Gas-guzzling automobiles have taken much of the public blame for greenhouse gas emissions, but a big source of Oakville’s emissions lies closer to home.
Our houses – many of them with leaky windows, poor insulation and inefficient furnaces and air conditioners – are responsible for more than a quarter of the town’s emissions.
Add in the impact of commercial and institutional structures, and the built environment is responsible for about 40 percent of the town’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to Oakville's Community Energy Strategy report.
The report notes that room for improvement is significant as, on average, homes and buildings in Oakville are about half as efficient as global benchmarks.
Programs to entice owners to improve the energy efficiency of their buildings have existed for years, with the latest introduced by the federal government a few months back.
But retrofit programs are expensive, and their effectiveness is often limited.
Building the new stuff better is clearly critical if the town is to meet its goal of a 50 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2041.
New development brings opportunities
When it comes to town-owned facilities, environmental sustainability is a key component of design. New buildings are typically designed to achieve silver certification under the third-party LEED rating standard that evaluates sustainability measures.
But with the town’s buildings and vehicles amounting to only 1.35 percent of the community’s energy use, improvements need to be made to the efficiency standards of other new construction.
Recent meetings of the town’s planning and development council have seen councillors quizzing developers on their willingness to integrate energy-efficiency features into building plans.
“When you look at north Oakville as it expands, it’s the biggest opportunity we have, where they're building from scratch,” explains councillor Peter Longo.
But what’s the quickest way to get developers to build greener? Get buyers to care about green features.
“I think the pendulum is shifting, but a lot of it is still really driven by community demand,” Longo adds.
He says there’s work to be done to help consumers see the benefit of making small upfront investments in improved insulation and efficient windows in exchange for future energy savings and reduced emissions.
Big buildings offer big possibilities.
Love it, hate it or live in it, new development is rapidly changing the face of Oakville. That change will only accelerate as a new generation of very tall buildings appears on the landscape in North Oakville, around the GO stations and in Palermo and Bronte Village.
Under construction at the corner of Dundas and Trafalgar, one of those high-rise developments is being built by Minto Communities GTA.
Known as North Oak, the condominium buildings will feature a geoexchange energy system that uses the earth’s stable underground temperatures to provide energy-efficient year-round heating and cooling.
A long-established technology, geoexchange systems can reduce carbon emissions by as much as 70 percent, says Carl Pawlowski, project manager of sustainability with Minto.
In place of traditional boilers, the building will feature a closed-loop system that pumps liquid underground to heat or cool it.
“You’re pulling heat out of the earth in the winter to heat the building and then placing the heat back in the summer to cool the building,” explains Pawlowski.
The system reduces the building’s energy use and greenhouse gas emissions but will also offer residents a comfortable living environment and protection against rising energy bills.
While the technology isn’t new, a new way of financing it is making it feasible for use in buildings like North Oak, explains Roya Khaleeli, Minto’s director of sustainability and innovation.
A third-party provider manages, maintains and operates the geo-exchange equipment under a 30-year lease arrangement with the condominium.
For homeowners, year-one costs are designed to be roughly the same as a conventional condo. As carbon taxes drive up utility costs, the system will become less costly to operate than traditional heating and cooling.
The system is also designed to allow future towers to be connected, to create a community energy system.
Convincing the consumers
Beyond the cost savings, Pawlowski emphasizes that the system will keep residents more comfortable by eliminating seasonal switchovers between heating and air conditioning.
Builders need to balance cost, convenience, and consumer choice with sustainability features in a competitive sales environment.
While buyers are becoming more knowledgeable about energy efficiency and sustainability features, they aren’t driving change, admits Khaleeli
“I don't think we can say flat out that the market is telling us they want more energy-efficient low carbon buildings, and so that's why we're building it,” she says.
“We are conscious of where policy is going, so whether you're in the city of Toronto or you're in Oakville, or you're in Vancouver or Ottawa, all the cities right now are pointing to the need for higher-performing buildings,” she adds.
“And because we understand where the performance of buildings needs to go, we've just taken it on that with each new building we build; we're going to continue to try and move and evolve the design of our buildings forward in a way that aligns with what we think the market demand is in that community.”
Along with the geo-exchange system, the North Oak buildings will integrate energy-efficient lighting and mechanical features, as well as energy recovery ventilators to target Energy Star multifamily high-rise certification, said Pawlowski.
What does the future look like?
The push to build better is gaining momentum.
The transition to net-zero emission buildings, which generate as much energy as they use, is the goal of a range of standards and policies from municipal, provincial, to federal governments.
The city of Toronto has adopted an aggressive Green Building Standard that demands improved performance standards of new construction.
And earlier this spring, the federal government provided funding to develop a sustainable infrastructure training and certification program at McMaster University. Developed in partnership with the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering, the program will train a pool of construction engineers and technologists with skills in designing, constructing, operating and maintaining sustainable infrastructure.
While geoexchange energy systems will be considered for future projects, Khaleeli said Minto is also looking to other emerging technologies to move buildings toward a net-zero future.
- Building-integrated photovoltaics – Integrating solar panels into building features such as roofs, windows and facades maximize the area that can be used to generate energy.
- Sensors – Developing sensor technology makes buildings smarter and gives building managers better insight into how utilities are used and where adjustments can be made.
- Embodied carbon – About a quarter of the emissions related to buildings aren’t due to the energy used to operate them but because of the energy used to construct and demolish them. Using building materials that generate fewer emissions to extract, manufacture, transport and demolish will reduce embodied carbon in our buildings. “This is going to open up some innovation and will encourage us to look differently at how we design and what we design and the materials we design with,” says Khaleeli.
- Modular and offsite construction – Building home components off-site reduces waste materials and allows for higher precision in bringing together components.
- Windows – With windows typically making up such a significant percentage of modern high-rise building design, their impact on energy use is considerable. “There’s opportunities for the window supply industry to really step up and play a greater role in terms of energy efficiency and comfort,” said Khaleeli.