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

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

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

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

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

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

Investors are shopping for rental buildings

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

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

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

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

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

What it takes to green a retrofit

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

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

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

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

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

—Tom Wainwright, London’s Royal Holloway University

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

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

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

Scaling low-carbon rentals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yet these workhorses of our vertical transportation systems – Americans make 20 billion elevator trips per year – are anything but generic. Indeed, the extraordinarily elaborate industrial and regulatory structure baked into the ordinary elevator plays an outsized role in explaining one of the more perplexing riddles of the built form of global cities, which is this: why do North American cities produce far more tall-and-sprawl development, whereas urban regions in other parts of the world typically feature extensive tracts of mid-rise buildings that beget denser and more sustainable neighbourhoods?

The answer, or at least a significant part of it, can be found in an eye-opening May 2024 deep dive on the state of the global elevator sector, published by a Brooklyn think tank called the Center for Building in North America. Written by its executive director, Stephen Smith, the report unpacks why North American elevators are on average three times more costly than their European counterparts – a price divergence that has enormous implications for built form. The United States and Canada also have fewer elevators per capita than any other high-income country.

“High-income countries with strong [labour] movements and high safety standards from South Korea to Switzerland have found ways to install wheelchair-accessible elevators in mid-rise apartment buildings for around $50,000 each, even after adjusting for America’s typically higher general price levels,” the report finds. “In the United States and Canada, on the other hand, these installations start at around $150,000 in even low-cost areas.”

The elevator question has taken on much more salience in the past few years as big cities across North America juggle severe housing shortages and sustainability-driven efforts to intensify residential neighbourhoods by allowing multiplexes and low-rise apartment buildings amidst huge swaths of detached houses. While some cities – such as Seattle and New York – still permit the construction of walk-ups without elevators, such dwellings limit accessibility for people with disabilities, seniors and young parents. What’s more, the high cost of North American elevators has made retrofitting those older buildings financially unfeasible – a problem older apartments in Europe do not face.

Smith’s study shows that North America has hewed to a largely outdated form of elevator regulation, whereas the rest of the world in the late 2000s adopted a far more flexible European technical standard that allows builders to install or retrofit elevators in low- and mid-rise buildings far more easily and inexpensively than is the case in the U.S. and Canada.

In Canada and the U.S., the average number of apartments served by a single elevator now exceeds 100. In Europe, the ratio is far lower, at about 30, at least in part because most European jurisdictions allow the construction of “point access block” apartment buildings, which are configured around a single winding staircase and tend to be lower and squatter. Smith points out that even in very small multi-family buildings in much of Europe, with only one or two dozen units, it’s not unusual to have multiple elevators.

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Smith himself became acutely aware of elevator access issues not long after buying a fifth-floor condo apartment in a newly built Brooklyn walk-up in 2017. He chose the building because of the low monthly maintenance fees. “I was an in-shape 32-year-old and had only ever lived in walk-ups in New York,” he wrote. “An elevator just seemed like an unnecessary cost.”

Yet soon after he took possession, Smith contracted a viral infection that produced a debilitating constellation of symptoms, including dizziness, extreme fatigue and nerve damage. Cycling became treacherous, and the climb up to his apartment turned into an arduous trek.

At the time, Smith was tuning in to the surge of interest among American urbanists and small builders in early efforts to increase density in cities like Minneapolis, whose council in 2018 made triplexes legal anywhere in the city and abolished parking requirements. Contractors responded, but often with low-rise apartments that lacked elevators. Yet through friends and relatives in places like Romania and Italy, Smith knew that in those jurisdictions, small-scale apartments routinely came fitted out with lifts.

Besides the yawning gap between the technical standards in North America and the rest of the world, Smith’s investigation uncovered a range of other factors that drive up costs in Canada and the U.S. These include chronic shortages of skilled workers who can build and maintain elevators and restrictive provisions in collective agreements between the major manufacturers – such as Otis and Thyssen – and the elevator trades. Case in point: while the manufacturers increasingly want to move production offshore and ship pre-assembled elevator components, contracts allow unionized workers to actually disassemble pre-assembled parts and then rebuild them on site, a measure meant to eliminate production efficiencies that could reduce jobs.

Regulations, especially around accessibility, also play a perverse role. North American rules specify minimum cab sizes to allow for turning radii for wheelchairs and stretchers. The result, overall, is fewer elevators and thus less accessibility, Smith found.

Finally, the technical specs in North America are less flexible and more complicated, and Smith argues that there’s a linear relationship between that complexity and cost. The cost helps drive development choices: builders want to go higher to recoup those investments, and consequently the elevators serve more people, receive more wear and tear, and are therefore down far more frequently. In high-density urban cores, like Toronto’s downtown, the results are elevator peak periods and lineups to get out the door.

Smith’s recommendations include a call for North American regulators to consider the high-level implications of ratcheting up safety and accessibility standards, which, evidence suggests, ends up leading to fewer elevators or elevator-accessible apartment buildings.

The report’s primary recommendation, however, is philosophical: North American regulators and standards-setting entities should seek to take a more international outlook, borrowing from what’s worked fine in most of the rest of the world. “In the absence of strong data on the inadequacy of international practices, deference should be given to what is tried and true in societies with far more – and far more affordable – elevators than North America,” the report says.

The post How new elevator rules can help fix the housing crisis in North America appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The strategy brings together a smorgasbord of funding programs for buildings and energy efficiency, most of which the government has already announced, including measures from the 2024 budget that included $15 billion in apartment construction loans, $6 billion for infrastructure to support new housing supply and density, and $976 million for rapid construction of affordable housing.

But it contains no mandatory regulations or new public investments to bring emissions from the country’s more than 16 million homes, 564,000 commercial and institutional buildings, and 34,000 federal properties to net-zero.

“This was supposed to be a strategy to demonstrate how to achieve net-zero in the building sector,” Brendan Haley, senior director of policy strategy at Efficiency Canada, told The Energy Mix in an interview Wednesday. “It doesn’t deliver on that because it has neither mandatory performance standards for heating equipment in buildings, nor the public investments that would be needed to scale up retrofits.”

Over the last few years, Ottawa has often resisted calls to adopt ideas “that we felt were urgent and quick wins” in areas like low-income energy efficiency, deferring ambitious action until the Green Buildings Strategy could be finalized, Haley added. “The hope was that we would move away from these short-term pilot programs toward a long-term mission to make buildings more energy efficient, with performance requirements and supports that Canadians could count on in the coming decades, and that markets could plan towards.”

But now, “we’re left with a reannouncement of essentially pilot programs which are time-limited, and when they run out of money they could be abruptly cancelled like the Greener Homes grants.”

The document appears to contain no references to the phrase “natural gas”, prompting some speculation that Ottawa was wary of the criticism it could run into for a more robust approach to decarbonizing buildings, the country’s third-largest source of the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.

“The government is moving in the right direction by attempting to decrease building emissions, lower household bills, and improve safety in homes,” Stand.earth said in a release. “However, the plan falls short by overlooking ‘natural’ gas, a highly polluting fossil fuel that is the most commonly used energy source for heating homes in Canada.”

