A handful of start-ups, many based in California, see all that plant matter as a potential feedstock for making products routinely used in housing construction – think insulation, flooring, panelling and concrete additives.

Not only would these bio-based products greatly reduce a building’s carbon footprint; in side-by-side comparisons, building materials made from straw, hemp, flax and cellulose are more fire-resistant than their conventional counterparts – a top-of-mind concern in the Golden State following the January wildfires that razed more than 50,000 acres of land, destroyed more than 16,000 structures and killed at least 29 people.

British Columbia and other parts of Canada have likewise experienced extreme weather events, from flooding to wildfires. “There’s going to be a really big push to create more houses in the near future,” says B.C.-based Elli Terwiel, owner and lead engineer at Sage Structural Engineering.

Terwiel is part of a growing movement of engineers, designers and architects that are trying to convince the construction industry that natural materials such as grain straw, corn stover (the stalks, leaves and cobs left over after the corn harvest), husks and even sewage sludge can be turned into high-performance building products. “The question is, how do we build those buildings better?” she asks. “How do we make these buildings the best that they can be for Canadians? And I do think that bio-based materials, whether just as insulation or the entire structure, there’s a place for them in the conversation.”

A recent report put out by RMI notes that many bio-based products are market-ready and are at or near cost parity today, despite most of these products not yet having reached the economies of scale of the incumbent building materials.

Mainstreaming natural building systems could, essentially, decouple economic growth from greenhouse gas emissions by transforming the high-emitting building sector into a carbon sink.

How did we get here?

The buildings and construction sector is by far the largest contributor to climate change, accounting for at least 37% of global emissions. In the United States alone, new home construction emits nearly 30 million tonnes of GHG emissions each year.

Until recently, architects and engineers have focused on reducing carbon emissions generated by the maintenance and operations of a building – the GHGs created from heating, cooling and lighting, which are projected to decrease from 75% of the sector’s total emissions to 50% over the next few decades.

But this assessment of a structure’s carbon impact doesn’t account for so-called embodied carbon. Embodied carbon refers to the GHGs released during the entire life cycle of a building, starting with the extraction of the raw materials used for construction through manufacturing, transportation, installation, use and disposal. The built environment relies on concrete, steel and aluminum, which are especially difficult to decarbonize and are responsible for a considerable proportion of a building’s embodied carbon load.

Studies have shown that as much as 60% of an average building’s carbon emissions are embodied as opposed to operational.

Everything old is new again

Bio-based building products are a highly effective way to reduce embodied carbon. Roughly 50% of the weight of plants is photosynthetically sequestered carbon. Buildings that pack mostly plant matter into their structures store substantially more carbon than the amount required to process and transport the materials themselves.

Straw, which is plentiful and a natural by-product of wheat, rice, rye and oats, sequesters 60 times more carbon than it requires to grow, making it one of the most powerful carbon-storing building materials in the world. “You’re taking what would be an agricultural waste product,” Terwiel observes, “that might break down in the field, and you’re putting it into a building. You’re storing carbon in buildings.”

Using natural building materials is not an entirely new idea. Cob, a mixture of clay and straw, is a traditional building technique in the United Kingdom, where cob houses dating back several hundred years still stand. Traditional straw bale construction has been employed for more than a century in the United States. Using cellulose (finely shredded cardboard fibres and recycled paper) for building insulation dates back many centuries in both the United States and Canada.

Code work

David Arkin, a principal at Arkin Tilt Architects, a firm that specializes in ecological planning and design based in Berkeley, California, has built dozens of straw bale structures as well as a four-unit townhome project in Oregon that achieved an 85% reduction in embodied carbon through the use of natural building materials.

The challenge of such structures – and there are several – is that straw bales, like so many biomass products, must be purchased directly from the source, in this case the local farmer. “It’s a matter of scale,” Terwiel says. “You have these very small producers who are at the early adopter stage, who haven’t achieved scale to be able to go after Rona or Home Depot. You have to know where to look to find these products and the people who know how to work with them.”

