Zero Emission Buildings

The ECA Zero Emission Buildings (ZEB)  WG’s objective is to mobilize Etobicoke to tackle the Climate Crisis via reduction of the GHG emissions from the buildings in Etobicoke to zero as quickly as we can.. The key mechanisms we will use to accomplish this are as follows:

  1. Residential Building Retrofit Strategy
  2. Commercial Building Retrofit Strategy
  3. District Heating Strategy
  4. Heat Pump Strategy
  5. New Building Strategy

Immediate Objectives

  1. Alignment with Government Strategies
    1. All three levels of government
      1. City of Toronto (ie. TransformTO, Five Year Plan Review, Toronto Green Standard, etc.)
      2. Province of Ontario
      3. Government of Canada
    2. Identify and advocate for improvement and alignment  with all 3 levels of government
    3. Identify and advocate for cooperation between all three levels of government
  2. Zero Carbon for Major New Building Projects. Identify a few major building projects in Etobicoke and advocate that those new buildings should be built to Zero Carbon standards now, and where possible, act a test beds for retrofit and newbuild standards going forward.
    1. Christie Lands
    2. Six Points
  3. Gas Cooktop & Oven Elimination.

This is something that we need to do – compile the research and help people understand how easy and cost effective this is. The one caveat – if you are looking at changing the electric service – then you need to look at the whole picture – including heating and cooling, as well as EV charging

  1. Identify Key Heating and Cooling Strategies to get to Zero CO2. Heating is the major cause of CO2 emissions from homes that must be abated.
    1. District Heating. Work with local experts, and if possible – the City of Toronto, the Province of Ontario, and the Government of Canada – to develop a well researched report on the role of district heating for Etobicoke.
    2. Retrofit Strategy. Shallow versus Deep Retrofit of House Envelope
    3. Cold Climate Air Source Heat Pumps (CCASHP). Including considerations of backup required for the coldest days in Etobicoke. The objective would be to do a cost comparison between a DH approach – and other approaches which can be identified. At this point – that means CCASHP
    4. One Stop Shopping. To improve the scalability and cost effectiveness for the purchaser, need to identify what measure the government and industry need to take to support an approach where the consumer can contract a trusted SME to get a packaged approach to a solution instead of each consumer needing to RYO.
    5. Scalability. Work with industry and government to identify the steps that must be taken to make the recommended processes scalable.

Current and Recent Efforts

Upcoming Actions

Our primary next action is to figure out and execute an advocacy strategy in support of that report.

  1. Instead of petitions, we want to focus on letters being sent to politicians from constituents in their riding. We think that this is likely to have a lot more impact with the politicians. We think that as well as the letters, we need to offer the politicians access to some data tools that make it easy for them to track how many letters on this topic they have received.
  2. We believe that the letters should be offering to partner with them to find solutions. That is, they should remain positive, even if we have concerns that the particular politician or their party may not be sincere about taking action on the climate – we think that by communicating in a positive way, we can drive home the message that to keep getting elected, they need to have a real plan.
  3. The same goes for the letters we want to send to academia, industry, and the financial industry.

So – a key next step is to select software that will help us manage a letter writing campaign. The Action Network free version looks like it might be a good choice. Does anyone know of any other options?

Blog Entries

Our Zero Emission Building blog: