FEATURED PROJECTS

2019-2023

What we did

A municipality, an ENGO, and two housing agencies walk into a bar… One outreach campaign and 110 pages of RFPs later: 30 companies, ten experts, and four housing societies join forces over an eight month lab to craft replicable deep retrofit strategies for six apartment buildings.

During this same period, we lobbied government and engaged the media to share the multiple benefits of retrofits, how monumental a task it is to climate-proof our homes, the barriers to doing so, and the significant economic and social benefits that could result. My team and colleagues also articulated the need for dedicated retrofit agencies to develop this market.

Outcomes

• Renovation of the six buildings in the pilot started between 2023 and 2025. Carbon emissions are expected to be reduced by more than 80%, and total energy use by 57% to 81%.
• We secured an additional $1.7 M in incentives to pay for these retrofits.
• Stories in The Globe and Mail, The Vancouver Sun, The Hill Times (here, here and here), and various industry journals increased awareness of deep retrofits.
• The federal government allocated $200M to start thirteen retrofit accelerators across Canada with a model inspired by Reframed and similar pilots.

Where we went next

• Made visible the size of the task at hand: at what pace do we need to retrofit buildings to meet Canada’s climate targets? How much public investment is needed to do so? (see project page for Renovation Wave)

Key partners: BC Housing, City of Vancouver, Metro Vancouver Housing Association, BC Non-Profit Housing Association, Pembina Institute

More information: Reframed Website (archived), Reframed Initiative Spotlight and Municipalities Accelerating Deep Retrofits

2019-2022

What we did

We modelled how Canadian buildings could reach net-zero emissions by 2050 without straining the electrical grid through a combination of electrification and energy efficiency. We estimated the incremental costs of this transition and the resulting job creation in each Canadian province. We estimated the level of public subsidies needed to enable this transition, based on historical precedent from utility incentive programs and based on the portion of renovation costs that cannot be recuperated from energy savings.

We engaged local government regulators and construction industry leaders on the best regulatory tools to drive this transition, and condensed the results into recommendations for regulations and subsidies. We customized the model for provincial (e.g. BC’s climate plan) and local opportunities (e.g. Kamloops, Edmonton).

To amplify this message, we collaborated with industry leaders to document the growth of green buildings jobs; we produced interactive maps for BC and Alberta showing that these jobs were distributed across rural and urban areas. We communicated the broader benefits of retrofits, and their importance for vulnerable populations, including Indigenous communities, long term care facility residents, and low-income households.

We convened a coalition of corporate and civil society voices calling for regulation on emissions from buildings and public investments to enable their clean transition, and combined forces with other environmental non-government organisations to lobby the federal government through the Green Budget Coalition. The call for a national Renovation Wave was one of the five priority recommendations of the Coalition for the 2020-2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 budget cycles.

The post-pandemic economic stimulus offered an opportunity and a challenge: investing in retrofits could help the Canadian economy recover, but the reality that retrofits require months to years of planning raised the question: where could stimulus dollars be invested so that the funds could flow quickly? To answer this, we convened three roundtables of leaders in the building sector and provided recommendations on where to direct economic stimulus funding for retrofits for Canada and British Columbia. We also compiled an inventory of emerging skills required for deep retrofits and offered recommendations to facilitate upskilling during the pandemic.

Outcomes

• We condensed the conclusions of the Renovation Wave report and insights from meetings with ministers and senior bureaucrats into a set of Recommendations for the Canada Green Buildings Strategy.
• The Renovation Wave report, and the four years of advocacy surrounding it, helped move the needle: we saw the federal government come back to funding retrofits in homes and commercial buildings at a scale not seen in the last decade. *
• Our assessment of policies advanced by the federal government showed that more needed to be done. The Canada Green Buildings Strategy, finally released in 2024, repackaged the many policies advanced since the last election, but did not reflect the scale of effort needed. On the funding side, it was mostly a recap of investments made since the pandemic;* on the policy side, the section dedicated to federal government actions includes only 13 new actions, most of them focused on stimulating construction of housing.  Only four actions targeted existing buildings, and these were modest in ambition and scope. The heavy lifting, both in funding and regulations, was again punted further down the road.

*New investments since the previous election included: $2 billion to finance commercial retrofits though the Canadian Infrastructure Bank  in 2020; $2.6 billion over seven years for energy-efficient improvements to homes in 2021; $4.4 billion over five years for interest-free loans of up to $40,000  in 2021; $200M for Deep Retrofit Accelerators in 2022; and $800M for direct install of energy efficiency measures in low-income households in 2024.

Partners: Green Building Coalition, Energy Efficiency Canada

More information: Renovation Wave report, Green Budget Coalition recommendations for Budget 2024 ; Recommendations for the Canada Green Buildings Strategy

2016-2018

What we did

In our second Pathways to Net-Zero Buildings Forum, my team and I hand-picked 126 thought leaders from 90 organisations for two days of dialogue to clarify challenges and test policies to accelerate building energy retrofits in BC.

Forum participants included representatives from all levels of government, building industry and trades professionals, utilities, research institutions, and non-governmental organizations.

The forum itself was the culmination of several months of fact-finding and sense-making: we worked with a multidisciplinary steering committee to clarify obstacles, gather case studies, compile costs, and review potential policy solutions. We compiled findings in a primer to enable all forum participants to start from the same basis of fact and articulate key questions we would discuss.

Outcomes

• We synthesized forum discussions into 20 recommendations for the BC government, BC Hydro, and the federal government, and generated an estimate of economic benefits and job creation and retrofit targets for BC.
• IN 2021, BC released its CleanBC Roadmap to 2030, which included a target to reduce emissions from buildings by more than half by 2030, which was aligned with our recommendation of a 50% to 60% reduction.  Incentive programs were also launched by the provincial government and utilities (although not yet at the scale we recommended).
• On the regulatory side, the Province adopted the recommendation to ban the sale of heating equipment less than 100% efficient (i.e. only heat pumps remaining on market); however, to meet targets we suggested this should be enforced as early as 2025 (as did the Climate Leadership Team).