Moreover, walls insulated with plant matter tend to be much thicker than typical ones. While this has its benefits – excellent thermal properties, soundproof rooms – it can also be impractical in high-density, urban settings. Which is why Anthony Dente’s firm, Verdant Structural Engineers, also based in Berkeley, has been developing a drop-in structural wall panel made from straw bales that fits conventional dimensions, complies with California’s building code and eliminates the need to visit the local farmer. Verdant plans on launching the panels in early 2026.

“I’ve given a lot of presentations to architectural firms,” Dente says. “I don’t talk about how they can buy 100 straw bales from the farmer and have a bunch of their friends stack them up in their walls. I’m talking to them about product development and efficiency and material science development and that they can start bringing these materials to their more conventional clients.”

The majority of plant-derived products, however, have yet to appear in building codes. Projects tend to be small-scale one-offs as a result, and mostly residential.

The compostable house

“Building for disassembly” refers to buildings that are designed so that every component can be removed and reused rather than tossed into a landfill where carbon is released into the atmosphere. For instance, hempcrete, derived from the hemp plant, is a superb insulating material and can also be used in place of concrete; it is lightweight, fire-resistant and entirely recyclable or reusable. “At the end of life, when you remove the finishes, you can take a building made with natural materials and it will compost itself. And that, I think, is pretty incredible,”  Terwiel says.

The RMI report cites a project that compared two residential homes, one built using standard, off-the-shelf materials, the other incorporating bio-based products in the flooring, panelling, rooftops and insulation. Equal in size, the carbon-storing model showed a 107% reduction in net emissions, tipping the building into net storage territory.

“By 2030? I’d like it if California has adopted and green-lighted the use of clay construction,” Dente says. “Clay construction is incredibly fire-resistant and high-performing – we make ovens out of clay! It’s kind of silly how hard it is to use a system that’s such a no-brainer fire solution.”

Victoria Foote is a writer and editor who specializes in clean energy and climate.

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Extensive new modelling by Corporate Knights’ Climate Dollars project reveals that the rapid transformation we need is within our grasp. But the buildings and transport sectors each hold an essential piece of the solution.

• Any successful effort to bring Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050 must shift the entire building stock to use heat pumps for space heating and cooling, while striking the best balance in each province between the cost and benefits of deep energy-efficiency retrofits.
• The Climate Dollars modelling places the batteries in electric vehicles at the centre of the decarbonization effort. Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) systems allow EVs to charge when solar and wind are abundant and cheap, then release part of that charge to the grid when demand is highest, reducing the cost of decarbonizing by $8,000 per vehicle – as long as those millions of EVs are on the road in time to make a difference.

The analysis shows that decarbonizing our energy system by mid-century will be a big, bold nation-building project in which every sector plays an essential part. We can meet that target faster and at less cost by looking at the electricity system, buildings and road transport as an integrated whole, rather than trying to shift each sector on its own.

Climate Dollars modelling points to a realistic path to eliminate Canada’s energy-related greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. It’s achievable and affordable, requiring a manageable share of the capital dollars the country already invests each year. It delivers hundreds of thousands of well-paying jobs in the rapidly emerging new energy economy.

The capital expenditure gap in buildings and transport

Corporate Knights set up the Climate Dollars project to measure the gap between current climate-related capital investments and the funding required to meet the country’s climate goals. Much of that investment will be for the renewable electricity supply and a project we’re calling the Trans-Canada Transmission Link that deliver the renewable energy to power Canada’s buildings, vehicles, industry and agriculture.

The other key pillars of any decarbonization plan are to make each of those sectors as energy-efficient as possible and shift their consumption from fossil fuels to clean electricity. The Climate Dollars modelling shows those changes increasing electricity demand from less than 600 to nearly 1,000 terawatt-hours per year, including 490 TWh in homes and commercial buildings and 150 TWh from road transport.

The other key pillars of any decarbonization plan are to make each of those sectors as energy-efficient as possible and shift their consumption from fossil fuels to clean electricity. The Climate Dollars modelling shows those changes increasing electricity demand from less than 600 to more than 1,000 terawatt-hours per year, including about 335 TWh in homes and commercial buildings and up to 290 TWh from road transport.

Both of these sectors can make it easier and less expensive for the grid to decarbonize. But only if they can clear a large gap between current capital expenditures and the levels that will be needed to get the job done.