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The release of the strategy “was an opportunity to ensure that new homes would be built with clean and modern heating technologies, making them less polluting and more affordable to heat and cool,” added Stand climate campaigner Lana Goldberg. “By neglecting to develop a policy to address ‘natural’ gas in new buildings, the plan ignores the elephant in the room.”

That’s “mind-boggling” when “we have a high tech, high-efficiency, low-cost, modern technology to heat the air and water in our homes,” she told The Energy Mix. “This government needs to do what it knows it has to do to deliver on its commitments to reduce Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions, even if there’s backlash from industry groups that benefit from the continued use of natural gas.”

The Canadian Climate Institute assigned much of that responsibility to provincial and territorial governments. “In particular, they should accelerate investments in energy efficiency and building electrification, and stop expanding gas infrastructure for new development,” said Sachi Gibson, the institute’s research director for mitigation, in a release that cites the CCI’s recent report on the future of Canada’s gas networks.

“Our research has found that energy-efficient heat pumps are already the lowest-cost option for heating and cooling many homes in Canada today, and can help reduce pollution while saving people money.”

More Comprehensive Support

A centrepiece of the announcement is the $800-million Canada Greener Homes Affordability Program (CGHAP), which replaces the existing Canada Greener Homes Grant with “more comprehensive support for the installation of retrofits, at no charge to participating households,” Industry, Science and Economic Development (ISED) Canada said in a release. “Using a ‘direct install’ model, where the retrofits are managed and delivered by third parties, this program could provide participating households with support up to four times more valuable than the former grant program.”

Recommended retrofits under the program “will be determined by experienced energy efficiency professionals, enabling each participant to receive what their home needs and making their homes more affordable and comfortable.”

The announcement links to a Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) landing page that describes a Canada Greener Affordable Housing program, featuring low-interest and forgivable loans of up to $170,000 per unit for retrofits and $130,000 per project for pre-retrofit activities. The program is targeted to older, primarily residential buildings with at least five units or beds.

The ISED release also commits to a “regulatory framework to phase out the installation of expensive and polluting oil heating systems in new construction, as early as 2028.”

“We will be moving to ban the use of heating oil in new construction. And that simply reflects the fact that there are lots of alternatives to heating oil,” Wilkinson told CBC. “Heating oil is enormously expensive, and it is the most polluting fuel that we use to heat our homes.”

The document. “offers few specifics on how the phaseout would work,” CBC notes, but “says it would include ‘necessary exclusions’ for places with insufficient access to electricity, or where backup standby heating is required.”

Building Sector of the Future

The strategy also sets out to “shape the building sector of the future” by working toward mandatory rules to replace air conditioners with heat pumps in new homes “and in certain retrofit scenarios”; Applying a “buy clean” policy that leverages federal procurement to promote low- and net-zero-carbon construction materials and designs; Updating the legislative tools in the federal Energy Efficiency Act to “account for the realities of today’s online retail environment”; Introducing consistent home energy labelling across the country; and toughening up the existing Energy Efficiency Regulations for air conditioners, water heaters, and some other home appliances and components.

“Greening the buildings sector remains a substantial and complex undertaking,” the strategy states. “Buildings have long life cycles and therefore reducing emissions, while also improving resilience to climate change, requires important investments that often need multi-year planning.”

With the private sector and financial institutions also playing a role, “strategies like maximizing utilization, reusing, refurbishing, and repurposing already built space provide a cost-effective way to help decarbonize Canada’s buildings stock by extending the lifespan of existing buildings and avoiding the energy-intensive process of creating new materials,” the document adds. And deep retrofits that upgrade multiple building systems and equipment “can achieve maximum energy savings and GHG emissions reductions.”

‘Quick Wins’ and Ambiguity

In a detailed assessment of the strategy, Haley says Efficiency Canada first suggested the requirement to “make air conditioners heat pumps” in a joint report last year with the Building Decarbonization Alliance, the Canadian Climate Institute, and the Greenhouse Institute. The policy, which is already in place in Vancouver, “ensures customers purchasing an air conditioner get the best product (that can also heat), increasing choices and opportunities to save money and improve comfort by operating the heat pump,” he writes.

The policy is “meant to be a quick win,” Haley writes, “an initial step in a regulatory pathway that would move to future requirements, such as requiring 100% efficient space and hot water heating systems.” But the federal version includes unnecessary restrictions that would undercut the benefits of the new rule, and also lacks a clear definition of a “net-zero end state”.

While eliminating heating oil amounts to “a consumer protection measure due to its high costs and risks,” the impact of the federal plan “is questionable due to its restriction on new buildings, which are unlikely to use oil heat,” he adds. “An oil heating phaseout would protect more consumers by applying to the replacement of systems in existing buildings and new ones.”

The strategy is ambiguous about Ottawa’s plans to require net-zero standards in new construction, including the minimum 3.5 million homes the government wants to see built by 2030. “An immediate action the government can take to meet its net-zero commitments and lock in affordability is to require housing built with funding under the National Housing Plan to meet net-zero standards,” Haley writes.

And while it recognizes the need to speed up energy retrofits to around 3% of the building stock per year, amounting to $400 billion per year in annual capital investment over the next three decades, “no federal public investments or performance standards that could trigger private sector activity are included in the plan.”

Needed: More Political Space

The strategy “helps clear the way for concrete policy implementation,” Haley concludes, opening the door to some “quick wins and immediate gains” through the Energy Efficiency Act amendments, the shift from air conditioners to heat pumps, the heating oil phaseout, and higher performance standards for federally-funded housing.

But it should also “create some reflection within the green building and energy efficiency community,” he writes. Despite “significant progress” in recent years, the strategy shows that “more political space has to be created for governments to move forward with the public investments or mandatory performance requirements needed.”

In Wednesday’s interview, Haley cited the federal government’s low-income energy efficiency program as a moment when public advocacy successfully pushed a new idea onto the government’s agenda. “What needs to be done is people, citizens, raising their voice and getting the attention of their political leaders,” he told The Mix. “More of that needs to be done, because we’ve seen that it works.”

But when that advocacy falls short, “if those policies are not being achieved or implemented, you can’t just blame the government for that,” he added. “You have to be a bit self-reflective about what else can be done.” On energy and climate policy, “the other reflection is why policies like energy efficiency equipment and green buildings, which are clearly a win-win, were not at the forefront of the recommendations for this government, instead of policies that don’t produce those co-benefits and don’t seem to make a lot of sense to people.”

Betsy Agar, director of the Pembina Institute’s buildings program, said the release of the Green Buildings Strategy will contribute to a conversation on how net-zero targets can be achieved.

“It’s a tool we can talk to any government about,” she said. “Now we can see the gaps, so we know what to push for.”

This article was first published by The Energy Mix. Read the original story here. 

The post Canada’s new green buildings strategy funds low-income retrofits but ‘falls short’ on role of ‘natural’ gas appeared first on Corporate Knights.

As more people become concerned by the heat waves, forest fires and flooding exacerbated by climate change, they’re switching their carbon-emitting home appliances for electric, emissions-free alternatives. The impact of millions of electric vehicles, heat pumps, induction stoves and heat pump water heaters can be measured not only in carbon emission reductions, but in significant savings too.

