e spent a bunch of time these last two months working on a submission to the Net Zero Advisory Body (NZAB2050) to recommend what we should do to Achieve Net Zero Buildings by 2050. That link will take you to the report – please have a look and share your thoughts on the ECA Google Group.
The elevator speech goes something like this:
- This is an important area to focus on – buildings are the 3rd largest source of GHG emissions in Canada. By getting going early, we lessen the GHG impact, and create a great economic opportunity for Canada and Canadians.
- We think the key technologies are shallow retrofit, Cold Climate Air Source Heat Pumps (CC-ASHPs), District Heating and Cooling (DHC), and Solar. The opinion is divided on CC-ASHPs or DHC being the most important.
- Finance is critical – we need some good thinking on how to make sure that property owners, developers, utilities (including new DHC utilities as well as existing electrical utilities), educational institutions, businesses, and governments have access to the required capital to quickly scale up to deal with this opportunity.
- Rules, regulations, guidelines, training – By making sure that we have consistency across the country, we make it much easier for skilled workers, and production of components to be easily used across the country, which makes scaling up as well as costs easier to manage.
- Scalability – Ensure that the solutions to each of the above components (technology, finance, regulation, training) can be scaled-up to meet the requirement. To retrofit all buildings in Canada by 2050, assuming we are in full motion by the beginning of 2023, we will need to do 2,000 buildings per day. This means that a good deal of thought must be put into ensuring the proposed solutions are massively scalable.
The version linked to above was sent to NZAB2050 on 2021-12-22 – the last day for submissions.
We plan to continue improving this document, and we will make sure that the website has an easy-to-find link to the most current document. We would love to hear your thoughts on where to go next with our effort to define and advocate for a path to net zero buildings by 2050. Our current thoughts are:
- Identify federal politicians, both in the government and in the opposition, who we want to ask to consider this report, and start sending them letters to share the report.
- Ditto for the provincial government
- Ditto for the City of Toronto
- As well as the politicians, identify the key civil servants at each of those government levels and share the report with them.
- Create a discussion forum for “Net Zero Buildings by 2050” and share this widely. Google Groups? Some other technology?
- Start sharing this report with other organizations working to address the climate crisis, and see if we can get them to help us share these ideas further.