For Canada’s nine million residential buildings and one million commercial buildings, the two decarbonization scenarios in the Climate Dollars analysis require additional capital expenditures between $14 billion and $35 billion per year through 2050. The more ambitious scenario, combining heat pump conversions with deep energy retrofits in the residential sector, reduces electricity consumption in all provinces but Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ontario. Heat pump conversions without the efficiency upgrades cost far less but increase the investment needed to ensure a renewable electricity supply through the winter months.

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In response to the affordable housing crisis, Canada will also see construction of hundreds of thousands of new residential buildings by 2030, the majority of them multi-family structures. They’ll all have to be built to the highest possible energy-efficiency standard and equipped with air-source or ground-source heat pumps, not fossil-fuelled heating or cooling.

In transport, additional capital investment of $270 to $300 billion over the next 25 years will be needed to complete the shift to electric vehicles and install 555,000 new public charging stations, with V2G technology turning the batteries in those cars into a valuable grid resource. Annual investment peaks at $17.5 billion in 2032 and then starts falling as the cost premium for personal EVs declines throughout the 2030s.

Decarbonizing buildings means investing in ourselves

Every aspect of the Climate Dollars modelling points to the investments that will make Canadians’ lives safer, healthier and more affordable. The buildings sector is where the response to climate change literally comes home. Our buildings must be electrified and prepared for the extreme weather that is already locked and loaded in the atmosphere as a result of past and present greenhouse gas emissions. Heat pumps and efficiency improvements in our building stock are also essential enabling investments for the electricity supply sector to be able to make the transition to a renewables-based grid. In a cascading, global climate emergency, the simplest, cheapest path to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from building energy use is to replace fossil-fuelled heating and cooling with heat pumps at a cost of $370 billion through 2050, or about $13.6 billion per year.

More extensive building retrofits deliver benefits far beyond energy savings and emission reductions. They help protect our homes and businesses from storms and flooding, wildfires, heat waves and power outages that will become more severe and frequent as the years go by. A national energy-retrofit mission would create hundreds of thousands of jobs in a thriving, new business sector, helping to build stronger communities and avert the worst impacts of climate change.

Every aspect of the Climate Dollars modelling points to the investments that will make Canadians’ lives safer, healthier and more affordable.

Even assuming that economies of scale bring down the cost of building retrofits by 50% by 2035, it would take an additional $500 billion over the next 25 years, an average of $20 billion per year, to recondition the entire building stock. Canadians actually invest much more than that in existing buildings; in 2024 alone capital expenditures on building renovations totalled $101 billion in the residential sector and $28 billion in the commercial sector.

But while those improvements included some energy-efficiency upgrading, the priorities for building upgrades are generally directed more toward interior redecoration and refitting. This is a recurring theme in the analysis of decarbonization – it is not so much an increase in the total capital that is required but rather shifts in the way capital is allocated, projects are planned and organized, a new work force is trained and deployed, and government incentives are designed for building retrofits.

Road transport is already decarbonizing

In road transport, the shift from internal combustion to electric vehicles is already well under way. Electric vehicle sales in Canada are growing exponentially. And with the price gap expected to narrow through 2035, drivers can look forward to a clean-energy dividend on fuel of up to $1.2 trillion through 2050, after subtracting the cost of the electricity to run the vehicles.

But we’ll have to move quickly to seize the moment. The average car or light truck stays on the road for 15 years, and some commercial trucks even longer, so getting to a zero-emission fleet by 2050 means phasing out new gasoline and diesel vehicles by 2035.

Climate Dollars calculates a capital expenditure gap of $300 billion to fully electrify road transportation, including the cost of a V2G-enabled charging infrastructure. But that’s based on the assumption that the price difference between internal combustion and electric vehicles will gradually decline, reaching parity in the 2030s, with EVs then becoming less expensive than gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles. If there were no price difference today, the capital cost of electrifying the entire road transport sector would tumble to just $57 billion between 2025 and 2050.

Decarbonizing car culture

Cars and trucks have shaped the urban form of our communities and the supply chains that sustain them for the last century. Canadians travelled an average 12,000 kilometres per person per year in 2022, not counting long-distance trips, and made 82% of those trips in cars and light trucks.

Given this heavy reliance on private vehicles, the Climate Dollars analysis shows only one viable path to decarbonizing transportation by 2050.