Corporate Knights partnered with the Toronto Star to analyze the co-benefits of these clean technologies, quantifying just how much households can save by adopting them, and what their impact will be on emissions.

If someone had told you in 2008 – the year after the first iPhone was released – that in the next 15 years, virtually everyone in Canada would have a smartphone, you might have rolled your eyes all the way to the internet café (as you slowly tapped out a text on your numbered keypad).

Nowadays, it’s hard to believe we ever lived without the internet in our pockets. But that’s how adoption curves work: new technology is adopted slowly at first, then all at once.

The digital technology that swept our lives into this millennium changed the way we communicate and shop, plan trips and watch shows. But it also came with a heavy cost to the planet. The greenhouse gases produced by online video streaming exceed 1% of global emissions. Bitcoin miners produce more carbon emissions than all of Serbia.

The next wave of technological upgrades to our lives, however, will emit zero carbon. It’s going to change how we get around, the way we heat and cool our homes, and what we use to cook and take showers. The electric vehicle, heat pump, induction stove and heat-pump water heater may not alter our behaviour so much as texting and email. But they will revolutionize society, allowing us to continue to do many daily activities – only faster, more efficiently and without producing any emissions.

And they are poised to go from curiosity to ubiquity more quickly than you think.

Their carbon-saving potential is enormous. According to an analysis by Corporate Knights’ research division and shared with the Toronto Star, these four technologies alone would cut the average Canadian household’s carbon footprint by 80%. If everyone made the switch, it would eliminate 92 megatonnes from Canada’s national emissions annually – more than the entire oil sands produces.

The financial benefit is even greater. If everyone in Canada swapped out their existing gas-powered car, furnace, stove and water heater for these green technologies, the collective yearly savings would be more than $65 billion, the analysis found. That’s $4,300 per household.

If everyone in Canada swapped out their existing gas-powered car, furnace, stove and water heater for these green technologies, the collective yearly savings would be more than $65 billion and 92 megatonnes of CO2 – more than the entire oil sands.

These ecological and economic incentives have created the conditions for rapid adoption, motivating governments that have emission-reduction targets to meet and individuals feeling the squeeze of fossil-fuel-driven inflation.

Critics say fear of climate change will not prompt people to adopt new technology. They argue that we just love our gas stoves and gas-guzzling SUVs too much. But dozens of car dealers and HVAC professionals who spoke with the Star said EVs and heat pumps are popular not because they’re green – people are buying them for other reasons: convenience, comfort and cost savings. The end result is a win-win. People’s lives get better. They save money. And the faster these technologies are adopted, the fewer emissions Canada will produce.

Corporate Knights partnered with the Toronto Star to analyze the co-benefits of these clean technologies, quantifying just how much Canadians in each province can save by adopting them, and what their impact will be on emissions. The results vary widely across the country.

In Quebec, Manitoba and British Columbia, where hydro dams provide cheap, carbon-free electricity, the benefit of ditching fossil fuels is the greatest. An average British Columbian household switching to these four technologies would save more than $4,800 per year and virtually eliminate their carbon footprint (83% average).

In provinces with carbon-intensive electricity, such as Alberta and Nova Scotia, switching off fossil fuels has a smaller impact – and can even make your emissions rise in some cases – but the financial benefits are not insignificant. An average Nova Scotian household adopting the four green technologies would save $5,200 per year and shrink their emissions by five tonnes (or 64%).

Switching now is also future-proofed. As the carbon tax rises, the cost savings grow – reaching an additional $790 per year on average* for every Canadian household in 2030. And as the electrical grids in these provinces decarbonize, the already low emissions will piggyback them right down to zero.

In the U.S., those figures will shift state-to-state as well. But in New York, households switching to these four technologies would save an average of US$2,133 per year while reducing their carbon footprints by 7.3 tonnes.

We’ve reached out to early adopters in Canada to find out about the benefits and challenges of these technologies and have created online calculators so you can figure out the estimated cost and emissions savings associated with each technology depending on where you live. While no one would say these four pieces of green technology are a panacea for solving climate change, they’re a big start. And they’re something individuals can do without waiting for the government to act (though the incentives and rebates help).

Each EV, water heater, heat pump and induction stove on its own may not make a big difference for the warming planet, but they will save a family hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars a year. And as North Americans switch away from burning fossil fuels and electrify their lives, the cumulative power of individual action is undeniable.

Savings from switching to an electric vehicles

David Hollingworth is an active skier, someone who heads up to Whistler from his home in North Vancouver for a day on the slopes whenever the powder is fresh. But unlike many of his neighbours, he straps his skis to the top of his EV – a Nissan Leaf – for the trip into the mountains and leaves his family’s gas-powered car – a Honda CRV – at home. “It’s just a no-brainer, the cost savings,” he says. While it costs more than $100 to gas up the CRV, Hollingaworth estimates that an overnight charge for the Leaf runs him only about $2.

In the eight years since he bought his EV, Hollingworth says, he’s grown more enamoured with it. The electric car serves his family’s day-to-day needs so well they’ve cancelled the insurance on their gas-powered car except for a few months in the winter when they go on longer ski trips.

“I don’t keep a log of the expenses for both vehicles, but it’s just obvious. I’m sure that we’ve saved thousands of dollars in fuel and maintenance [with the EV],” he says. “Even driving the CRV a lot less, it seems to cost us at least $1,000 in repairs every year. And the Nissan Leaf, it’s basically maintenance-free.” Fuel and maintenance savings are often cited as the top benefits by EV owners. In B.C. – which has the highest gasoline prices in the country and some of the lowest electricity prices – those savings are $2,450 per year on average, according to the Corporate Knights analysis.

The savings assume charging at home using average electricity prices. Of course, many EV owners minimize their costs by charging overnight when electricity is cheaper and searching out free charging, still widely available.

While EVs have a reputation for being expensive, this is changing quickly. Many of the early high-end models are now making way for entry-level EVs priced far lower than the average cost of a new car in Canada, which hit $58,478 at the end of last year.

A survey of Toronto car dealerships last year turned up four EV models with a listing price below $40,000 and nine more between $40,000 and $45,000. These prices don’t include the $5,000 federal EV purchase subsidy, which is topped up by certain provinces, ranging from $2,500 in Newfoundland and Labrador to $7,000 in Quebec. (Ontario cancelled its EV purchase rebate in 2018 when Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives came into power.)

In B.C. and Quebec, the purchase subsidies are coupled with a sales mandate, requiring dealerships to have EVs available for purchase. (The federal government announced a nationwide sales mandate last December.) This combination has fuelled the fastest uptake of EVs in the country. Last year, EVs made up 16% of all new car sales in B.C. and 12% in Quebec.

Ontario lags behind. Only 6.5% of new car sales in the province were EVs last year. Since automakers send their EVs to the provinces that have sales mandates, Ontarians have to wait for months or even years on Canada’s longest EV wait lists.

In addition to savings, EVs also boast souped-up climate impacts. Even in provinces with electricity generated from fossil fuels, EVs dramatically reduce emissions because they’re so efficient. In an EV, up to 91% of the energy in the battery goes directly to turning the wheels, while in a gas-powered car, 84% of the energy in the gas tank is lost to heat and friction.

