Evidence of meeting #48 for Environment and Sustainable Development in the 45th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was building.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Senior Director of Policy Strategy, Efficiency Canada
You can measure in kilowatts too, but a kilowatt hour is what it—
Conservative
Conservative
David Bexte Conservative Bow River, AB
It still leaves the implementation problem. You know, the actual work being done is often not effective.
Conservative
David Bexte Conservative Bow River, AB
It is not exclusively effective. Sometimes very good work is done, but the right technical solution isn't necessarily brought to the right problem.
I'll highlight another example. You gave the example, Mr. Dicaire, of the electrification of residential houses in Ottawa, which is fantastic when there is access to nuclear power, but what about Alberta, where the available base energy unit is natural gas? For a chemical engineer, the loss on transformation of power from burning it to electricity, when we're electrifying something and we could just keep burning natural gas to make the system more efficient, so the heat pump doesn't work anyway....
Does the heat pump work in that system? Are we incentivizing the right tools in every part of the country?
Senior Manager, Conservation and Sustainability, Ottawa Community Housing
The first thing I'd say is that your energy retrofit is giving you more capacity across the board. Whether you want to use less natural gas, or whether you want to use less electricity, the retrofits that I described can save you 60% of your energy consumption, regardless of what you are deciding to spend for that one.
Senior Manager, Conservation and Sustainability, Ottawa Community Housing
Yes.
To your comment about the effectiveness, I know that you've heard testimony that was a kind of scorecard to previous deployments. That ends up not necessarily being a reflection of the retrofit or of whether it's a retrofit of that program or policy that is trying to get those things out there. In terms of making sure that the proper quality control measures are in place, with our project, we kept that project very specific and close to the chest so that we could see and prove that we could get the results we had intended.
Senior Director of Policy Strategy, Efficiency Canada
I was trying to get at this in my opening remarks, but let's talk about some of the policy reasons for why performance might not be what was predicted. Especially on the homeowner side, there's very little in the business models of, say, contractors, that gives them an incentive to do very high performance. If you are installing a heat pump, for it to be sized properly, you should really do a heating load calculation first. After you install the heat pump, it should be commissioned, and ideally it should be monitored after the fact, but contractors don't make a lot of money doing that kind of work.
Senior Director of Policy Strategy, Efficiency Canada
They make money by basically installing the system and going away. There's nothing in federal policy, if we look at the former grant program, that tried to provide some sort of accountability for that performance, that tried to say that, if you do these things, such as commission the system, monitor performance and actually hold yourself accountable for performance, you'd get more incentives from the federal government.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Shannon Miedema
I'm sorry, but your time is up.
We'll now go to Mr. Fanjoy for six minutes.
Liberal
Bruce Fanjoy Liberal Carleton, ON
Thank you, Chair.
Thank you, witnesses. It is good to see you again.
Mr. Haley, last Friday, in the Senate, Senator Mary Coyle introduced Bill S-251, an act to establish a national strategy to end energy poverty. That gets to the heart of what we're talking about here at the ENVI committee. One of the specific objectives of this study is to understand how we make home energy retrofits accessible to low-income Canadians, who are disproportionately affected by higher energy costs.
What does an effective retrofit program look like for a low-income household? What barriers do we need to remove beyond simply providing financing?
Senior Director of Policy Strategy, Efficiency Canada
Yes, Mary Coyle has introduced a bill to develop a national strategy on energy poverty. A lot of other countries have done this. Essentially, it's very simple. Let's define the problem, measure the problem, have experts look at the problem and then hold ourselves accountable for solving that problem. That's what her bill would do.
I think that's really key, because right now we do have a program, the Canada greener homes affordability program, which is targeted for low-income homeowners. It's a program, but it doesn't really have a strategy, or a super clear goal, wrapped around it. I think having that national goal around eliminating energy poverty would help direct that program towards the performance we need.
Yes, it doesn't make sense to put a low-income household into debt. There can be a role for some financing for lower- and middle-income households, but in general, you want their bills to be reduced right now to get them out of energy poverty. That's why that program is no cost and direct install. It's also coupled with, and actually implemented by, utilities, which already have those types of programs in market that are cost shared by those utilities and other administrators.
Liberal
Bruce Fanjoy Liberal Carleton, ON
Efficiency Canada has said that Canada needs to increase annual building retrofits from about 1% to over 2.5% by 2030. What's preventing Canada from reaching that target today?
Senior Director of Policy Strategy, Efficiency Canada
That's a big question.
One thing is that there is no mission-oriented policy to say how we're going to do this over the next number of decades. We're talking about essentially retrofitting the entire building stock. We have had programs, but they seem to be in a boom-and-bust dynamic. They come and they go away. You can't really operate a contract or business around that. It's also difficult for customers to understand who to trust in that situation. That's one of the reasons I'm suggesting a financing platform approach, which would be able to recycle capital. It could help us get away from that boom and bust.
The other thing is that we need to retrofit differently. Right now, we retrofit in quite an artisanal or bespoke way—every single building, one at a time. If we're talking about retrofitting the entire building stock, we could think about it as more of an industrial process. This is what Dan has pioneered by using panelized construction to industrialize the retrofit process more.
Liberal
Bruce Fanjoy Liberal Carleton, ON
Thank you.
Mr. Dicaire, what are the unique challenges that you and Ottawa Community Housing have discovered while retrofitting older buildings?
Senior Manager, Conservation and Sustainability, Ottawa Community Housing
In terms of the experience OCH has, the first thing is that we have a very low vacancy rate. The reason we did the retrofit the way we did—a panelized, exterior energy retrofit—is that we can't displace our tenants to do these upgrades. We need to do them with the tenants in place, so we came up with a strategy that allows us to do them while the tenants are in place.
The second thing is the workforce. We started this project back in 2018. I will say that it officially started in May 2020, so we did this through the pandemic. Back then, we used our own forces because there wasn't a whole lot of market development, in all honesty. Nowadays, we're starting to see a lot more of those contractors and entrepreneurs who are able to offer a panelized solution, whereas, back then, we didn't really have an option. There was so much risk priced into the quotes we were getting that we decided to do it with our own forces. We have seen that expansion as a result of the interest. There are many other contractors who can pick up and bid on this work.
The third thing is financing. It is always a question, as Brendan described. Providing stable, predictable, long-term funding is the best way to make sure that you incentivize and create the market.
Liberal
Bruce Fanjoy Liberal Carleton, ON
I have one further question.
Sometimes we talk about how cold our ridings are across the country. Ottawa can be a very cold city in the winter. We certainly had a cold winter last year.
What was your experience in terms of the comfort of Ottawa Community Housing residents after the retrofits?
Senior Manager, Conservation and Sustainability, Ottawa Community Housing
I will tell you that, since the retrofit, the tenants have had a great experience in terms of the level of comfort in their units on both the heating and the cooling sides. Those units did not have cooling previously. I can tell you that the biggest smiles I got from those tenants was on that first long May 24 weekend, when it got really hot. All of a sudden, they had air conditioning, and all sins were forgiven with respect to the construction process.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Shannon Miedema
Thank you, Mr. Fanjoy.
We are going to turn back to Mr. Lockhart.
I think everything has been resolved, and you now have five minutes to give your remarks. Thank you for hanging in there with us.