Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you to the members of the committee for the invitation to appear today. My name is Maya Papineau. I'm an associate professor of economics at Carleton University, where my research program focuses on environmental and energy economics.
Much of my research asks a simple question: How can Canada reduce greenhouse gas emissions while ensuring that the policies we adopt deliver tangible benefits to Canadian households? Motivated by my work, I would like to make three points about reducing emissions from Canada's buildings.
First, we need to both design and evaluate energy efficiency investment programs based on what they actually achieve for Canadian households rather than what simulation models predict they will achieve. In recently published research I co-authored, we examined Canada's ecoENERGY retrofit program using detailed household-level data. This was a predecessor to Canada's greener homes program. We found that participating households reduced natural gas consumption by 20% and that those savings persisted for at least a decade. Households undertaking comprehensive building envelope retrofits reduced consumption by about 35%.
Those are substantial savings, but we also found something that should be important for the design of future federal programs. The savings that households experienced were substantially smaller than the savings predicted for them before they undertook the retrofit. Across retrofits, realized energy savings were only about 60% of model predictions. For comprehensive envelope retrofits, realized savings were less than half of predictions. This matters, because households make investment decisions based partly on expected savings. If we overestimate those savings, we risk overstating both the private financial benefits of retrofits and their contribution to emissions reductions.
Prior research from the U.S. has found a similar performance gap. One study found that differences in contractor workmanship accounted for roughly 43% of the gap between projected versus realized energy savings. This points to an important lesson for Canada: We need evidence on which approaches to contractor training, certification and quality assurance contribute to improvements in energy performance. Otherwise, we risk spending more public and private money without achieving the expected energy savings or emissions reductions.
Second, affordability needs to be a central measure of whether building decarbonization is succeeding. As households electrify heating and transportation, electricity becomes the principal energy carrier for more essential energy services. This makes the distributional consequences of electricity prices increasingly important. Our research on the ecoENERGY program found significant variation in the benefits households attained. Some households spent significant amounts of their own money on retrofits that produced considerably smaller bill savings than predicted. At the same time, retrofit rebates were distributed relatively evenly across the housing wealth distribution rather than being concentrated among households likely to face the greatest affordability constraints.
Research from several countries has found that higher household electricity costs have been associated with lower public support for ambitious clean energy policies, while other studies have found that the political costs of climate policy depend, importantly, on policy design and whether households are protected from regressive impacts. As decarbonization proceeds, we need to measure what happens to the total amount that households spend to heat their homes and obtain other energy services, as well as how these costs are distributed.
This brings me to my third point. We need much better real-world evidence as building decarbonization and electrification scale up. Engineering-economic models are indispensable for planning, don't get me wrong, but they rely on assumptions about technology performance, adoption and consumer behaviour. Large-scale retrofit programs should therefore also be treated as opportunities to gain insights. Governments and utilities should, with appropriate privacy protections, facilitate research using high-quality data on actual energy consumption, technology adoption, electricity system investments, tariffs and household expenditures. This would allow us to identify which combinations of retrofits, rate design, workforce development and targeted assistance deliver the greatest social benefits.
I will close with three principles for federal building policy. First, measure real-world outcomes. Evaluate programs using realized energy savings, emissions reductions and household financial benefits. Second, invest in people. Workforce training and quality assurance evaluations should be treated as part of climate policy. Third, make affordability a key part of measuring success. Track total household energy expenditures and their distribution, not electricity prices in isolation.
Canada can substantially reduce emissions from its buildings, but durable progress will depend on whether these investments perform in the real world and whether their benefits are experienced in people's homes and household budgets.
Thank you. I look forward to your questions.