So in Alberta and Saskatchewan, where most electricity is generated by burning coal and natural gas, an average family would reduce their carbon emissions by 1.2 tonnes by switching to an EV, the Corporate Knights analysis found.

In Quebec, Manitoba and B.C., where most electricity comes from hydro dams, an EV would reduce a family’s carbon emissions by far more: 3.1 tonnes per year.

Nationwide, if everyone switched to an EV, it would reduce Canada’s carbon emissions by 57.8 megatonnes, or about 8.6% of all emissions. This assumes we maintain our current electrical generation sources. But if the federal government succeeds in getting our electrical grids to net-zero by 2035, EV adoption would reduce emissions by 67 megatonnes, or 10%.

On each trip up to Whistler in his Leaf, Hollingworth has to make a 20-minute stop in Squamish for a quick charge. He uses the opportunity to stretch and admire the mountains, taking pleasure, he says, in knowing he’s doing his part to protect them from climate change. “There is some type of endorphin or dopamine that happens when you know you just saved a bunch of carbon emissions.”

He says he thinks everyone will soon be driving EVs, not only to reduce emissions, but because they’re so much cheaper and more convenient to operate. “We’re in a transition period now. People will roll their eyes in the future when they look at how we lived today.”

Savings from switching to an electric heat pump

Shortly after Brian Gifford retired and moved back to Halifax, he knew he had to do something about the oil furnace in his basement, which was costing him $2,500 to run each winter. Not knowing that he had any choice but to continue to use oil, he added insulation to his basement, walls and attic – and saw his heating bills go down to $1,700.

Five years later, he was told his firebox had a crack and the furnace would have to be replaced, so he looked at switching to natural gas – newly available in the Maritimes – or buying an electric heat pump. “Both environmentally and financially, heat pumps made a whole lot more sense,” he says. Installed in 2015, the heat pump has reduced his annual heating bill to $700 – about a quarter of what it used to be. “The heat pump is a huge, huge benefit, especially in places like the Maritimes, where heating costs are relatively high because we use oil,” he says. “We’re saving a lot of money. We’re really happy with that.”

For decades, heat pumps weren’t powerful enough to heat through Canadian winters. But a new generation of cold-climate heat pumps now available have been shown to work in the deep cold of Whitehorse. They also do double duty, running in reverse to provide air conditioning in the summer.

Much like the EV, the heat pump electrifies something that’s traditionally powered with fossil fuels. And like an EV, switching to a heat pump to heat your home saves money and reduces emissions – even on a dirty grid, like Nova Scotia’s – because the technology is so much more efficient.

While the newest natural gas furnaces operate at 98% efficiency, heat pumps are 220 to 320% efficient in Canadian conditions. This means that in a furnace, one unit of energy in natural gas produces 0.98 units of heat in your home. But with a heat pump, one unit of energy in electricity produces 2.2 to 3.2 units of heat. This works because heat pumps use ambient heat in the air and concentrate it, gaining a multiplier effect on the energy used to power the process.

As a result, heat pumps promise cost savings not only for people who switch from natural gas and oil furnaces, but for those switching from electric baseboards, because they will use far less electricity to produce the same amount of heat.

The Corporate Knights research division calculated that for a typical single-family detached house in Nova Scotia, switching from an oil furnace to a heat pump would save $1,750 in annual heating costs. They would save even more switching from baseboard heating: $2,773 per year.

The price to install a heat pump can vary from around $4,500 for a hybrid (one that works with your existing furnace) to upwards of $20,000 for a top-of-the-line centrally ducted model. Federal government rebates of up to $5,000 and zero-interest loans of $40,000, both offered through Ottawa’s Greener Homes Initiative, can significantly reduce how much you pay out of pocket at the outset. It can even eliminate the cost: if you’re switching from oil to a heat pump, there’s a special federal program that will cover up to $10,000.

Provincial rebates stack on top of the federal ones, offering an additional $5,000 in Ontario and Nova Scotia and up to $20,000 in Quebec, reducing upfront costs even further.

Since the federal subsidies were introduced in 2021, heat pump adoption has shot up, surpassing sales of natural gas furnaces in Canada for the first time, according to wholesale shipment information tracked by the Heating, Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Institute of Canada.

Because of their efficiency, heat pumps use far less energy to heat than furnaces, but just how big their impact is on carbon emissions is mostly determined by how the electricity is generated. In Nova Scotia, where the majority of electricity comes from coal and oil, switching from an oil furnace to a heat pump will reduce a typical household’s emissions by 1.2 tonnes. In provinces with lots of carbon-free renewable electricity, the greenhouse gas reductions are even greater. In Ontario, for example, a household making the switch to a heat pump would reduce their emissions by 4.2 tonnes and save $489 a year at today’s gas prices – savings that will nearly double by 2030 as the carbon price increases.

Canada-wide, if everyone switched to heat pumps, it would produce annual savings of $13.5 billion and emission reductions of 26.3 megatonnes, equal to 4% of Canada’s total GHG emissions, according to the Corporate Knights analysis.

For a peek at the future, look no further than Sweden, where heat pumps have almost entirely replaced oil for residential heat. Since 1990, heat pumps have been responsible for reducing carbon emissions from heating by 95%, according to Martin Forsén, the president of the European Heat Pump Association, who gave a recent presentation in Toronto. The adoption of heat pumps has gone so well in his Scandinavian country that he sees their global dominance as an inevitability. “I don’t think it’s a question of if. It’s just a question of when,” he says.

That’s a sentiment Gifford shares. Heating by burning fossil fuels in your basement will soon be a thing of the past. “It’s a necessary change and I’m looking forward to it,” he says. “It can’t happen soon enough.”

Savings from switching to an electric water heater and induction stove

Anya Barkan’s water heater was 15 years old and “a piece of garbage” when she called her rental company and asked for it to be replaced. After some back and forth that left her frustrated, she decided to break free from the rental contract she had inherited when she bought her home and get a heat-pump water heater. “It just made sense. We wanted to stop that monthly fee and get something that is much more energy-efficient and also not reliant on natural gas,” she says.

Breaking the contract proved much harder than getting the heat-pump water heater. But ever since, Barkan says, she has been happy – and not only because she no longer pays the monthly rental fee. “It’s like shooting two birds with one stone. It’s not just one thing or the other. You can make your house more efficient and lower your bills. But also, it’s better for the environment in terms of fighting climate change.”

Water heaters don’t have a huge impact on gas bills on their own. But like gas stoves, they are often one of the few links to the natural gas system in a home. If swapping these two gas appliances for electric means being able to cut your gas line, it supercharges the savings because it eliminates the fixed monthly charge for natural gas, which comes to $325 a year in Ontario.

The Corporate Knights research found that swapping out the gas water heater for one that operates with a heat pump would save an Ontario family $124 per year. Similarly for an induction stove: the annual savings in Ontario for switching from a gas stove are only $5, but if switching allows you to cut your gas line, those combined savings jump to $454 a year.

