enwave has been working to install what’s called GeoExchange technology in thousands of new homes in North America. This system harnesses thermal energy from the ground to heat homes during the winter and cools air during the summer. 

Catherine Thorn, a senior director of community energy planning at Enwave, noted another major hurdle to decarbonizing Canada’s buildings: builders are still being compensated with rebates for installing carbon-intensive natural gas infrastructure. Thorn said that if the developer isn’t planning to use natural gas, they’ll still be asked to install gas infrastructure and won’t receive any rebate if it isn’t used. “It’s a very big mismatch in incentive in what we’re trying to achieve,” she said. 

Regulate and subsidize it

Governments across the world have varying records on their efforts to decarbonize buildings. The City of New York has upped its ambition on cutting building emissions, with a piece of legislation called Local Law 97. This bill will require most buildings with more than 25,000 square feet to meet standards on both energy efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions by 2024, and stricter limits will be enacted in 2030. Langer said Toronto is exploring the idea. 

On the national level, some G7 countries have introduced robust retrofit subsidy programs. In 2020, the Italian government introduced a 110% subsidy for green retrofits that in turn boosted the country’s gross domestic product by 0.7% last year and created 153,000 jobs. 

Canada, in contrast, has been a laggard in this area. The federal government’s modest retrofit program for homeowners that launched in May – the Canada Greener Homes Grant – has struggled to keep up with demand, having received more than 180,000 applications, according to The Globe and Mail. The program reimburses homeowners for up to $5,000 in retrofits and has processed payment to only 1,227 applicants as of January 18. 

We can’t keep trying to do retrofits in the way we were doing them in the 1980s and 1990s and expect to bend this curve.

-Ralph Torrie, head of research at Corporate Knights

In December, the Prime Minister’s Office released mandate letters to cabinet ministers that signalled that retrofitting buildings would be part of the government’s plans to cut emissions, following similar commitments made during the recent election campaign. 

Schatz said some of the key government commitments to watch in this area will be making the electricity system net-zero by 2035; implementing a national zero-emissions building strategy; creating a net-zero building code by 2024; and launching a National Infrastructure Assessment (an evolving document that will guide Canada’s infrastructure) that includes buildings. 

The clock is ticking on the federal government’s pledge to axe emissions by 40% to 45% below 2005 levels by 2030. Since there are just over 400 weeks until that deadline, achieving this goal will involve taking a wrecking ball to Canada’s building emissions, and doing it swiftly. 

“We’ve got to start behaving like this is the emergency we’ve been saying it is,” said Torrie. “We’re out of time.”

The post How to nail down the green renovation revolution appeared first on Corporate Knights.

To achieve this objective, engineered versions of age-old building technologies, like wood, straw or bamboo, are critical. These bio-based building materials generally demand less energy in manufacturing and have the ability to capture and store carbon through photosynthesis.

This is why experts in green building policy, climate science and architecture increasingly tout the benefits of transforming buildings from a giant source of carbon into a large carbon sink.

As scholars of business sustainability and bio-products markets, we closely observe the trends in green building and construction industries, and the reactions these provoke in sectors of the economy looking to cut emissions. With corporate announcements on the rise that publicize natural materials like wood as “the new concrete” in company offices and warehouses, we believe it’s time to take a closer look at the opportunities and limitations of making building materials part of a company’s net-zero carbon pledges.

The rise of net-zero carbon offices

The past two decades have seen the use of green buildings as an explicit tool to reduce the carbon footprint of companies. It is now commonplace for business offices to feature the latest in engineering and building operations, from energy efficiency and on-site heating and cooling, to waste reduction and recycling.

Bloomberg’s European headquarters, for instance, has earned the title of the world’s most sustainable office building for combining all these measures. From a company perspective, going beyond operational efficiency, to also focus on building materials, is a logical step.

