Thank you, Madam Chair, for inviting me to speak today. I am the director of sustainability at Habit Studio, as well as senior adviser with the ReCover Initiative, which is Atlantic Canada's deep retrofit accelerator funded by NRCan.
I recently co-authored ReCover's “Atlantic Canada Deep Retrofit Roadmap”, which modelled technical and economic pathways for retrofits to prevalent housing types in the Atlantic provinces. My responses to the questions of this committee will be informed by that research and by direct experience in working with homeowners to make their homes more energy-efficient and resilient and less expensive to operate.
There's no question that home energy retrofits and adaptation measures represent a meaningful opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase energy affordability. Energy savings of 50% to 80% and substantial greenhouse gas savings are technically viable, as found in our research. Retrofits increase energy affordability, but they don't always deliver overall cost savings. That's something we think is important to note. ReCover studied this using an economic model called the total cost of building ownership, or TCBO for short, which accounts for construction costs, financing, maintenance and energy bills projected over 60 years.
A significant driver of the TCBO is maintenance capital, meaning the end-of-life replacement of large items like roofs or HVAC equipment. We found that this can cost more than the energy of the building over the life of the building. Our modelling looked at construction in a range of costs between $1,000 and $5,000 per square metre. There is a good business case at $1,000 per square metre, but in the market we are seeing in Atlantic Canada, the costs are more in the $3,000 per square metre range.
Those results were sobering, but the answer is not to not support retrofits. Retrofits make homes more resilient to extreme weather. A well-insulated, airtight home stays habitable for much longer during a power outage, allowing occupants to safely shelter in place. Resiliency investment is critical in Atlantic Canada. Hurricane Fiona left about 80% of Nova Scotia and 95% of P.E.I. without power, with some locations experiencing prolonged outages of several weeks.
Also, a key finding of our research is that retrofit costs are not borne equally across beneficiaries. We call this the retrofit value gap. What this means is that homeowners pay for the retrofits, but a significant portion of the benefits are non-energy benefits that are societal, reducing burdens on health care and public safety, improving grid capacity and more. Managing that gap is important if we're going to accelerate retrofits.
Retrofit support does exist, but low-income households, renters, rural households and equity-deserving homes are being unevenly reached and not reached on the scale needed. The Canada greener homes affordability program is expected to reach about 1,600 households in Nova Scotia, for example, but Efficiency Canada estimates that over 113,000 Nova Scotian households are experiencing energy poverty.
The delivery system is also a barrier. We are facing a labour shortfall of about 12,600 construction workers by 2034. Experience in high-performance construction techniques is growing but uneven, and owners in rural and remote areas are being underserved. Owners receive inconsistent recommendations in pricing. Some owners have access to supports that are emerging, such as navigator programs, and we see that they're moving forward with more confidence. Most need to rely on their savings or credit from traditional banks to fund retrofits. There are emerging PACE programs, but the uptake is very mixed.
The flip side of this is economic opportunity, with residential retrofits alone modelled to reach $8 billion a year through to 2050 if the region can support it. Addressing the workforce barrier is critical to us unlocking this.
I would echo each of Bryan's suggestions to recapitalize the existing federal programs.
I have four other high-level recommendations that can be expanded on: multi-year predictable retrofit funding; building data that's treated as public infrastructure; clear conditions on all building programs for new and retrofit, meaning not just vaguely suggesting energy efficiency but tiers; and counting all retrofit benefits when measuring the value of a program.
Thank you.