But it’s not just economics. There are other reasons people are looking to get rid of their gas stoves. Worries about air quality in the home surfaced earlier this year after an official with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission said the agency was considering banning new gas stoves amid research that links them to childhood asthma.

While the ensuing uproar prompted the head of the agency to walk back talk of a ban, the health hazards are real. Health Canada’s residential indoor air-quality guidelines estimate that 25% of houses with gas stoves exceed the exposure limit for nitrogen dioxide, one of the toxic compounds released when a gas stove is turned on and “for brief periods of time after cooking,” even with “moderate ventilation.”

Meanwhile, some professional chefs recommend switching to induction stoves for performance reasons alone, saying they’re faster to heat up, more responsive, not as hot to work over and easier to clean.

Soon, people moving into new houses and apartments could have no choice but to go without gas appliances. Dozens of cities across the United States, recently joined by Vancouver, have banned natural gas hookups in new developments. New York State just passed a similar ban statewide, and Toronto and Montreal city councils are considering similar measures.

Even though they burn little gas, the climate impact of eliminating these gas-burning appliances isn’t negligible. Switching from a gas stove to induction will reduce an average Ontario household’s indoor emissions of greenhouse gas by 370 kilograms. Swapping a gas water heater for a heat pump version saves 640 kilos.

If everyone in Canada made these changes, the collective impact would reduce emissions by 7.6 megatonnes, more than 1% of all emissions in the country. It’s what analysts refer to as the light-bulb effect. When incandescent light bulbs were replaced by LEDs, the difference in electricity consumption was tiny for a lamp or light fixture. But multiplied across households, apartment buildings, university campuses and sport stadiums, the cumulative impact was enormous.

That’s where we’re at right now with climate change. The solutions are all readily available. The wind turbines and solar panels that will provide clean electricity are being adopted much faster than anyone predicted. Now it’s time to electrify and use that clean electricity to eliminate carbon emissions.

“It’s not just your individual action that will change the world,” says Barkan. “We need to go at it together.”

Full calculator

Calculate the cumulative impact of swapping out all four technologies below.

*To learn more about how averages were calculated, see our notes on assumptions and emission factors.

Marco Chown Oved, climate reporter, Toronto Star

Ralph Torrie, research director, Corporate Knights

Cameron Tulk, lead digital designer, Toronto Star

McKenna Deighton, digital designer, Toronto Star

Jack Dylan, creative director, Corporate Knights magazine

The post GREEN house effect: Calculate the savings from electrifying your home appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The EPBD dates to 2010 and has been updated several times in the European Parliament, including in late 2021. An even more ambitious set of net-zero standards was proposed in March 2023, all in the service of slashing emissions by 55%  by 2030. A key piece of the new policy turned on establishing “minimum energy performance standards” and timelines for buildings across the EU, as well as targets that push upgrades in the least efficient structures. 

However, delays in the adoption of these latest regulations – which aim to spur green renovations in the poorest-performing buildings, drive the take-up of heat pumps and ensure that all new buildings achieve net-zero by 2028 – have kindled concern among climate activists, who point out that 40% of all energy consumption and 36% of emissions in Europe are related to building operations and building materials.   

The stalled process, moreover, is playing out amidst the so-called “boiler wars” in Germany – a reference to efforts to fully halt the use of fossil-fuel powered boilers as a source of space and water heating. Spurred on by the war in Ukraine, German regulators this week announced a deal to ban boilers beginning in 2024, a move that further underscores the delays in Brussels.

In response, a coalition of more than a dozen progressive businesses that participate in the Corporate Knights Global 100 council this week released a statement calling on the European Union to immediately take five critical steps: 

• Approve ambitious minimum energy-performance standards. 
• Deploy best-available energy-efficiency technologies, like heat pumps, to complement the uptake of renewables. 
• Ensure that all new buildings are actually zero-emission structures. 
• Ban fossil-fuel-powered boilers. 
• Update energy performance certificates. 

The group – which includes the Danish insulation giant Rockwool, IKEA and Schneider Electric – notes that the heavy use of natural gas for heating represents a crisis, both from a climate point of view and also economically, due to rising gas prices related to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “European consumers and companies are suffering from high energy prices,” the coalition said in a statement released this week. “Reducing their bills means eliminating losses to inefficiency, reducing both their consumption and overall scarcity.” 

More than 50 global companies representing US$900 billion in revenues signed on to the Corporate Knights Action Declaration on climate policy engagement during COP27 in Egypt last fall.  

A key question hanging over the EPBD implementation involves renovation, especially of older buildings, of which there’s no shortage across the EU. At the moment, only one-fifth of a percentage of buildings are renovated in the EU. To achieve the region’s 2030 timelines, that number will have to grow to 3%, equivalent to an estimated €275-billion outlay on renovations.  

While those figures translate into enormous job-creation opportunities – the coalition estimates that every billion spent on construction translates into 19,000 long-term jobs – the goal remains daunting. Many jurisdictions have adopted voluntary energy-retrofit loan or grant programs, but take-up has been modest – in Canada, the Greener Homes program has attracted 170,000 applicants, a small figure given that the country has eight million homes; even if the program is fully subscribed, it would touch only 10% of all Canadian homes.  

The exception is Italy, where a pandemic-era program provided subsidies exceeding the entire value of a retrofit. The offer, not surprisingly, was a big hit with homeowners and property managers and is expected to cut emissions from the least efficient buildings by 50%, as Corporate Knights reported last fall. The €44-billion initiative is now completely tapped out.  

The Corporate Knights Action Declaration is also advocating that EU regulators accelerate the uptake of heat pumps using measures such as promoting a ban on the use of new fossil fuel boilers and closing a loophole that enables builders or renovators to install hybrid boilers or boilers that rely on renewable fuels, like biogas. “Electric heat pumps will always be more efficient and thus, in the long run, more affordable than burning renewable fuels,” the group’s statement says. “Waste heat re-use will also lower the demand of input energy needed to produce heat.”

With regulators in places like New York City and California really leaning in to building efficiency, fossil fuel reduction, and renewable-energy incentives, the EU’s climate policy institutions, so often lauded for their progressive outlook and green building practices, now find themselves in the unusual position of playing catch-up.   

The post Lighting a fire under Europe’s green buildings policies  appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Depending on how you play with the statistics, buildings contribute between a quarter and half of the global greenhouse gas emissions threatening the survival of our species. And most of those emissions come from the world’s biggest cities. In New York City, heating, cooling, cooking, water heating and clothes drying in buildings create about 70% of atmospheric carbon and methane.

We’re beginning to do better with the electrification of vehicles and the ramping up of renewable energy. Adoption of these has already passed the tipping point. Greening these sectors together with solving our buildings predicament would put us on a path to ending about 75% of global emissions.

Unprecedented heat, fires, floods and storms are forcing politicians to declare a climate emergency, and more are turning to the building sector for solutions. U.S. President Joe Biden’s pivotal Inflation Reduction Act is pouring billions into tax incentives for building retrofits. Officials all over North America are announcing bans on natural gas hookups in new buildings. In place of gas-burning furnaces, politicians are talking up electric heat pumps.