Walmart offers one prominent example of the use of bio-based building materials. The retail giant is set to finish its new home office in Bentonville, Ark., by 2025. It is the largest corporate campus project in the U.S. that uses mass timber, a group of large engineered structural wooden panels that have gained market acceptance following changes in building codes, for the construction of multi-storey and tall wood buildings.

Structurlam, a Canadian company that delivers mass timber, opened a fully automated facility in Walmart’s home state where it procures lumber from forests in the region to complete the project. Similarly, Google will soon finish its first mass timber office complex.

Microsoft already opened a building on its Silicon Valley campus that uses over 2,100 tonnes of cross-laminated timber (CLT), a wood panel system that is projected to reach a global market size of more than $3 billion within the next five years.

Some European firms like the German retail chain Alnatura are using prefabricated loam in their headquarters, and automaker BMW is about to open an electric vehicle showroom in California that has flooring made from hemp wood.

Green construction meets prefab

What unites these technologies is a potential to combine climate benefits with the shift towards off-site construction and prefabrication, where the planning, design, manufacturing and partial assembly of building elements occurs at a location other than the final building site.

Many of the manufacturers that offer buildings made from bio-based materials are, in fact, a new class of technology start-ups that are backed by large investors.

Prefabrication helps optimize material use and model adaptive structures that can be deconstructed, modified and reassembled, thereby reducing the need for virgin resources.

This provides companies with immense flexibility in planning for the long-term use of their office buildings, sales stores, warehouses and factories, without having to think about demolishing a structure.

Limitations of bio-based building material

Bio-based building materials have their limitations. Harnessing their environmental potential requires that they are sourced from sustainable supply chains. From a climate perspective, building wooden office towers with timber can be counterproductive if large amounts of carbon dioxide are emitted in the logging, transport and manufacture of wood products.

A company may also ask whether new buildings are needed in the first place. After all, the lowest carbon footprint is that of a building that is never constructed.

Companies may consider using bio-based building materials in retrofitting and remodelling existing offices or factories instead of building new ones. Serial retrofit initiatives, of the kind spearheaded by governments in Europe and suggested for Canada, already funnel capital into the scale-up of industries for prefabricated building technologies, like facades made from wood and recycled materials.

Ultimately, as with all corporate environmental strategies, simply introducing bio-based products and materials to the company, be it in office buildings or elsewhere, without having resources in place to monitor their environmental efficacy (for example, in procurement, installation and use) can backfire.

The future of bio-based building materials

Building materials can play a key role, when considered as a part of a broader strategy in companies’ efforts to reach net-zero emissions. Over 450 firms around the world have already pledged to finance the transition to net-zero emissions by 2050.

The issue of materials in construction is gaining attention at the global scale as well. With more than 130 events focused on the built environment at the COP26 summit in November, buildings received more attention than ever.

That being said, bio-based products and materials will require even more attention going forward. A likely bottleneck in assessing when and how to use bio-based building materials, will be just how quickly industries normalize the use of life cycle costing tools, such as whole life carbon accounting.

Progress on the adoption of these tools has been slow, but the recent signing of whole life carbon requirements by 44 large companies offers hope that the time for net-zero carbon buildings may indeed be ripe.

Meike Siegner is a post-doctoral research fellow at the department of mechanical and industrial engineering at Ryerson University.

Cody Searcy is a professor of mechanical and industrial engineering, as well as vice-provost and dean of graduate studies at Ryerson University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Against a backdrop of horrific climate disasters, a number of developments in 2021 offered some cause for optimism, from the International Energy Agency’s call to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 to new commitments from global banks and institutional investment funds to decarbonize their holdings. A growing number of cities, including New York, are enacting rules that ban gas hook-ups for new buildings. Meanwhile, in a case that could have long-term implications for energy-inefficient design in the era of climate change, a group of San Francisco condo owners sued a developer for US$10 million because the west- and south-facing units in their all-glass curtain-wall tower overheated so severely. 