Where we went next

The forum prompted us to initiate two new projects:

• We established a retrofit accelerator in BC (see project page for Reframed Initiative)
• We modelled and communicated the scale of investments needed to achieve retrofits across Canada, quantifying the scale of public subsidies needed (see project page for Renovation Wave).

More Information

Video

Web Page

2015-2019

What we did

We worked with leading policy makers and early adopters of the Passive House standard to build trust among politicians and facilitate adoption of passive principles by regulators (Passive House is a high performance construction method that dramatically reduces energy waste).

We conducted interviews with North American passive house practitioners to map out barriers, provide a jurisdictional scan of supportive policies, and tally the number of passive house projects in development across North America. This showed that there were m

ore passive house units in development in 2016 alone than had been built in the ten preceding years combined. Practitioners highlighted how specific public policies accelerated adoption in certain regions and discussed how cost barriers and the perceived risks of increased insulation and air tightness sometimes deterred action.

To address these concerns, we reviewed available research on the risks of trapping moisture or air pollutants in high performance wall assemblies, discussed how passive standards addressed the risk of overheating, and compiled case studies to provide information on the incremental cost of passive design. We compiled findings into a key report with policy recommendations to boost passive design adoption.

We then hosted two workshops for policy-makers at the North American Passive House Network in NYC: one focused on removing policy barriers and one on accelerating market transformation. 

We further built public support by hosting building tours for the media, publishing articles celebrating a Passive House boom in Vancouver, mapping Passive House projects in development across BC, publishing a series of blogs (1, 2, 3), and highlighting lessons learned from Brussels (Belgium), which adopted a Passive House-inspired building code, looking at ways it could be applied in BC.

 Outcomes

• City of Vancouver adopted Passive House certification as a pathway for developers to obtain more density as part of the city’s green rezoning bylaw (news)
• The BC Energy Step Code aligned its metrics and objective with the Passive House standard, thus clarifying for the construction industry what the ‘end goal’ is, signalling to the industry where building codes are expected to require by 2030.
• We kept tracking the uptake of various building certifications in the following years, showing that the number of certified buildings in BC increased by about 13% year over year between 2015 and 2020 (See BC green Buildings Jobs map)

More Information

https://www.pembina.org/reports/naphn15-accelerating-market-transformation-.pdf

https://youtu.be/Y28bPBOmJ8E?si=_VtlCjoW_CwFubhB

2015-2016

What we did

In The first Net Zero Energy Forum we brought together 82 thought leaders to map a transition to net zero ready construction in British Columbia.  To prepare participants for the forum, we conducted a series of interviews and compiled findings in two primers: the first told a history of energy efficiency requirements in British Columbia, the second articulated the role of public policy in facilitating market transformation for higher performance standards. In particular, we discussed how the role of building codes was shifting from ‘lowest common denominator’ codes, which regulate practices after they were adopted by most builders, to ‘activist’ codes, which adopt regulations to drive a needed shift in construction practices. This shift came as code integrated new objectives, going beyond safety, durability, and accessibility, to address the need to decarbonize the building sector and protect structures and occupants from a changing climate.

Building on these two primers, the forum used plenary presentations, table discussions, breakout sessions, and plenary engagement to explore a policy proposal leading to net-zero construction by 2030 via two possible pathways: (1) a carefully planned one-time shift to a high performance standard based on passive house principles, or (2) a phased-in approach where a similar objective is reached over four code cycles.

At the time, BC was ‘modernising’ construction regulations to harmonize the variety of requirements local governments imposed on developers. The process of Code modernization was, at the time, driven by the “Ministry of Natural Gas and Minister Responsible for Housing;” climate action was not prioritized by this ministry, and the harmonization process was at risk of repealing municipal measures to reduce carbon emissions from buildings. To avoid this, we worked with local governments and lobbied for the Province to provide local governments with opt-in regulations to allow them to pursue climate action within a provincially harmonized framework.

Outcomes

• In a constructive discussion, forum participants were evenly split between the two pathways but agreed that it was absolutely feasible for BC to get to net-zero ready construction by 2030.
• The forum confirmed broad support for BC to adopt a ‘stretch code,’ a provincially crafted regulation that local governments could adopt to require higher levels of energy efficiency. This paved the way for the development of the BC Energy Step Code, and a few years later to the development of a federal stretch code.
• Forum discussions were used to refine the policy proposal into a recommended  pathway for code development and accompanying actions for utilities and the province to drive this rapid evolution.
• We leveraged the momentum to form a coalition of 160 corporations and organisations that signed a Call to Action on Climate and Energy in the Building Sector, broadening the support for many of the forum recommendations. These recommendations were also echoed by a Provincially appointed expert advisory, the Climate Leadership Team.
• The Province adopted a net zero energy ready target for 2032 in the next Climate Plan (2016), arguably the only progressive commitment from the government at the time.

Where we went next

• Built support for the Passive House standard to be used as a ‘north star’ for code development (see project page for ‘Passive House: from niche to norm‘).
• We continued to advise on the development of the BC Energy Step Code through the various committees formed to design the opt-in regulations.
• Once the Energy Step Code was launched, we joined forces with a few companies and non-profits to spearhead a campaign for municipal councils to adopt the higher steps.
• We lobbied for the BC Energy Step Code to shift from ‘fuel neutral’ metrics to include carbon-emissions metrics, which eventually led to the development of the BC Zero Carbon Code.

 More Information: website