In the midst of it all, Benedict and her team are in the spotlight, having partnered with New York State, the city and RiseBoro Community Partnership over many years to refine climate solutions, most recently installing heat pumps and other green technology in nine multi-family buildings in Brooklyn. “Suddenly, I’ve been getting a lot more calls about affordable retrofits, creating lower-carbon, healthy spaces,” Benedict says. “This RiseBoro group alone has another 100 buildings. We’re starting on some more projects of theirs right after these nine, plus a 13-storey seniors’ tower.”

Like Benedict, architects, engineers and builders everywhere are now being asked to decarbonize larger buildings than ever before, with well-proven green technology that much of the public assumes is new. Green building professionals have survived decades-long struggles against industry acceptance, regulatory frameworks, tight budgets, supply chains and, above all, fear of change.

Now that public support for the energy transition is growing, can we take emissions from all buildings to near zero? Can we ramp it up fast, and scale it up large? Absolutely yes, say these experts. Corporate Knights reached out to the teams working on more than half a dozen of the most exciting green architectural achievements in North America to learn more about how they’re doing just that.

There may not be enough of them, but many buildings are already greener than we think, and sustainable features are already operating at large scale. Read on to find out just how large and how today’s green building heroes are trying to save our planet.

Affordable housing retrofits in Brooklyn

The first Earth Day took place on April 22, 1970, and on that mucky spring morning, a young Benedict donned her rubber boots and went out into the woodlands and parks of Connecticut with a community team to pick up litter. She was shocked to discover that, by summer’s end, people had thoughtlessly spread trash in the exact same places.

Now an architect, Benedict is still trying to clean up the neighbourhood. But she’s using Casa Pasiva, a 146-unit project in Bushwick, as a model for healthy, cost-effective, deep energy retrofits to occupied buildings that are mostly affordable rental units. Her team is refining an innovative methodology to reach Passive House certification from Phius (Passive House Institute U.S.). “With retrofits you become inventive,” says Benedict. “We were able to get a zoning change approved so we could put eight inches of insulation on the outside of buildings. We all need to take action and take responsibility for climate change.”

The insulation, along with new windows, heat pumps, induction cooktops and energy recovery systems, will reduce energy usage by 60% to 80%, significantly lowering operational expenses and emissions. Tenants usually grumble about having to move out for a couple of weeks during renovation, but, Benedict says, “when they hear they will be able to control their air conditioning, they’re more motivated.”

It’s relatively easy to erect a few new low-carbon single-family homes or multi-unit structures. Benedict has worked on a number of them. But buildings last for up to 100 years and are typically replaced at a rate of about 3% annually. Most of New York City’s fossil-fuel-heated edifices will still be standing in 2040. Benedict is one of the few people anywhere successfully tackling this massive retrofit challenge – and the impacts are longer-lasting than picking up litter.

Extreme-weather-resilient subdivisions in Florida and Texas

In 2022, Hurricane Ian hit Florida with a huge storm surge and 150-mile-per-hour winds. It killed more than 100 people and left billions of dollars in damages, mostly around Fort Myers. It bashed the area for nine hours, but a town called Babcock Ranch almost completely withstood the pounding. Built among forest trails, lakes and wetlands by former NFL player Syd Kitson, the town of 2,000 homes features extensive ecosystem-based flood and wind defences, plus solar panels, home batteries and electric vehicle chargers.

“When I was a child, my father and I witnessed the incredible power of a hurricane slamming the New Jersey coast,” Kitson says. “The outdoors are in my soul. I wanted to create a place that respected nature and could stand up to hurricanes.”

Babcock civil engineer Amy Wicks agrees. “Nature was always smarter than us. It has survived for thousands of years. We need to work with it, not against it.”

Some of the country’s largest builders are partners at Babcock Ranch, as well as at Whisper Valley, one of several expansive sustainable subdivisions in the Austin area in Texas. The latter will soon reach 3,000 low-energy homes, all cooled and heated with geothermal. The low-carbon system uses artificial intelligence to save about 60% on energy through networking, sharing and optimization.

Whisper Valley is as resilient as Babcock Ranch. The subdivision emerged unscathed from the deadly Texas cold snap of 2021, which killed more than 200 people with lower-quality homes and heating equipment not designed for freezing temperatures.

Geothermal for Toronto condos

For 13 years, Tim Weber tried to sell geothermal cooling and heating systems to Ontario condo developers with little success. Why add to capital budgets with scary technology? Weber hit on an idea: what if, like the gas companies, he became a utility?

He found a deep-pocketed investment partner in Quebec, created an entity to handle condo owner billing and maintenance, then in 2015 he went back to developers with the message that he could now own and maintain those systems, reducing both their capital budgets and technology problems. They started listening. There are now dozens of increasingly large condo projects in Ontario with geothermal fields under them.

One of Weber’s early partners was Stanley Reitsma, who as a teenager planted hundreds of trees on his family farm in Ontario and later studied geology and earth sciences. Reitsma went to work in the Alberta oil sands, drilling deep holes in the ground. “But I was always an environmentalist,” he says. In 2004, he headed back east and started GeoSource Energy.

Today it’s one of the most successful geothermal drillers in North America, bringing geothermal heating and cooling to condos, affordable multi-family homes, and university and government facilities on both sides of the border. The projects are big and the company will soon scale larger, too. Always a little ahead of the curve, Reitsma is now working with some international construction conglomerates interested in creating models that can respond to the current dramatic increase in green construction.

Passive and massive in Boston

Thanks to double pane Sotawall Thermo-3 windows, a howling wind outside was barely audible on the 32nd floor of Boston’s Winthrop Center in January while Brad Mahoney talked about architectural details and energy loss: “This is not just a blip. This is the way that projects will be built.”

Millennium Partners, the developer behind the Winthrop Center, claims that at 53 storeys, the massive 1.8-million-square-foot residential, office and retail complex is “the world’s largest Passive House office building.” More than half of it, the 812,000-square-foot office section, is LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Platinum, WELL Gold, and Passive House certified by PHI. The entire building will emit about 150% less carbon than a typical Class A (modern high-rise) structure and 60% less than LEED Platinum. (LEED was one of the earliest building energy certifications. Passive House is more rigorous, and results-focused. WELL emphasizes health and wellness by managing air quality, water, light and fitness enhancement.)

Before 2016, Millennium was not focused on sustainability. But Mahoney had always been environmentally conscious, having acquired his LEED AP (for “accredited professional”) designation about 20 years ago. He persuaded Millennium’s president that green buildings were the way forward. The two began building a digital library on all things related to low-carbon construction. They partnered with a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and visited the Passivhaus Institut in Darmstadt, Germany. They hired New York’s Handel Architects and Steven Winter Associates for the Winthrop Center request for proposal. They won the contract.

Last year, the project won a 2022 Passive House Trailblazer award from the U.S. Passive House Network, and tenants start moving into the tower in early 2023. “This is the space to be in, because there is now so much momentum,” says Mahoney. “We’re never going back to the old way.”

Harlem: ‘Sendero verde’ means ‘green path’

In October 2019, at a low-key technical event at the Scarborough campus of the University of Toronto, the keynote presentation was given by building engineer Lois Arena from Steven Winter Associates and architect Deborah Moelis from Handel Architects. The presentation’s content reverberated across the North American construction world.