Here are five trends to watch for in the world of sustainable design in 2022:

1) Revved up stationary batteries, EV charging and microgrids

As the electric vehicle (EV) market grows, so does pressure on existing electrical grids, which in turn forces systems planners and utilities to be more proactive about distributed energy. In Canada’s most populous province, the Ontario Energy Board in 2021 began developing a new process for regulating this evolution. This entails a massive deployment of local renewable sources so the proliferation of EVs doesn’t merely trigger more investment in large gas-fired generating stations. 

The EV charging sector is abuzz with start-up, investment and commercialization activity, stoked by multibillion-dollar government incentives announced last year for charging infrastructure. As well, new planning rules, such as the 2022 version of the Toronto Green Standard, will soon require developers to ensure that all parking spaces in new condo and office towers are fitted out with EV chargers. “I only hope that [governments] will also consider the new infrastructure that is needed to make that path successful,” says Deborah Byrne, chief operating officer for Kearns Mancini Architects, a Toronto firm that develops highly energy-efficient projects. 

Another area poised for growth is the microgrid service industry and the energy storage market for stationary batteries like Tesla’s Powerwall, which is a device that can be installed in homes or offices to store back-up power. For college campuses, larger industrial sites or fleet depots, microgrid developers are installing on-site stationary batteries and rooftop solar panels to allow property owners to load-shift, meaning they are less exposed to peak period rates while still being able to operate charging stations for EVs. Eventually, though the technology remains nascent, microgrid software platforms will be able to draw power from parked EVs whose batteries are equipped with “vehicle-to-grid” inverters. 

2) Goodbye natural gas furnaces

Public awareness about the need to transition away from natural gas to electricity for space heat, hot water and cooking is on the rise. In B.C. and Quebec, clean energy policies are giving financial incentives to homeowners who fuel-switch. And last year’s federal budget included billions in no-interest loans and grants for home energy retrofits, including subsidies for equipment such as air source heat pumps. 

Policy-makers remain hesitant to stoke this transition, partly because of the lobbying heft of the natural gas industry, but also because they haven’t figured out how to provide enough clean electricity to satisfy additional loads from space and water heating. 

3) Getting to the bottom of embodied carbon

In the latest iteration of Toronto’s Green Standard, the city’s developers can voluntarily begin assessing their projects’ embodied carbon (i.e., the carbon used to make materials like steel or drywall), with the understanding that the next version of this step code will make disclosures mandatory. Similar rules came into effect in B.C. in 2021. 

Knowing your project’s embodied carbon requires developers and architects to make life-cycle assessments of building materials, with the ultimate goal of reducing waste and promoting the use of less carbon-intensive components (such as wood-fibre insulation instead of foam) as well as substitutes, such as concrete produced with steel slag instead of limestone-based cement. 

Yet the trade-off between reducing so-called operational carbon emissions produced by building operations (e.g., heating and cooling) and embodied carbon remains a fraught subject. For example, passive house design, a green building standard with a heavy emphasis on insulation, has been criticized because it doesn’t pay enough attention to life-cycle analysis.

“Our more progressive projects have switched from embodied carbon boosterism to actually counting embodied carbon in a detailed way,” says Monte Paulsen, a passive house specialist at RDH Building Science, in Vancouver. “This is leading to some surprising findings, as many architects and boosters discover that all-glass buildings with wood inside perform worse [than] code requirements. Let’s hope that as we begin actually counting embodied carbon, we can make decisions based on data rather than belief.”

4) Fresher air for all

For decades, we’ve put up with crummy indoor air quality, thanks to off-gassing from synthetic carpets and other textiles, hermetically sealed windows and sub-standard or poorly maintained ventilation systems. Airless meeting rooms that produced drowsiness and headaches were a terrible but unavoidable feature of work or school life.

So in the world of building design, the run-up to last fall’s return to class may be remembered as a moment when architects, property managers and public sector agencies found religion around air quality and ventilation, the neglected poor cousins of the sustainable design world. The importance of proper ventilation has been underscored by accumulating evidence that airborne aerosols are a primary vector of COVD-19 infection. 

