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Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador have targets to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, while Prince Edward Island is aiming for 2040
Retrofitting Atlantic Canada’s aging homes, apartment and office buildings could become an important tool for the region to reach net-zero emissions over the next two decades.
It also could cost more than $240 billion.
ReCover, an Atlantic Canadian deep retrofit accelerator based in Dartmouth, estimates that bringing the region’s residential building stock to a substantially higher level of performance could require about $187 billion through 2050. Commercial and institutional buildings would require another $55 billion.
It is a staggering price tag, but Lorrie Rand, senior adviser and co-founder of ReCover, argues the investment needs to be viewed as infrastructure spending rather than simply an energy-efficiency expense.
“This is not an inexpensive problem,” Rand said.
“That is a lot of money. But we need to look at buildings like they’re infrastructure. We sort of look at them generally as assets. But most of us spend 90 per cent of our time in buildings. It’s incredibly important to public health and well-being that we have building stock that’s at a reasonable level of performance.”
Trying to meet 2050 targets
Atlantic Canada has little choice but to tackle the existing building stock if it wants to meet its climate commitments, Rand said.
Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador have targets to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, while Prince Edward Island has set a 2040 target.
“That is a very short amount of time,” Rand said. “Emissions from buildings are a significant percentage. There’s really no viable route to achieving our net-zero ambitions unless we do deep retrofits to buildings.”
Buildings account for about 17 per cent of Atlantic Canada’s emissions, according to ReCover, while much of the region’s building stock predates modern energy-efficiency standards.
Quantifying the challenge
ReCover’s new Atlantic Canada Deep Retrofit Roadmap is an attempt to quantify the problem and identify where investment could have the greatest impact.
More than 850,000 buildings across the four Atlantic provinces have been mapped out and each have been organized into 20 common building types.
It includes separate assessments of the region’s residential building stock and commercial and institutional buildings, with the analysis based on energy modelling, building archetypes and lifecycle cost analysis.
Rand said previous studies have generally concluded that Atlantic Canada needs to retrofit its buildings, but the region lacked a detailed picture of the size of the undertaking.
“We know that retrofits are a problem for a lot of reasons,” Rand said. “It seemed like nobody had done any deep research. Studies have been done if the Atlantic provinces should retrofit, and the answer is always yes. But no one had looked at the actual size of the problem until now.”
For commercial and institutional buildings, energy reductions of 60 to 75 per cent are technically achievable across the 10 building archetypes, such as schools, warehouses and large apartment buildings.
For residential buildings, deep retrofits could reduce energy use by 50 to 80 per cent across 10 home types, including bungalows, split-level homes and small multi-unit residential buildings.
Rand said reaching energy savings goals “is technically achievable.”
“We do not see any technical hurdles in doing these projects,” she said. “The barriers are money or policy. We also don’t have the workforce to implement this. We have an aging workforce in the construction industry. How do we recruit more young people for something that’s badly needed.”
Big price tag for residential upgrades
ReCover estimates about $2 billion a year would be required to deep retrofit Atlantic Canada’s commercial buildings by 2050.
The potential payoff is significant, with up to 75 per cent energy reductions across the commercial building archetypes studied.
The residential side of the financial equation is considerably larger.
In its findings, ReCover predicts it would cost $7.8 billion a year through 2050 to deep retrofit 65 per cent of Atlantic Canada’s residential building stock. That compares with about $15.3 billion that is invested annually in residential construction across the region.
“When I look out my window, most of the buildings I’m looking at, I’m confident we could do a retrofit and help our province to hit our climate targets,” Rand said. “And as a country, we’re retrofitting around one per cent of the building stock annually. Experts put the kind of estimate that we need to be retrofitting between five and 12 per cent of the building stock annually. So, we need to go faster.”
Most Atlantic Canadian homes were built before meaningful energy codes existed. Many are expensive to heat and increasingly exposed to extreme weather.
For homeowners, however, energy savings are only part of the issue.
“Most homeowners, the biggest long-term cost driver is not energy at all,” Rand said. “It is deferred maintenance on aging systems.”
The what and why of a ‘deep retrofit’
A deep retrofit can combine energy upgrades with work that homeowners and building owners will eventually have to undertake anyway, including improvements to insulation and heating systems.
Not only could a more efficient building provide lower energy costs, it can also offer better indoor air quality, greater comfort, improved reliability, reduced maintenance costs and greater resilience during extreme weather.
Atlantic Canada has some of the oldest buildings in the country, and rural buildings can receive less attention when upgrades are being considered, Rand said. Many also have “pretty significant maintenance backlogs.”
“When a really intense storm comes through, whether it’s a summer storm, a hurricane or a winter storm, the buildings themselves are less robust than they need to be because of the severity of these storms,” she said.
“By retrofitting, we can make the buildings more resilient structurally.”
Nova Scotia just experienced the hottest stretch of the summer, with temperatures reaching record highs in many parts of the province. Poorly performing homes can become dangerously hot, particularly for older people, children and people with chronic health conditions.
Power outages can compound the problem, particularly in rural communities where utility and emergency services may already be stretched.
“These are life safety issues,” Rand said. “We’ve just come through a week of some really high temperatures. Homes were getting hotter and hotter and that enters into life-threatening territory. And there’s our electrical grid. Sometimes the power could go out for an extended period of time, especially in rural areas.
“Fixing our buildings can abate those situations.”
Rand also pointed to high levels of chronic lung conditions in the region and the connection between health and indoor air quality. The Atlantic provinces historically exhibit high rates of childhood asthma and respiratory illnesses, according to Statistics Canada.
“There are a lot of reasons to retrofitting that go beyond energy,” Rand said.
“There are huge social benefits, including reduced health-care spending and reduced spending during emergency measures situations.”
The financial case can be much harder for individual building owners to make.
But Rand argues the question should not simply be whether Atlantic Canada can afford to retrofit its buildings, it should be whether the region can afford not to.
“Nobody likes it when somebody says we should be spending more money,” Rand said.
“But I think Atlantic Canadians need it. And we need it for more than just hitting our climate plan and our greenhouse gas emissions, reductions and targets. We also need it because we have so many people experiencing energy poverty.”
Rand added that the data gathered for the roadmap has evolved into an “evergreen” database that can continuously be updated.
The next step, she said, is moving from a regional assessment to a functioning retrofit industry capable of delivering projects at a much faster pace. That requires financing, policy, workforce and supply chains to act on it.
Efficiency Canada, the energy-saving policy think tank, is also examining how federal policy can help build a stronger national retrofit system.
“ReCover’s roadmap starts to bring that role to life by mapping Atlantic Canada’s building stock and identifying priority building types, helping decision-makers see where similar retrofit projects could be grouped and matched with the right contractors, technologies and financing solutions,” Betsy Agar, director of buildings policy at Efficiency Canada, said in a news release.
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