The duo was instantly famous, revealing that they had designed the 709-unit Sendero Verde project in New York City within the confines of an affordable housing budget. They reported that their companies had also collaborated on The House, a 26-storey modular Passive House–certified student residence for Cornell University’s tech school on NYC’s Roosevelt Island, and were working on the 53-storey Winthrop Center in Boston. Oh, and by the way, the Passive House–certified residence for U of T Scarborough coming in 2023 is theirs too.

Sendero Verde is perhaps the big daddy of them all. The two-building housing complex in Harlem has double pane windows, a well-sealed envelope at least five times tighter and better insulated than typical buildings, and is heated and cooled by a commercial-scale heat pump system.

Arena and Moelis’s presentation was a shock for many, because it helped answer some of the questions that a significant portion of the construction industry and the rest of the world is only now beginning to ask: Are green buildings a theory, a bunch of pilot projects, or a real thing? Can they be built quickly? Can we afford to build them?

“We’ve got the data now, and all our projects are already at least 50% lower emissions,” says Dylan Martello, Passive House consultant on Sendero Verde. “With New York, Massachusetts and many other governments making changes, I’m optimistic that things are going in the right direction, but I’m not sure if it’s fast enough. I worry because I want to have kids one day.”

Today at building conferences around the globe, the question being asked by Martello and a growing legion of allies is no longer “Can we afford to build green buildings?” It’s “With our planet in crisis, can we afford not to?”

BF Nagy is the author of The Clean Energy Age and numerous magazine features. He also produces videos on climate solutions.

The post How today’s green building heroes are scaling up to save our planet appeared first on Corporate Knights.

When U.S. President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022, he set in motion a seeming avalanche of public and private investment in climate solutions, including those focused on the building sector, which accounts for about 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The bill will allocate US$391 billion toward climate solutions, including new tax credits for residential energy retrofits, energy efficiency rebates and a range of related measures, such as new energy efficiency standards for air conditioners and other HVAC equipment. There’s also funding for retrofits, updated building energy codes, and deductions for commercial buildings that reduce their energy consumption.  

The Inflation Reduction Act’s impact extends across the 49th parallel, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government has sought to make sure that the unprecedented public funding in the U.S. doesn’t suck green investment out of Canada, including investment that will decarbonize buildings.  

Herewith, a sampling of what 2023 may have to offer in the world of green buildings. 

Green ‘proptech’

Private equity has increasingly sought out “proptech” ventures, and especially green proptech – technologies designed to improve the environmental performance of buildings. A/O PropTech, a venture capital firm specializing in this space, reported recently that this sector has clocked an 84% annual growth rate over the past five years, with US$4.5 billion allocated globally, much of it landing in European cities. A/O PropTech itself has a stake in 22 firms, including property-management software platforms, electrical-appliance control systems and various planning analytics tools.  

According to a new market analysis entitled The Future of Building in a Low Carbon World, the company says it sees investment opportunities in the coming years in a range of construction-related verticals, such as green procurement software, architectural software that enables low-carbon design approaches, and emerging building materials. In particular, A/O predicts further innovation in the design of modular housing, citing the US$1.6 billion invested in the prefab (aka modular construction) industry in 2022, which was two-and-a-half-times more than the previous year.  

The modular construction sector – which relies on factory-built components and assembly to drive up productivity and quality control – has generated a lot of attention recently as pressure to accelerate the development of affordable housing builds due to skyrocketing real estate prices and rents in many cities. Modular construction is also associated with cleaner construction as it can be done faster, and with reduced waste and emissions.  

Carbon disclosure makes for green buildings

The push in recent years to build more energy efficient buildings can inadvertently boost the use  of carbon-intensive construction materials, like certain types of insulation. Similarly, urban intensification, which reduces transportation-related carbon, also tends to drive up the use of carbon-intensive materials, like concrete, steel and glass.  

Efforts to push developers to assess and disclose the embodied carbon in their projects, and then report on the energy performance of their buildings, have gained some traction in recent years, for example with New York City’s Local Law 97, which mandates asset managers to begin filing assessments of energy consumption by 2025. The Toronto Green Standard, updated in May 2022, now requires developers to measure and disclose embodied carbon if they want to qualify for certain rebates for green building projects. And Canada’s federal government in late 2022 established an embodied carbon standard for its own construction projects. 

Interestingly, large asset managers are the ones pushing for more disclosure and better reporting. In an October 2022 report entitled Full Disclosure, the Canada Green Building Council, representing firms with $110 billion in assets, called on governments to establish building-energy disclosure guidelines and mandate data sharing as a prerequisite for approvals. “Data transparency and benchmarking can help guide energy and emissions reductions, and more broadly, can aid in the development of effective policies and programs,” the report said. All the members have vowed to make their own data – good, bad or ugly – public.  

Circular construction

Data and disclosure aren’t the sole drivers. As cities move to intensify, there’s growing interest in recycling construction debris from older buildings as a means of reducing construction-related emissions. But as The New York Times reported in a widely read October 2022 feature, circular-economy-minded Dutch architects and builders increasingly look to “urban mining” as a means of sourcing cast-off materials – like discarded clothing refashioned into insulation – for new projects.  

Amsterdam has gone one step further, by monitoring its circular economy performance and making the results public. The city’s first pass was self-critical. “Despite many initiatives, the bulk of Amsterdam’s economy is still based on intensive primary material consumption.” As the old saying goes, you can’t manage what you don’t measure.  

Renewables paired with storage

The growth of solar is on a steep upward trajectory, driven by falling prices, expanding incentives and, in some jurisdictions, including Tokyo and parts of the EU, mandates on new construction. But with the proliferation of electric vehicles and thus demand for renewable electricity, combining solar panels with utility-scale storage is poised to see accelerated growth in the next several years. Indeed, the expanded role of solar and storage will enable more homes and commercial buildings to transition to electric heat.  

The massive scaling up of renewables is a necessary step in the energy transition but not sufficient, given issues with intermittent supply. Local grids, feeling the pinch from increased electricity demand, need new deployments of both local renewables and storage systems that can store and then provide off-peak power. “By 2025, over 29% of all new behind-the-meter solar systems will be paired with storage, compared to under 11% in 2021,” according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. “The utility-scale market is also recognizing the benefits of pairing solar with storage, with over 45 [gigawatts] of commissioned or announced projects paired with storage, representing over 50 [gigawatt hours] of storage capacity.” 

Storage initiatives come in many flavours – battery farms, pumped hydro (surplus power used to pump water into reservoirs), or the production of green hydrogen for fuel cells with industrial–scale electrolyzers. In its 2022 budget, Canada’s federal government introduced a 30% tax credit for companies developing battery storage and clean hydrogen solutions. The Biden administration in 2021 pumped US$9.5 billion into clean hydrogen development, with more expected under the Inflation Reduction Act. However, clean hydrogen for home energy is not yet a slam dunk. A much-hyped “world-first” project in Scotland, to use green hydrogen to replace natural gas, has succumbed to delays and technical problems.  