From a sustainability perspective, improved ventilation can be tied to energy-efficiency devices, such as heat-recovery systems attached to fans and exhaust vents. In buildings designed to minimize energy leakage with features such as triple pane windows and ultra-air-tight vapour barriers, proper ventilation becomes that much more important as a means of preventing mould from excess indoor humidity. The result, however, are buildings with excellent indoor air quality, helping us all breathe easier in the coming years. 

5) Smarter land-use planning

For many environmentalists, it is an article of faith that land-use planning rules that promote intensification and transit do the heavy lifting of carbon reduction. While policies that enact or safeguard green belts and density targets along transit corridors are not new, a growing number of cities have responded to the housing affordability crisis of recent years with policies designed to end what one Toronto business lobby group has dubbed “exclusionary zoning.” 

These policies include automatic permissions for basement apartments, laneway suites (where possible) and backyard “accessory dwelling units” (a.k.a. garden suites) in neighbourhoods dominated by single family homes. Toronto City Council recently voted to update highly restrictive residential zoning rules by also permitting so-called multiplexes in low-rise neighbourhoods. 

While such measures don’t, in and of themselves, deliver affordability, they do begin to address the depopulation of aging residential neighbourhoods where housing prices are no longer in reach for the vast majority of the population. 

“There are lots of forces resisting this [trend], but it is happening much more than many would have hoped even two years ago,” observes Shoshanna Saxe, an assistant professor of civil engineering at the University of Toronto and a sustainable infrastructure expert. “This is more important for sustainability than almost anything else we could do at this point, and will certainly have a much bigger impact than any novel low-carbon material.” 

The post Five future-friendly ways sustainable design can help the planet in 2022 appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Canada is committed to spending an unprecedented $85 billion on housing and public transit over the next decade: more than $70 billion to meet critical housing needs through the National Housing Strategy (NHS) and $15 billion for public transit. Together with the $13 billion the federal government has already spent on transit since 2015, this will be the biggest transit investment in Canadian history.

The NHS provides grants, low-cost loans, tools and research to improve housing security and quality for one million Canadians – including building 160,000 new homes. During the election campaign, the Liberals’ Housing Plan called for 1.4 million homes to be built, preserved or repaired, and their proposed $4-billion Housing Policy Accelerator calls for 100,000 new “middle class” homes by 2025. While both the National Housing Strategy and the Liberal Housing Plan note transit-oriented development as a priority, more robust policies and incentives are needed to achieve location efficiency.

And in order to maximize the returns on these investments to address the twin crises of climate change and housing affordability, the federal government must place land use and location at the centre of its housing and carbon-reduction plans. 

All levels of government must also seize this moment for the one-third of Canadians who live in unaffordable dwellings. Improving public and policy-maker understanding of how land use impacts housing affordability and carbon emissions from transportation will be key. 

Housing and transportation account for the vast majority of household carbon emissions. Moves toward net-zero buildings and electric vehicles are essential. But green tech is not enough – we must also drive less. Just as we need deep energy-efficiency retrofits for our buildings, we need to retrofit our cities and suburbs to make them more location efficient. 

Location-efficient, “15-minute” neighbourhoods are designed for pedestrians and include a mix of land uses so that people can safely and conveniently walk to jobs, stores, services and parks. “Smart growth” policies focus new development in 15-minute neighbourhoods and link them together along regional transit corridors and bike networks. People drive half as much in compact, transit-oriented areas because destinations are closer together. Car trips are shorter, more trips are practical on foot, by bike or on public transit – cutting carbon emissions in half.

In the Greater Toronto Area, 81% of home buyers would prefer to live in walkable, transit-friendly neighbourhoods but can’t afford to. Households in location-efficient neighbourhoods can meet their daily needs with one car instead of two, saving $8,000 to $15,000 annually. 

