Ask people across Canada about this summer’s wildfire season and they will tell you how the resulting smoke affected their daily lives. This underscores the urgency of getting our country on a credible path to net-zero by 2050. I’d like to think this might help us return to normal summers at some point – even if that’s decades from now.
For now, as summers such as these prove, climate change is not a distant risk. Its impacts are showing up in our homes and communities.
So, it’s increasingly important that the buildings sheltering us are prepared for these next few decades and can provide comfortable, healthy, affordable environments that protect people from extreme weather, power grid disruptions and uncertain global conventional energy markets.
That is why we need to rethink how we see buildings in general because they are a central lever of an electrified economy.
Buildings are part of the electricity system
When recognized, designed and retrofitted as efficient and resilient energy resources, they help expand local power generation – and much more. We have an incredible opportunity to draw more value from our buildings. We just need to look at them differently.
Earlier this year, the federal government released its electrification strategy, with a bold and necessary goal of doubling electricity supply over the next two decades.
But to get this right, Canada needs to achieve two equally ambitious, complementary goals by 2050: double electrification (the share of Canada’s final energy needs supplied by electricity) and double energy productivity (the economic value generated from each unit of energy consumed). One focuses on shifting energy demand to electricity, while the other focuses on getting more value from every unit of electrical energy used.
Energy policy conversations too often stop at generation and transmission. To fully realize the benefits of an electrified economy, Canada must achieve the doubling of the role of electricity by 2050 through investments in buildings, transportation, demand-side management and workforce development.
Buildings play a central role here, not simply as energy consumers but as active energy system assets. Whole-building retrofits that incorporate load management, storage and distributed energy resources can reduce peak demand, improve affordability, strengthen grid reliability, support grid modernization, lower emissions and enhance climate resilience.
Building a durable retrofit market
So how can we scale a building retrofit industry in Canada?
On their own, neither public dollars nor ad hoc investment by individual homeowners and property managers will build a robust building retrofit industry. We need a durable strategy that moves beyond boom-and-bust incentive programs and embraces value-driven, market-led approaches to build a self-sustaining, made-in-Canada retrofit industry.
A value-driven retrofit market can attract private and institutional capital by monetizing the full range of benefits that better-performing buildings deliver.
These buildings reduce maintenance costs, lower climate-related risks, improve insurability, increase asset value, strengthen tenant retention and lower health-care costs. By acting as flexible and efficient grid assets, they also help manage local generation, reduce peak loads and provide value to the electricity system itself.
As the one place where key electrification technologies are deployed – heat pumps, electric vehicle charging, thermal storage and distributed energy resources, including rooftop solar panels and batteries – buildings are essential to enabling a reliable, affordable low-carbon energy system.
When these benefits are recognized and financed, retrofits become an investment opportunity rather than a subsidy-driven activity.
Federal government programs such as the greener homes neighbourhood pilot and the deep retrofit accelerator initiative are critical foundations. They demonstrate how neighbourhood scale and whole-building retrofits can deliver lasting affordability gains, while helping build the skilled workforce, delivery models and industry capacity needed to meet Canada’s retrofit challenge at scale.
An important step toward this more durable market was the expansion of funding for Ottawa’s greener homes affordability program, which is designed to advance affordability, climate action and energy security while making home retrofits accessible to thousands of low- and median-income households.
Another milestone this year was the relaunch of the Pembina Institute’s reframed initiative – a platform focused on scalable retrofit solutions for multi-unit residential buildings.
But this momentum alone won’t be enough. Canada’s electrification strategy must recognize buildings as active energy system assets, hosting many of the technologies needed to achieve our electrification goals.
Retrofits are infrastructure investments
As Canada expands electricity capacity over the coming decades, retrofits are strategic investments in housing stock, infrastructure resilience, energy systems and industrial capacity. They reduce emissions and costs, while protecting communities from extreme heat, flooding and wildfire smoke.
Yet Canada’s retrofit market remains largely dependent on stop-start incentives and fragmented project-by-project activity. If the federal government supports the market conditions needed to scale retrofits across the country, we can build a more affordable, reliable and resilient energy system.
To adapt to a changing climate, we must change how we see, build and maintain the structures where we spend most of our lives. Let’s take care of our buildings so they can keep taking care of us.
