Nearly one quarter of British Columbia’s greenhouse gas emissions come from the built environment, including buildings, deforestation, and waste.
That figure is higher in urban centres. According to one estimate, energy use in buildings in Vancouver accounts for 55 per cent of the city’s emissions.
That means any plan to help B.C. meet its target of a 33 per cent reduction in emissions below 2007 levels by 2020 and an 80 per cent reduction by 2050 must include the built environment.
When the provincial government released its new Climate Leadership Plan in August, it contained a number of strategies for making buildings more energy-efficient, including a goal to make new buildings net-zero-ready by 2032. It also promised to create incentives for energy-efficient buildings and to increase efficiency requirements for gas fireplaces and air source heat pumps.
But the plan received a mixed reaction from UBC’s Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability, which runs a research project on energy efficiency in the built environment with the University of Victoria’s Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions.
“One of the positive aspects of the plan is that it recognizes that the built environment represents both a significant contributor to the province’s overall emissions profile and a ‘real ongoing opportunity for change,’” the centre wrote in a response.
The centre acknowledged that the net-zero-ready target is “an important and necessary step.” Net-zero-ready buildings are so efficient that their energy use could be offset by renewable energy produced on-site – through solar panels, for instance.
But the response goes on to list a number of concerns about B.C.’s new plan, including that many of the proposed strategies are “too vague” or call for emissions reduction plans and tools that already exist.
It also points out that the plan says little about improving the efficiency of existing buildings, which it calls “the most ‘improvable’ of building sector emissions contributors.”
This isn’t the first time researchers have taken B.C. to task for a lack of action on energy-efficient buildings.
In 2015, a study from the energy efficiency research project compared B.C. unfavourably to Massachusetts and California, which are considered North American leaders in energy-efficient buildings.
The study found that B.C. has weaker policies and lacks an arms-length oversight body that the other jurisdictions have.
Another 2015 study found that B.C. lacks energy performance requirements for net-zero-ready buildings. “B.C. has committed to ‘lead the way to net-zero buildings’ but it has yet to define its target nor a plan of how to get there,” the paper reads.
And a third paper from 2015 looked at why on-bill financing programs have worked elsewhere in Canada and internationally, but not in B.C. On-bill financing provides loans to building owners to pay for energy-efficiency upgrades. The loans are then repaid through an extra charge on the owner’s utility bill, but because efficiency upgrades reduce energy consumption, the actual utility bills change very little while the loan is paid off, and they drop afterward.
The study estimates that an on-bill financing program could bring $60 million of additional economic activity to B.C. annually.
So while the Climate Leadership Plan shows some progress on energy efficiency, there is still a long way to go.
Maura Forrest, 24 November 2016