Carbon and household cost savings are among the many economic, community and environmental benefits of smart growth policies – including better health, a higher quality of life, more customers for neighbourhood businesses and protection of habitat and farmland.

This is a win for municipal governments, as well. Smart growth costs billions of dollars less in infrastructure than sprawl because it allows for more people to be served by fewer roads, tracks, pipes and wires. Developers don’t pay for the full costs of the offsite infrastructure required to support new suburban development, and municipal tax coffers are responsible for covering significant operating, maintenance and replacement costs. On the other hand, compact development can produce significantly higher municipal tax revenues. 

Smart growth costs billions of dollars less in infrastructure than sprawl because it allows for more people to be served by fewer roads, tracks, pipes and wires.

For the past 75 years, government policies have incentivized car-oriented, single-family neighbourhoods. Traditional neighbourhoods with bustling sidewalks and active main streets have become expensive because today’s market under-supplies walkability. As this pent-up demand grows, location-efficient housing commands higher prices – and that dynamic drives gentrification of established neighbourhoods that displaces or further disrupts the lives of Black, Indigenous, racialized and low-income communities.

The urgent and obvious solution is to increase the supply of affordable housing in accessible locations, providing a range of “missing middle” multifamily housing to meet diverse economic and social needs. From duplexes and triplexes to mid-rise apartments and secondary suites, this new supply must be affordable to lower-income and middle-income renters and homeowners.

We need to build and retrofit more “15-minute neighbourhoods” where people can access almost everything they need on foot, by bike or by transit. We do that by adding in missing components to existing neighbourhoods – be they sidewalks, shops, housing or parks, and planning new neighbourhoods around transit stations and designing them for pedestrians.

We should also consider ownership and sharing models that save money, cut carbon and improve quality of life. Shared walls in multifamily buildings reduce heating demand, car and bike “sharing” reduce total kilometres driven, and common rooms in apartments and co-housing cut costs and strengthen community.

Here are three steps the next federal government can take to increase the supply of affordable, location-efficient housing:

1. Federal policies must be part of the solution and not the problem. A key step will be for the federal government to apply transportation affordability and location-efficiency lenses to housing and public transit programs to identify conflicts and opportunities for better alignment between the two. This should be supported by increased research funding on location efficiency, such as through the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s Housing Supply Challenge.

2. Provide technical and financial support to increase municipal capacity to plan, implement and evaluate location-efficient solutions – in coordination with provincial authorities. To do this, the federal government should enhance programs run by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) that support land-use planning, active transportation, public transit and sustainable and affordable housing (and FCM should better align them to generate efficiencies and multiple benefits).

The government should also develop planning and evaluation tools to assess the full costs and benefits of different urban development futures, including a Canadian version of the U.S. Housing + Transportation Affordability Index. This calculates total costs of housing plus transportation for specific locations, illuminating the affordability benefits of efficient locations. We must support the development of affordable housing on underutilized public land near transit hubs, develop best-practice guidance on channelling revenues from commercial development to support affordable housing and enhance public space, and develop guidance on how to integrate secondary suites and laneway housing into residential retrofit programs to generate income to support deep efficiency and affordability.

3. Provide financial incentives and establish performance criteria for federally funded projects to deliver transportation and housing affordability and carbon reduction. For example, municipalities that receive federal transit funding should be rewarded for enhancing 15-minute neighbourhoods and for increasing affordable housing. Performance incentives could also be incorporated into infrastructure funding agreements with provincial governments. In early years, municipalities could receive technical support to plan for transit-oriented development, active transport, and affordable housing and be rewarded for performance. Over time, these practices would evolve into the new normal.

The time has come to build the homes of tomorrow in a smarter and more equitable way by making location efficiency a top policy and spending priority of the federal government when it comes to climate, housing, transportation and infrastructure. 

Carbon down. Community up.

Steve Winkelman is executive director of the Ottawa Climate Action Fund.

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