My first recommendation was for multi-year predictable retrofit funding either for supports or actual capital costs. This is needed. Bryan mentioned this. Industry, manufacturers and the entire building ecosystem need to see signalling that retrofits are going to be supported. We need retrofits to achieve our climate goals. Buildings represent 20% or more, depending on where you are, of greenhouse gas emissions. The business case is not fully there for owners. Public investment is warranted for health, safety, resilience and all the other non-energy benefits.
We want building data to be treated like public infrastructure. What I mean by that is this: Every single organization like mine begins every effort of supporting retrofits by, essentially, gathering a bunch of data, but we're gathering the same data over and over again. The federal government has a lot of this data in various places. It's just a lot of work to get it. Establishing some kind of pragmatic way of sharing that data.... It can certainly be anonymized, but it's very important to organizations and industry.
I recommend clear conditions on building programs. As an example, I wrote a letter to Ms. Miedema about this earlier this spring. We have programs wherein the federal government is investing considerable money in new housing infrastructure, vaguely saying that these houses will be energy efficient. I would like it to have a very clear target on any programs that it's launching for new...or retrofitting. This sends the right signal to industry: We care about energy efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions. In the case of new buildings, it means not building buildings today that are going to need a retrofit in 30 years, which is absolutely happening right now.
Lastly, I recommend that we count all retrofit benefits when we're measuring the value of a program. We need more understanding of the financial value of non-energy benefits. There are considerable health savings among populations that are not living in mouldy buildings, for example. That's an issue which is very dominant here in Atlantic Canada, where chronic lung conditions are high in number. We have really moist and mouldy buildings. I recommend the valuation of resilience benefits and the benefits to public security in terms of keeping people off the streets if they have to leave their homes in a bad storm. The cheapest form of improving our grid capacity is still deep retrofitting. It's a very unexciting issue or opportunity.
I think the biggest non-energy benefit.... I mean, it's an energy benefit, but not for the homeowner. If we conserve energy by doing deep retrofits, we can have a very significant impact on reducing grid strain and improving our electrical capacity. All these things need to be quantified and measured when we're considering the value of a program.