The sector can and should achieve some emission reductions by cutting down on the number and distance of car and truck trips, boosting public transit, moving more freight by rail, and over the short term, making internal combustion vehicles more fuel-efficient. Those are all worthy and important steps to take.

But bringing every part of the transportation system to zero emissions by 2050 must begin with rapid electrification for a fleet of cars, pickups, SUVs and commercial trucks. Along the way, vehicle-to-grid technology will dramatically reduce the cost of delivering a decarbonized electricity grid.

* * *

Corporate Knights will soon be releasing the full Climate Dollars analysis to drive discussion on the opportunities ahead, and how Canada can align with the investment strategies that allies in the European Union and elsewhere are already pursuing.

Corporate Knights is able to carry out this research thanks to support from the McConnell Foundation, the Trottier Family Foundation, the Chisholm Thomson Family Foundation and the Graham Boeckh Foundation.

The post Canada won’t meet its climate targets without heat pumps and EVs appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions can help mitigate these impacts and their costs. The Canadian Climate Institute has explored in detail Canada’s options for getting to net-zero emissions. There’s little debate that the big switch from fossil fuels to clean electricity will be a cornerstone of Canada’s net-zero future and a competitive necessity for the economy.

But our latest analysis turns up another important benefit: this switch will see most Canadian households spending less on energy compared to today.

Notably, our most recent calculations find that, on average, energy costs for Canadians will decline around 12% by 2050 (Canada’s target year for reaching net-zero) – even with the investments needed for household equipment, such as heat pumps, and electricity grid expansion. And that’s before factoring in the policies already in place to make the transition more affordable for households (things like rebates for electric vehicles, home retrofits or carbon pricing). While this finding may be a surprise for some, recent polling shows that two out of three Canadians already believe it.

Consider how much you spend each year refuelling your vehicle. An average Canadian driving around 15,000 kilometres will pay about $2,000 a year for gas (ignoring price spikes seen in 2022) but could refuel an electric vehicle for $350 a year for the same mileage. Electric motors are more than twice as efficient as combustion engines at converting energy to motion. Even if average electricity rates increase as we build out power grids to meet growing demand, the total cost of owning and operating an electric vehicle still offers net savings.

Consumers are catching on – roughly one in 10 cars sold in Canada last year was electric. While EVs still come with a price premium up-front, the costs of their batteries have fallen by more than 90% since 2010. As their market share increases, economies of scale and experience will further drive down their costs. Some expect them to reach price parity within five years without subsidies.

Similarly, heat pumps (which can be used to heat and cool homes and are typically three times more efficient than baseboard heating or gas furnaces) offer payback for consumers. But help with the equipment cost will remain important for access, even as costs fall. Financing, including low-interest loans, can help households afford the up-front cost and shorten the payback period (supports are already available but can be overly complex).

Affordability isn’t just about average costs; it’s also about stability. Fossil fuel prices are much more volatile. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine led to record-high spikes in gasoline and natural gas prices, and these spikes pose challenges for household cash flows. Switching to electric vehicles and heating can buffer Canadians from having to make sudden and difficult budget choices because of global events.

The data backs this up: multiple U.S. studies show prices for electricity are more stable and predictable relative to gasoline and natural gas for domestic consumption, even preceding the Ukraine crisis. And according to the International Energy Agency, a net-zero pathway not only lowers energy bills, but also protects households from global energy price shocks, reducing energy costs by 40% during such times relative to the status quo.

Of course, a widespread switch to electricity still presents challenges. Low-income households and renters may not be able to unlock the benefits of electrifying. While renters often pay energy bills, landlords choose heating systems. Low-income households are likely to be some of the last to switch from fossil fuels, and the costs of maintaining fossil energy systems risk falling disproportionately on them. Careful policy-making can and should ensure that all Canadians are able to enjoy the benefits electrification can offer. For example, technology rebates should be higher for low-income households, and avoid their having to bear costs up-front. Regulations and incentives can ensure that tenants get to benefit.

Done right, the energy transition won’t just be good for the climate or the economy – it’ll also be good for our bank accounts.

Rick Smith is the president of the Canadian Climate Institute. Kate Harland is a senior research associate at the Canadian Climate Institute.

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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.