Investor interest in offshore wind will also drive investment in storage and green hydrogen production. According to a 2022 year-end review by the U.S. Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, the amount of offshore capacity in the development pipeline grew 13%, with more than 40,000 megawatts planned or under construction. The demand will be stoked by tax credits and grants enabled by the Inflation Reduction Act. The European Union and the United Kingdom have 100 gigawatts of offshore planned by 2030 – enough to power 75 million homes. Despite its extensive shoreline, Canada lags behind the U.S., with 5 GW of offshore wind to be built off the coast of Nova Scotia by 2030.  

The surge of investment that will be unleashed this year by the Inflation Reduction Act comes at a fortuitous moment, as it dovetails with critical refinements in renewable energy systems, green building technology and consumer/developer attitudes about why decarbonizing the built environment is a critical piece of the fight to reverse the climate crisis. Perhaps 2023 will be the year when all the pieces begin to fit together.  

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This wasn’t the first time that energy efficiency experts had challenged the EPC rating system. Earlier in 2021, the national government had concluded that an EPC grade didn’t predict how larger buildings actually performed in terms of energy consumption and carbon emissions.

The United Kingdom’s EPC labelling system is hardly unique. Since the early 1990s, hundreds of thousands of developers have opted to build their projects according to elaborate checklists and performance thresholds prescribed by green building organizations. Some, however, have not aged well. Just 12 years ago, a New York developer erected a US$1.8-billion office building, One Bryant Park, praised for its sustainability features and its LEED Platinum rating. Today, the owner faces steep fines because the building’s carbon emissions exceed the cap established by a 2019 New York City bylaw known as Local Law 97.

These clashes reveal two important shifts in the narrative about the carbon footprint of buildings: one is that some green labels don’t really deliver the goods; the second is that local building and energy codes, which traditionally established minimal standards, are playing a much more important role in driving carbon reduction in buildings, which account for about 40% of all greenhouse gases.

Since the early 1990s, the world of voluntary certification has functioned like a marketplace of aspiration. A range of organizations offer seals of approval for a fee. Developers have to jump through hoops that run the gamut from technical air tightness measures and storm water management to fuzzier categories, such as wellness and “ecosystem services.”

The oldest is BREEAM, which originated in the United Kingdom. It commands the largest market share in Europe (560,000 buildings are BREEAM certified) and is seen as the common ancestor for many later certification schemes, including LEED, which has been administered since 1993 by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). As of 2019, the USGBC had issued 100,000 LEED building certifications for commercial projects. Passive House, prevalent in northern Europe, has a narrower mandate focusing on energy performance.

The number of building certification standards has proliferated. A 2017 study published in Building and Environment estimated there are now about 600 green rating systems globally. Developers seek out such certifications not just because they yield greener buildings, but also because those buildings are more marketable, and profitable. In North America, academics and environmentalists have criticized LEED’s approach because developers could game it out, running up their score by adding cosmetic features (e.g., bike parking) that don’t really improve a building’s carbon footprint.

A 2018 study published in the Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology offered a bracing conclusion: “A decade of research suggests that LEED-certified buildings, on average, achieve little or no primary energy savings relative to other similar buildings,” the authors  wrote. “Evidence suggests that any reduction in site energy is typically achieved through increased electric use and corresponding off-site energy loss.”

But in the past few years, some governments have stepped into this breach by cranking up their sleepy old building codes as a means of driving decarbonization.

“A decade of research suggests that LEED-certified buildings, on average, achieve little or no primary energy savings relative to other similar buildings.”

–Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology

The City of Toronto and the province of British Columbia, for example, have both adopted what are known as “step codes” – tiered building regulations that set out increasingly stringent energy/carbon performance standards. For private builders, the first-tier requirements are mandatory, and the system works like an escalator: at regular intervals, the second (voluntary) tier becomes the basic mandatory tier, and so on. The fourth and latest version of the Toronto Green Standard went into effect in May.

Under New York’s Local Law 97, property owners whose buildings have more than 25,000 square feet of floor space are required to meet energy efficiency targets and reduce emissions by 20% by 2024 or face fines; even more stringent caps come into effect by 2030.

San Francisco in 2020 banned the use of natural gas in all new buildings, joining New York City and a growing number of municipalities that have taken the same step. California this year amended its own building energy code to require all new homes to be fitted out with solar panels, phase out refrigerants, and establish new standards for heat pumps and electricity storage systems to ease pressure on the grid.

For years, environmentalists have argued that tougher building codes could reduce emissions, and this future seems to have finally arrived, at least in some places. But it raises an interesting question about all those certifications: in a world of tougher codes, will these ecolabels still be necessary?

Thomas Moore, a senior consultant with Steven Winter Associates, a New York–based green building services firm, says the choice of certification is highly dependent on the type of project. For companies or institutions that plan to own a structure for a long time, he says, the best choice is Passive House, which emphasizes airtight building envelopes, high-performance windows and extensive insulation, all of which is meant to minimize heat loss and thus reduce energy consumption by as much as 90%.

“People in New York City with projects that achieved high LEED ratings are now being told that there’s a new law on carbon emissions that wasn’t accounted for 10 or 20 years ago and [they] will get a fine.”

–Yetsuh Frank, managing director of Building Energy Exchange

Passive House certification, moreover, has to be earned through verification of the completed project’s actual energy performance, not via checklists of features that generate points, as is the case with LEED (i.e., a LEED Platinum building must score over 80, whereas LEED Certified is 40 to 49). “If you’re a long-term investor and will hold on to a building for 50 years,” Moore says, “then Passive House aligns very well.” Some point to the fact that one way to achieve Passive House certification is to use a lot of petrochemical-based insulation, which drives up embodied carbon. But life-cycle analysis will be mandatory by the end of the decade.

Toronto now accepts Passive House–grade energy modelling results as a means of demonstrating compliance with the Toronto Green Standard. By 2030, they’ll no longer be optional. New York, by contrast, took a more hard-edged approach with Local Law 97, which has firm 2025 deadlines and real fines. By 2024, New York will also have an all-electric building regulation.

These new building codes represent a sea-change, says architect Yetsuh Frank, managing director of Building Energy Exchange, a non-profit that seeks to educate building owners on decarbonization. “People in New York City with projects that achieved high LEED ratings are now being told that there’s a new law on carbon emissions that wasn’t accounted for 10 or 20 years ago and [they] will get a fine.” He points out that by emphasizing the stick as much as the carrot, New York legislators have forced property managers and their bankers to pay more attention to the risk exposure associated with failing to update older buildings.

Moore is also seeing more projects where the developer is layering on certifications; that is, using not just LEED or Passive House, but others that measure related aspects of a building’s performance, like healthy indoor environments. “That’s what buyers care about,” he says, pointing out that certification systems like Well and Passive House are highly complementary.

All of this activity offers more proof that we simply have to find ways to make buildings that generate fewer emissions and don’t make their inhabitants sick; neither are nice-to-haves. Indeed, it may be that the voluntary building-certification systems that evolved over the past three decades will eventually become obsolete. The sooner we get to that day, the better.

Toronto journalist John Lorinc writes about cities, sustainability and business.

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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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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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